Countdown to Prayerpalooza

The governor will give brief remarks, read scripture and offer a prayer in the middle of the seven-hour-long program, said Eric Bearse, spokesman for the event, called The Response.

Even the pandering is bigger in Texas.

Alice Patterson is the Texas state coordinator for The Response. And while The Response is explicitly a nonpartisan event, that hasn't kept Patterson from arguing that the Democratic Party is "an invisible network of evil." Hey, that could mean anything!

Controlled by demons! Demoncrats! It all makes sense now.

"They're intolerant, they're hateful, they're vile, they're spiteful," Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said of gay rights activists in April. "They're not the enemy. The enemy is simply using them as pawns. They are held captive by the enemy." Perkins, whose FRC was recently labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-gay rhetoric, has been named as a co-chair of The Response and will speak at the event. Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association's issues director, has taken things even further:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual soldiers basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

All of which is false.

The AFA, which is co-sponsoring the event, recently launched a boycott of the popular Fox television program Glee because it is "glamorizing homosexual behavior."

But it's not just gay people and Democrats they hate; it's grizzly bears and killer whales and the Statue of Liberty and the Sun Goddess.

The recently emerging perception today, PrayerMania Eve, is that all of this attention being paid to Perry, his Response -- and particularly the vicious criticism he has endured -- is drawing legions of sympathetic Christians, previously turned off by the governor's public piety, to rise up and rally to his defense.

Yes, now the spin is that he's being persecuted for his religious beliefs, just like That Other Prophet, and he must be Saved.

I suppose if the Christian Soldiers rallying tomorrow in the football stadium can produce Perry to meet his critics face to face, then perhaps the cross, the nails, and the angry mob could be produced to give them what they want.

A martyr.