State Sodomy Laws Continue To Target LGBT Americans

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In its decision in Larence v. Texas, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down the sodomy law of the State of Texas - and by implication, the laws in 12 other states, including Virginia. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling many states like Virginia (which except for during the early days of the nation has ALWAYS been in the rear guard of discrimination and reactionary social norms in general) have not purged their sodomy statutes form the states codes. Worse yet, the laws continue to be utilized to target and harass LGBT Americans. In this region of Virginia, the City of Virginia Beach continues to conduct sting actions even as serious crime continues to grow. Thus, anyone who seeks an assignation outside the privacy of their home is looking to get arrested. Equality Matters looks at this continued sad state of affairs:

Eight years later [after Lawrence v. Texas], however, eighteen states still refuse to rewrite their laws and take these anti-gay relics off their books, with countless LGBT Americans continuing to feel their devastating effects as a result. Several state legislatures and courts have exploited loopholes in the Lawrence decision, while others have simply refused to acknowledge the decision altogether.

Nearly a decade after Lawrence, many states have continued to enforce laws prohibiting private, consensual sex between same-sex adults.

In Michigan, the practice of charging and convicting gay men under the state’s “Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature” or “Gross Indecency” laws still exists, with violators facing the risk of having to register as sex offenders and prison sentences of up to 15 years. According to Rudy Serra, attorney and Chairman of the Executive Clemency Council for the State of Michigan, police officers continue to aggressively prosecute LGBT people without legal challenge

Unfortunately, the practice of improperly arresting gays and lesbians on "crime against nature" or sodomy charges only to have them later dismissed is not uncommon in states that still maintain these laws. In Virginia, for example, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office defends the practice, stating it was “how the system works.”

Justice Kennedy wrote a paragraph outlining the parameters of the Supreme Court’s decision: The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused. It does not involve public conduct or prostitution. It does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter. The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. [emphasis added]

This paragraph has been the source of a great amount of ambiguity for those attempting to determine the constitutionality of state sodomy laws.

Even in states where sodomy and “crime against nature” laws are never enforced, the mere presence of the laws sends a powerful signal about the value of LGBT members to state and local communities. These laws reinforce negative stereotypes about homosexuality, same-sex relationships, and the validity of the lives of LGBT people.

As a result, un-repealed sodomy laws continue to reinforce damaging stereotypes about gay and lesbian people, branding them as criminals and justifying anti-gay bigotry.

The last quoted sentence hits at the real reasons such anti-gay statutes persist: to denigrate LGBT citizens and in the process give the imprimatur of the state's power to Christianist religious belief in direct contravention of the U. S. Constitution.

Rational Evangelicals Question the Existence of Adam and Eve

News bulletin to NOM and the hate merchants at FRC, AFA and Mission America: rational and tethered to objective reality evangelicals are starting to question the historical existence of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Obviously, if the was no Adam and Eve, the hate groups' slogan of "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" goes to Hell in a hand basket in short order. And for the Roman Catholic Church too, if Adam and Eve did not really exist, the doctrine of original sin and the debased nature of human kind likewise takes a major hit. Bob Felton sums up the danger signals for far right, Bible beating Christians:

The difficulty is obvious:
■ No Adam and Eve, then …
■ No Fall, and …
■ No Original Sin, and …
■ No need for salvation; Christianity then becomes just one of many ethical systems — and no more.

NPR has an article that looks at this growing heresy, at least in the minds of the wingnut crazies, which truly does strike at the heart of the "Bible is inerrant" crowd. Here are some highlights:

[N]ow some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.

To many evangelicals, this is heresy. "From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," says Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. Rana, who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio University, readily admits that small details of Scripture could be wrong.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, . . . . says the Adam and Eve story is not just about a fall from paradise: It goes to the heart of Christianity. He notes that the Apostle Paul (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) argued that the whole point of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was to undo Adam's original sin. "Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," Mohler says.

This debate over a historical Adam and Eve is not just another heady squabble. It's ripping apart the evangelical intelligentsia. . . . "The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins.

Giberson — who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College until his views became too uncomfortable in Christian academia — says Protestants who question Adam and Eve are akin to Galileo in the 1600s, who defied Catholic Church doctrine by stating that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was condemned by the church, and it took more than three centuries for the Vatican to express regret at its error.

Fuzale Rana isn't so sure this is a Galileo moment: That would imply the scientists are correct. But he does believe the stakes are even higher in today's battle over evolution. It is not just about the movement of the earth, but about the nature of God and man, of sin and redemption.

"I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history," he says. "Because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not.",/blockquote>

For the record, I support the Gospel message of love of neighbor and not judging others. As for the institutional Church in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and other denominations which make hatred of others and judgment of others their hallmark - and in the process savage the Gospel message - I hope this is a growing trend that cuts these institutions and people off at the knee caps.

Tuesday Male Beauty

More Hate and Bathshitery From Christianist Crazies

Yesterday two posts looked at the bizarre alternate universe world view of Michele Bachmann. As crazy as Bachmann may be, she is hardly alone when it comes to acting as a merchant of hate and contempt against other Americans a- or in her rejection of scientific knowledge. On the issue of gays, Bachmann's anti-gay views are right up there with those of Linda Harvey, head of the SPLC registered hate groups Mission America. Harvey's latest spewing of anti-gay malice was captured by Right Wing Watch and involves Harvey's desire to see LGBT citizens driven from the ranks of the nation's teachers. Here's some of Harvey's bullshit:

Mission America’s Linda Harvey launched into another anti-gay tirade on her radio show on Friday, criticizing the National Education Association for supporting the rights of gays and lesbians to become teachers. Harvey, who once claimed that the NEA was using scholarships to make kids gays, on the other hand contends that schools should ban gay and lesbian teachers until they “leave that behavior behind.”

Harvey: Kids should not be put in the confusing position of having a teacher they like and respect in many ways who’s also known to be practicing homosexual behavior. Of course that’s where many of our children in public schools today find themselves because the National Education Association not only allows but applauds and defends openly homosexuality and even transvestite teachers…. The fact is that no homosexuality should be in our schools, period. When people leave that behavior behind, then they might be qualified for a job involving children. Out and proud homosexuals should not have jobs that involve children. I know that’s not the current policy in many schools but it should be.

I cannot help but wonder how one gets so utterly full of contempt and malice for other people - especially LGBT Americans. This past weekend hundreds of conservative lawmakers and lobbyists gathered in New Orleans for the so-called American Legislative Exchange Council’s ("ALEC") annual meeting. As Think Progress reports, the gathering turned into another gay bashing event with SPLC registered hate group, Family Research Council, disseminating anti-gay literature. Here are some highlights:

The corporate front group is so concerned with secrecy that it instructed hotel security guards to physically attack two ThinkProgress journalists covering the event.

However, it wasn’t just conservative legislation that was being passed around during ALEC’s meeting. Among the materials handed out to every attendee were anti-LGBT pamphlets from the Family Research Council, including the “Top Ten Myths About Homosexuality” and the “Top Ten Harms Of Same-Sex ‘Marriage’”.

The supposed myths included “people are born gay,” “sexual orientation can never change,” “homosexual conduct is not harmful to one’s physical health,” and “homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals.” In its second pamphlet, the FRC told conference-goers that expanding marriage to include same-sex couples will somehow mean “fewer people would marry,” “fewer people would remain monogamous,” and polygamy will soon result.

The USA: A Leaderless Nation

A column in the Washington Post looks at Obama's speech yesterday and the man's apparent total disconnect from what's happening to the economy and continued refusal to be a leader. I've said it before, that in 2008 we all were sold a very bogus bill of goods. In the context of the 2011 elections here in Virginia, I very much fear the disgust with a lack of leadership by Democrats in Washington and the White House in particular will lead to a reprise of 2009's electoral disaster. Here are highlights from Dana Milbank's column:

A familiar air of indecision preceded President Obama’s pep talk to the nation. . . . It’s not exactly fair to blame Obama for the rout: Almost certainly, the markets ignored him. And that’s the problem: The most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency.

The economy crawls, the credit rating falls, the markets plunge, and a helicopter packed with U.S. special forces goes down in Afghanistan. Two thirds of Americans say the country is on the wrong track (and that was before the market swooned), Obama’s approval rating is 43 percent, and activists on his own side are calling him weak.

Yet Obama plods along, raising gobs of cash for his reelection bid — he was scheduled to speak at two DNC fundraisers Monday night — and varying little the words he reads from the teleprompter. He seemed detached even from those words Monday

In the White House briefing room after Obama’s statement, the press corps grilled Jay Carney about the lack of fire in the belly. “The president said our problems are imminently solvable, and he talked about a renewed sense of urgency,” CBS’s Norah O’Donnell pointed out. “Why not call Congress back to work?” Carney chuckled at this suggestion. “I mean, the Dow dropped below 11,000 — where’s the sense of urgency?” O’Donnell persisted.

NBC’s Chuck Todd was not swayed. “Why not bring Congress back now?” he repeated, pointing out that “the American public seems to be in a little bit of a panic” while Washington says, “We’re going to stand back and wait until school starts.”

“Why?” inquired Politico’s Glenn Thrush. “He’s the leader of the free world. Why isn’t he leading this process?” That is the enduring mystery of Obama’s presidency. He delivered his statement on the economy beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, but that was as close as he came to forceful leadership. He looked grim and swallowed hard and frequently as he mixed fatalism (“markets will rise and fall”) with vague, patriotic exhortations (“this is the United States of America”).

“There will always be economic factors that we can’t control,” Obama said. Maybe. But it would be nice if the president gave it a try.

More Monday Male Beauty

The New Yorker Savages Michele Bachmann

I know that I've already written about Michele Bachmann earlier, but The New Yorker has a must read profile on Bachmann. While the article is entitled "A Leap of Faith" it might just as well be captioned "The Face of Insanity." Conservative pundit David Frum found it impossible to not comment on The New Yorker article in a piece on his blog bearing the title "Inside Bachmann's Brain." Here are some highlights from Frum's piece:

"Here’s a route into her head; remember Bachmann’s statement about the Founders tirelessly working to end slavery? The statement was widely ridiculed as an expression of pure ignorance. Lizza takes the statement instead as a route into Bachmann’s own personal alternative knowledge system:

Bachmann’s comment about slavery was not a gaffe. It is, as she would say, a world view. In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with [John] Eidsmoe, her law school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

You don’t want to invest a lot of time nit-picking the historical inaccuracies here. (For example, John Adams was a Unitarian who rejected the divinity of Christ, Alexander Hamilton avoided church, and while all three genuinely abhorred slavery, only Jay can be said to have worked to end it.) The anecdote is valuable as an illustration of the way in which Bachmann processes information. Lizza found a 2005 interview in which Bachmann was asked about books she liked. She praised two: Ann Coulter’s Treason and Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey. Lizza explains the latter:

[Pearcey] teaches readers how to implement Schaeffer’s idea that a Biblical world view should suffuse every aspect of one’s life. She tells her readers to be extremely cautious with ideas from non-Christians. There may “be occasions when Christians are mistaken on some point while nonbelievers get it right,” she writes in “Total Truth.” “Nevertheless, the overall systems of thought constructed by nonbelievers will be false—for if the system is not built on Biblical truth, then it will be built on some other ultimate principle. Even individual truths will be seen through the distorting lens of a false world view.

As Lizza points out, Bachmann regards even the most mundane political facts through the prism of a worldview that would probably seem extremely strange to most Americans. One of her first great political causes was to attack federal vocational education programs on the grounds that they promoted:

a “new restructuring of American society,” beginning with “workforce boards” that would tell every student the specific career options he or she could pursue, turning children into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.”

This kind of talk would sound paranoid to most of us. It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society. Bachmann’s religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times.

As for The New Yorker article itself, here are some other interesting highlights that underscore the fact that Michele Bachmann is utterly unfit for the presidency - or any other elected office for that matter:

Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians. Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin, to whom she is inevitably compared. Bachmann said in 2004 that being gay is “personal enslavement,” and that, if same-sex marriage were legalized, “little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it.” Speaking about gay-rights activists, that same year, she said, “It is our children that is the prize for this community.” She believes that evolution is a theory that has “never been proven,” and that intelligent design should be taught in schools.

In the fall of 1975, Bachmann enrolled at Winona State University, a small school in southeastern Minnesota, where she became more devout and tried to lead her dormmates to Christianity. There she met Marcus, whom, she has said, God called her to marry. She had a vision while praying “of me marrying this man in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin.” According to Michele, Marcus was simultaneously having a vision about marrying her.

[I]n January, 1977. Later that year, they experienced a second life-altering event: they watched a series of films by the evangelist and theologian Francis Schaeffer called “How Should We Then Live?” . . . . In the films, Schaeffer—who has a white goatee and is dressed in a shearling coat and mountain climber’s knickers—condemns the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism. He repeatedly reminds viewers of the “inerrancy” of the Bible and the necessity of a Biblical world view.

Francis Schaeffer instructed his followers and students at L’Abri that the Bible was not just a book but “the total truth.” He was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, . . . . Sara Diamond, who has written several books about evangelical movements in America, has succinctly defined the philosophy that resulted from Schaeffer’s interpretation: “Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.”

Bachmann enrolled at the new O. W. Coburn School of Law, at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. . . . . Among the professors were Herbert W. Titus, a Vice-Presidential candidate of the far-right U.S. Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party), and John Whitehead, who started the Rutherford Institute, a conservative legal-advocacy group. The law review published essays by Schaeffer and Rousas John Rushdoony, a prominent Dominionist who has called for a pure Christian theocracy in which Old Testament law—execution for adulterers and homosexuals, for example—would be instituted. In a 1982 essay in the law review, Rushdoony condemned the secularization of public schools and declared, “With the coming collapse of humanistic statism, the Christian must prepare to take over, he must prepare for victory.”

At Oral Roberts, Bachmann worked for a professor named John Eidsmoe . . . . . Bachmann worked as Eidsmoe’s research assistant on his book “Christianity and the Constitution,” published in 1987. . . . . Eidsmoe has stirred controversy. In 2005, he spoke at the national convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a defiantly pro-white, and anti-black, organization. (Eidsmoe says that he deeply despises racism, but that he will speak “to anyone.”) In Alabama last year, he addressed an event commemorating Secession Day and told an interviewer that it was the state’s “constitutional right to secede,” and that “Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster.” Bachmann has not, however, distanced herself, and she has long described her work for Eidsmoe as an important part of her résumé.

Around this time [the late 1990's], Bachmann became interested in the writings of David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, an educational organization founded to reverse the harmful effects of what it calls “our current post-Christian culture.” He was a longtime John Birch Society member, whose pamphlets include “The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination,” and “Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles,” in which Noebel argued that the band was being used by Communists to infiltrate the minds of young Americans. Bachmann once gave a speech touting her relationship with Noebel’s organization. “I went on to serve on the board of directors with Summit Ministries,” she said, adding that Summit’s message is “wonderful and worthwhile.”

While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.

Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”

There's much more in The New Yorker article. All of it paints one overall picture: Michele Bachmann is religious extremist nutcase who has disconcerting ties to racists as well as Christian Dominionist. Anyone who cares about the separation of church and state and equality for all races ought to be terrified that someone as extreme - and in my view mentally deranged - as Bachmann is in the top of the polls in Iowa at the moment.

Dow Drops 5.5% Yet Obama Still Doesn’t Blame GOP for Economic Turmoil

In its explanation for downgrading the USA's debt instruments, S & P basically indicted the Congressional Republicans and placed the majority of the blame for the downgrade decision on the GOP. One can debate the merits of S & P's decision, but with the path made ready for him Barack Obama STILL could not show that he has a spine and confront the GOP's irresponsible recklessness. Instead, he blathers and talks about "Congress" needing to act - and the Dow continued to plummet. What the nation needs right now is a LEADER with a backbone and a vision. In Obama we have neither. In a column on CNN, David Gergen has a column that makes the case that the USA needs a leader like Churchill who can "inspire his people to fight to the end" and "banish fear and steady a country." Instead of a Churchill, we have another Neville Chamberlain. I share John Aravosis' frustration at America Blog when he states:

I'm watching a tape of the President's remarks today about , and he once again failed to blame the Republicans for any of our problems (just as Geithner failed to do it last night). It's "Washington." No it's not. It's the Republican party in Washington. But in any case, what does that even mean, even if it is Washington? All the President is willing to say is it that it's people who put their party first? Well, that pretty much defines everyone in town, which is I think is his point.

The President is once again trying to cast blame on everyone but himself, and by everyone, I include - he includes - the Democrats in Congress, who are just barely hanging on in the Senate. The President's continuing effort to cast blame on "Washington" and "Congress" has to be hurting Democrats. He's been doing this for years. And now, we face a GOP that is as nutty as its ever been, and it's threatening real disaster, but the President can't find it in himself to blame them by name. That of course didn't stop the GOP presidential candidates from blaming the S&P downgrade on the President.

Andrew Sullivan in contrast - who as I've noted before was far behind the curve in terms of recognizing the toxicity of Bush/Cheney and the GOP - continues to stand by Obama:

[I]f you want to change that hideous dynamic, rooted in the 1960s culture war, you don't repeat it. You defeat it by consistent, relentless reason. Obama will be a transformative president only if he pulls this off, because he will have transformed our political culture for the better. As for his re-election campaign, just watch. The man has a long record of George HW Bush competence and quiet governance, but unlike GHWB, he can also unleash rhetoric that obliterates his opponents. Imagine a debate between him and Perry. Christianist swagger vs Christian calm. This is not weakness. It is a deeper form of strength.

I respect Andrew in many respects, but on this I think he's flat out wrong. Soaring speeches are not going to win back those who have said that they're "done" given Obama's lack of leadership and spinelessness. Too many Americans know know that Obama is all talk and no action. He may give pretty speeches, but that is all we will get. A Churchill would give speeches followed by action and not stop at talk devoid of action. I'd remind Sullivan that John Kerry ran circles around the Chimperator when it came to giving speeches, yet Kerry lost to the dullard. I for one want a primary challenge for the Democrat nomination so that we can hopefully find a Democrat with a spine and who is willing to lead and not be a follower and a lousy one at that.

Monday Male Beauty

Video Shows White Teens Killing Black Man

Hate is alive and well - especially in Mississippi - where a video caught a group of white teens targeting and black man then running him over with a car and killing him. It's yet another example of what the politics of hate and division of the far right bear as their ultimate foul fruits. The messaging of the far right seems increasingly out to dehumanize others because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion - all of which makes it easier for some to feel totally free to physically harm those whom have been dehumanized. It's precisely what the Nazi regime did to the Jews in the 1930's. What's shocking in this sad case is that the murder was caught on video. Here are highlights from CNN on the disturbing story:

On a recent Sunday morning just before dawn, two carloads of white teenagers drove to Jackson, Mississippi, on what the county district attorney says was a mission of hate: to find and hurt a black person.

In a parking lot on the western side of town they found their victim. James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker, was standing in a parking lot, near his car. The teens allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including "White Power!" according to witnesses.

Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith says a group of the teens then climbed into their large Ford F250 green pickup truck, floored the gas, and drove the truck right over Anderson, killing him instantly.

Mississippi officials say it was a racially motivated murder. What the gang of teens did not know was that a surveillance camera was focused on the parking lot that night, and many of the events, including the actual murder of Anderson, were captured live on videotape.

The group of teens that night was led by 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon, Jr., of Brandon, Mississippi, according to police and officials. "This was a crime of hate. Dedmon murdered this man because he was black," said Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith. "The evidence will show that."

Dedmon led and instigated the attack from early in the evening, he took part in the beating of Anderson, and Dedmon was also the actual driver of the Ford 250 truck that would serve as the murder weapon, according to officials.

As the teens were partying and drinking miles away from Jackson that night, in largely white Rankin County, Dedmon told friends they should leave, saying "let's go fuck with some niggers," according to law enforcement officials.

Dedmon pummeled Anderson repeatedly as he crumpled to the street, according to officials, though this is not visible in the videotape. Finally, after the beating some of the teens left and some got into the green truck.

At this moment on the video, Anderson becomes visible, as he staggered into view and walked towards the headlights of the truck. The truck suddenly surges ahead, running over Anderson, then continuing at high speed away from the scene.

Shortly after he allegedly drove the truck over Anderson, Dedmon allegedly boasted and laughed about the killing, according to testimony given by some of the teens to detectives. "I ran that nigger over," Dedmon allegedly said in a phone conversation to the teens in the other car.

It's frightening stuff and it's the result in part, I suspect, of the constant message put out by the Tea Party and Christianists that America - read whites - are under siege and losing control of the country. Sadly, I suspect that we'll see more murders like this. And not just of blacks.