Now that kids in Texas can learn about evolution, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's going to do.

No two ways about it, the God of all the heavens and the Earth is having a shitty week. First of all, you try working on Sunday when all your friends are going out to get tacos and eat them by the river. Second, one of the Lord’s best messengers—okay, one of the Lord’s loudest messengers—suffered a terrible setback in Texas. I know; that’s like Wade Boggs losing a beauty contest at Fenway, but it happened. You might remember Don McLeroy, the creationist, amateur historian and Texas Board of Education member who made it his mission to expunge evolution and the New Deal from his state’s public school curricula. Despite his assurances that “if you read the latest” on Joseph McCarthy, you’ll find that he was “basically vindicated,” the voters of Texas have turned on McLeroy, nominating lobbyist Thomas Ratliff for the seat McLeroy has held since 1999. Props to The Cure for the link. It’s important to note that Ratliff’s 50.4% to 49.6% victory came in the Republican primary, and he hasn’t won the office yet. It seems likely that he’ll do okay in the generals, though, since no Democratic candidate is even running for the board seat. In a district so tilted toward conservatism, at a time when the word “lobbyist” is slightly less politically advantageous than, say, “secessionist,” Ratliff’s victory can only be seen as a referendum. I’m not saying God is hurt by any of this, but I am saying it’s raining in Missoula right now.

Of course, Don McLeroy is not God’s only emissary on Earth, or even one of the bigger ones. Frankly, they’re kind of just Facebook friends. If you really want to embarrass God, you have to go to his very best friend in the whole gosh-darn world, Sarah Palin. Facebook enemy of God Ben Fowlkes sent me this video, which I initially thought was an audio recording of a stewardess trying to calm a plane full of retarded children right before it crashed:

Turns out that is the former Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States, speaking to an Ohio Right to Life rally about A) the importance of making sure that other people’s daughters don’t get abortions and B) that time everyone made fun of her because she wrote speech notes on her hand. “They couldn’t argue the content of the words,” she says, in perhaps the most ironic moment of failed epiphany in human history. “It was tax cuts, it was energy—for energy independence, and it was [can-do arm motion] lifting America’s spirits.” In a just world, Pain would trail off after saying “content of the words,” then stare into the middle distance for a few seconds before removing her lapel mic and walking away from the podium, never to be seen again. That didn’t happen, but to her credit, Palin does manage a little self-awareness, suggesting that she didn’t have a good answer for her critics at the time because, “as so often, well, it’s me.” That kind of self-deprecation turns out to be a good rhetorical strategy, since the next thing she does is compare herself to God. Palin invokes Isaiah 49:16, in which God tells the Israelites through the prophet Isaiah, “See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; you walls are ever before me.” The questions raised by this citation—has Palin interpreted the message of this Bible verse as, “it’s okay to write stuff on your hands?”; do the notes God writes on his hands wear off over time, and if not, how does he remember to remove them?—are lost in the thunderous applause.

If I were God, I would encourage Sarah Palin to mention our relationship as little as possible. He Who Is That He Is is perhaps enjoying the opposite effect from Glenn Beck, who recently urged his audience to abandon their churches should their pastors urge them toward social justice. “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site,” Beck said. “If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!” Beck is technically right that “social justice” and “economic justice” are euphemisms, employed in part because they sound more professional than “helping poor people.” Not coincidentally, it also sounds lot better to say that you’re against social justice—still doesn’t sound very good—than against helping poor people. That kind of redistribution of wealth, sometimes in the form of soup and warm sweaters, is exactly what Beck’s been fighting against his whole life since he became a born-again Christian. He went on to connect your local canned food drive to his favorite totalizing theory, the unity of Nazism and Communism: “Communists are on the left, and Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribed to one philosophy…social justice. They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers…”

If your pastor asks you to choose between Jesus Christ and Ronald Reagan, Glenn Beck wants you to choose Reagan. That Beck, who has made a spectacle of his Mormonism since converting to appease his wife, regards helping the poor as not just ancillary to Christianity but antithetical to it, tells us just how deeply he understands his own religion. Glenn Beck knows roughly as much about Jesus as he does about world history, which is to say he’s had it described to him in such a way as to make him feel confident about lecturing on the subject to millions. Beck’s position exposes his faith for what it is: a kind of retail politics religion that comes packaged with his ultra-conservatism. Church is just the way you are a Republican on Sunday morning. The next time Beck evokes his religion as an argument for one or another of his senseless arguments, I hope someone reminds him of this. In the absence of a God willing to stick up for himself, I hope someone slaps these people right across the mouth.

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