Yes, it's a dark view of the American character.

My feeling is that the American psyche embodies both the best and the worst of human nature. There is a xenophobic strain that has permeated our culture since before we became a nation, perhaps stoked by our two-ocean isolation. Ironically, we are a nation of immigrants. One could imagine that this might inoculate us from the poison of racial and ethnic hatred. If anything, it has heightened the sense of isolation felt by some on the fringes.

The institution of slavery in a relatively modern society helped to solidify a mind-set wherein some human beings were considered, legally, less "human" than others. Glowing embers of that attitude continue to smolder beneath our national surface.

Economic hardship tends to bring such strains into stark relief and make them more acceptable, particularly when the have-nots or the aggrieved are seeking someone to blame for their current plight.

On the other hand, what makes America exceptional is that we have laws and systems in place designed to conquer those base and ugly forces of human nature that have consumed other peoples. It is our strength that we keep trying to better ourselves as a pluralistic nation, in spite of persistent setbacks. We are a nation of laws, thank God. Unfortunately, we are also a nation of human beings, with all our inherent flaws.

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If you have a problem and you can't resolve it, then the next best thing is to make it somebody else's problem.

This wisdom holds as true for Holy Mother Church as for anybody else. The bizarre case of the Roman Catholic priest who was caught on the beach acting, um, human, with a lady was a huge black eye.

To add insult to injury, Father Alberto Cutie began publicly questioning one of the most sacred tenets of the Church, the doctrine of priestly celibacy. While this entertaining little affair doesn't rise to the level of the child abuse scandal, he had to go. But how to disappear him without generating further embarrassment?

Enter the Episcopal Church, which, as a member of the Anglican Communion, traces its very roots to a dispute between King Henry VIII of England and Pope Clement VII. The latter refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon when his head was turned by the comely Anne Boleyn, so Henry cut Rome out of the the English salvation business and became Protector of His Own Faith. Where better for Padre Alberto to hang his clerical collar?

In the end, everyone comes out ahead. It's a modern-day miracle.

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The gay marriage controversy in this country is probably going to die one opponent at a time.

Just as it is hard to find anyone credible who would publicly oppose interracial marriage today, it will eventually become quaint to hold the view that "marriage" should be an institution restricted to a man and a woman. It's just a matter of when.

In my opinion, those who cite the tenets of their faith as the reason for their inability to come to terms with this are entitled to do so. They are not being asked to marry people of the same sex.

When I lived in Oklahoma, there was a general assumption by the Christian faithful that Jews were not allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven because they did not address their prayers through Jesus Christ.

Now, there were never any petitions or fundraising efforts to outlaw Judaism in Oklahoma that I knew of (to be fair, part of the reason may have been that there is a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing individuals the right to practice their own faith).

I use this as an analogy for adopting a "live and let live" attitude about folks being allowed to marry whomever they want.

Those who pray to Jesus do not find their entry into Heaven hindered by the presence on this Earth of those who do not share their belief system. Similarly, people who are married to someone of the opposite sex need not feel that their marriage has been debased by others who happen to follow a different path.

Maybe I'm missing something.

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This is going to be fun.

President Obama has his hands full trying to sell health care, save the economy, and conduct foreign wars, so the last thing he wants to get involved in right now is a mudslinging campaign over a Supreme Court opening.

As soon as the White House drew up its short list of prospective candidates, the opposition research started. As I've mentioned before, a Supreme Court opening is just about the most potent fund raising opportunity that exists in American politics, so even if Obama nominated Snow White, they'd come up with something about her highly unorthodox, and no doubt immoral, living arrangement with seven men.

But there's a fly in the Conservative ointment: Sonia Sotomayor is Hispanic, and stands an excellent chance of becoming the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice in American History.

It is a delicious dilemma: The Democrats have an overwhelming majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, so it's a sure bet her confirmation will be passed to the main body of the Senate for a final vote. They also are just one short of the votes needed to prevent a filibuster. So you're a Conservative Republican, and you want to gin up some righteous anger about yet another radical activist judge, blah, blah, blah.

At the same time, Hispanics constitute a growing proportion of the vote, and alienating them could be tantamount to committing political suicide. These are people the Republican Party desperately wants to attract.

I had the pleasure of being the one to inform a Puerto Rican colleague about the Sotomayor nomination. "It's about time," she said, and grinned with pride.

Let's see now...who wants to be the pol who will be remembered for standing in the way of history?

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I'm sick of Twitter. I'm sick of hearing about it. If it's true that social networking is going to revolutionize the way we communicate, then we deserve what we get.

I've already discussed the coarsening of civilization thanks to this e-bomination. It looks like those of us troglodytes who don't understand the need to share the intimate details of our lives in banal microbursts with thousands of "followers" are fighting a losing battle.

As for intimacy, I'm sure somebody has figured out how to have cybersex in 140 characters or less. No need anymore to soften them up with dinner and a movie first--and we wonder why the economy's in trouble.

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You have to hand it to Bristol Palin. Like her mom, she's an expert at turning a sow's ear into a silk purse.

All teens do stupid things. Bristol figured out a way to get paid for talking about her stupid thing, in the form of giving a public service announcement extolling (choke!) teen sexual abstinence.

I don't know if young Bristol's trying to help burnish her mother's image for a presidential run in 2012, but if I were Sarah Palin, I'd be trying to keep her out of the spotlight.

After all, Sarah's shooting for the Republican primary, with all those pinch-mouthed morals voters, and having an unwed teen mother in the family displays a decidedly liberal-style cavalier attitude toward what is good and proper.

But then, if you're Sarah Palin, the Great Foxy Hope for the Conservative Future, they can bend the rules a little. Bristol's "situation" becomes a joyous celebration of life.

Now, if we could just get the girl to fly to Vermont and marry a woman...

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Remember Deep Throat's dictum in All The President's Men? "Follow the money!"

That's what's really behind every Supreme Court fight. Why is it that abortion becomes the number-one criterion for determining whether or not a prospective justice is qualified for the bench...rather than intellect, judicial temperament, scholarship, rigorous analytical powers, or any of the other qualities one might want in someone who occupies such a weighty position?

It's because a Supreme Court opening is the greatest opportunity of all to whip up a frenzy among the respective bases, who then reach reflexively for their checkbooks. It's high-stakes bingo time, folks. Lest we forget, the nominee is ultimately confirmed by politicians. Herein we see both the genius and the Achilles heel of the system designed by the Founding Fathers.

The Achilles heel is that we place so much importance on one subject when a Justice, during his or her career, will wield awesome authority to shape our country and its laws as they pertain to a whole raft of issues.

The genius is that the system encourages the nomination of less extreme candidates, because the President fears the loss of face and prestige if his nominee is rejected, particularly when his own party holds the majority in the Senate.

The best part is that it's bound to be a circus, and we'll all have front-row seats at center ring.

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I'm going to refrain from indulging in cheap double-entendres, since this is such a target-rich environment, it isn't even a challenge.

The Florida Legislature, which is sure to go into overtime because it can't hammer out an austerity budget, still manages to waste precious minutes over a front-burner issue that has evidently been on all our minds, specifically, the criminalization of human/animal sex.

My favorite quote out of all of this came a few weeks ago, when the state House was debating amendments to this bill that would exclude veterinary applications and situations involving animal husbandry.

A South Florida legislator (who shall remain nameless) shouted out, "You mean, people are taking animals as husbands??"

And we are entrusting these people with our tax money. Anyway, it's probably a good thing that this glaring oversight in our legal code is being rectified, in light of the fact that the Florida Constitution already forbids people of the same sex from taking each other as husbands.

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We might as well set aside the church vs. state argument, since if the boneheads in the Florida Legislature haven't accepted that one by now, they're never going to.

In their zeal to kowtow to their base, our representatives (mostly from the northern and central parts of the state) have tried repeatedly to get the cross tag (bearing the legend, "I believe") and the tag with Jesus' face on it officially approved.

What makes this year different is that the bill has a good chance of passing, and our craven governor, Charlie ("I want to be the governor of ALL Floridians") Crist is so busy running for the U.S. Senate that he says he will sign it if it reaches his desk. His reasoning must be that by the time the lawsuits reach the Florida Supreme Court, he'll already be safely in Washington, so it's no-risk for him.

But ponder this: Any religion that can't even get its act together enough to agree on who its interlocutor with God ought to be (think "Protestant Reformation," and "Orthodox vs. Latin," just for starters) is going to have one hell of a time determining what the state-sanctioned image of Jesus on the license tag should look like.

For all we know, He resembled Buddy Hackett, or maybe Moshe Dayan. You can be pretty sure He didn't look like the mug they'll probably stick on the plate-- some Northern European Renaissance artist's conception of a blond, blue-eyed Aryan ubermensch.

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Today, we are going to discuss the decline of civilization.

No, it isn’t the result of rot from within, the death of shame, or the erosion of morals. You can lay it all on the e-doorstep of fixed-rate unlimited access calling plans.

Now, even people with little means can remain connected all day, through cellphones, texting, email, Twitter, and a host of other media I haven’t had a chance to get incensed about yet. Talk has always been cheap, but now it’s even cheaper. When the value of something is debased, it gets overwhelmed with dreck.

I don’t care if somebody laments that they’re over-connected. Obviously, they can’t figure out anything more redeeming to do with their lives than mindlessly chatter or write in e-snippets all day, so no harm done.

What bothers me is when they indulge their need while someone who is too old to find this stuff necessary is trying to hold a personal, real-time, in-place conversation with them. Someone like me, for example.

Then, there’s what texting has done to flatten the language. World War III could easily start because Dmitry Medvedev misread an Obama text message lacking the proper irony-denoting emoticon, “;-)”,
as in, “U dummy ;-).” This tells me that the medium has an inherent clarity problem.

Go ahead, call me a Luddite. To me, subtlety and inflection are the exotic spices of communication.

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By now, you've heard all the arguments, so you're either in favor of Don't Ask Don't Tell, or you aren't. It isn't really Don't Ask Don't Tell, anyway, because the military diligently investigates all rumors of homosexuality in order to extirpate the so-called mental illness from the ranks. So even if gays don't come out, they must live in constant fear of being discovered.

As for the morale issue, I saw an interview once of an Army veteran from the Deep South who had gone to Vietnam as a young soldier in possession of all the usual cultural prejudices that one would expect. He came back a changed man. "There's something about being in a unit, knowing that all your lives depend on everyone doing his job," he said. "You put your life in your buddy's hands, and he puts his life in yours. You don't care about what color he is."

And as far as whether gays can make good warriors, there's a story about Alexander the Great, who, as legend goes, was gay. His troops were horrified to learn about his lover, who accompanied him on his campaigns as he conquered most of the known world.

What upset them wasn't that Alexander's main squeeze was a man; it was that he was a Persian.

So the problem isn't really gays serving in the military. The problem is with people who have a problem with gays serving in the military.

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What's different about the recent development in Vermont is that it eviscerates one of the arguments in the anti-gay forces' bag of nastiness. Until now, they claimed that the only way gay marriage could be legalized was by "activist" (defined as "people they didn't agree with") judges who stretched civil rights law to suit their own perverted ends.

Whenever the issue was subjected to a state legislature, which represented the true will of the people, it was bound to fail (so they maintained).

Well, the Vermont legislature not only passed same-sex marriage into law, it did so by overriding the veto of a Republican governor. You can't get much more willful than that. Makes one wonder what Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were up to besides revolutionizin'.

The Vermont vote even overshadowed the state supreme court decision in Iowa (Iowa!) reflecting the legal view that a class of individuals' civil rights were being violated by not allowing them to marry.

If the Forces of Righteousness decide they want to boycott products from the offending states, breakfast is going to be a pretty dreary affair. No bacon or ham if it comes from the Devil's farmyard in Iowa. No corn muffins, neither. Dry pancakes, too, if the maple syrup's made in Vee-Tee. And that Thanksgiving turkey's gonna be mighty bland without Massachusetts cranberries.

My old home state, Oklahoma, is likely to be one of the last to allow this kind of outlandishness to occur. Then again, it only just outlawed cockfighting a few years ago.

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There was a report on the radio that the crime of car stereo theft had all but disappeared.

Automakers realized that they could make more money by installing high-quality stereos as standard equipment in order to help their cars sell. With no need to upgrade one's stereo, the market for "used" ones evaporated.

This is the theory behind the "War on Drugs." No market, no crime.

One of the reasons the law enforcement approach has been such a dismal failure is that it may criminalize use and sales, but it never addresses the fundamental aspects of society that make drugs an attractive option to the population.

The Egyptians invented beer. Shortly thereafter, some Egyptian relaxed in his stone recliner in front of a wall of sports hieroglyphics with a six-flagon, and invented the weekend bender. People like to depart from reality. When given the chance, kids sniff glue, prisoners put together stills from anything they can find to make alcohol from fruit. Why? It's fun.

For America to be the kind of place where nobody sought to use and abuse mind-altering substances, we'd all have to be like...Utah. Which is a great place to live if you're into a pure lifestyle. A lot of Americans, I have a feeling, would not think of living in Utah as "fun." I understand, though, that even Utah is finally passing a law that allows you to get a drink in a bar. No fun, no tourists.

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There's no question that this Pope has made some controversial moves during his pontificate. Most recently, there was the rehabilitation of the holocaust-denying bishop. Oops.

Now, he's made some irresponsible remarks about condoms and AIDS during his trip to Africa. I don't quibble with his view that the use of condoms is a sin because it's a form of contraception, if that's what he believes. After all, he's in the belief business, and who knows what constitutes a sin better than the Pope? But, declaring that the use of condoms helps to spread HIV is just plain wrong.

Sure, abstinence works well, if you use it all the time. Unfortunately, the same God who created us also bequeathed us this pesky drive to procreate, and sometimes that drive just overwhelms reason and faith. I don't think He meant to say, as seems to be the case with HIV/AIDS, “Lapse one time and you're dead, along with a raft of other innocent souls you may be lapsing with in the future.” That doesn't leave much room for repentance and forgiveness.

Before you go calling me a Catholic-basher, I should say that I'm very fond of Catholics. In fact, I'm married to one.

I just think His Holiness is way off base this time. He's a man, not a god, and he isn't infallible. The problem is that his words, even when misguided, carry a great deal of weight.

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Now that the Jim Naugle era is over, we can afford to be a little magnanimous about a civic leader who remained so resolutely out of step with the community he served.

Mayor Naugle's views and outspokenness on the subject of gays made him a national poster boy for the Forces of Righteousness, and reflected an attitude more in line with the mayor of a medium-sized city in Utah than of a cosmopolitan, easy-going metropolis like Ft. Lauderdale.

He belongs in the pantheon of one-of-kind politicians who refused to back down from their words--no matter how many people they might have hurt--like Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, and Dick Cheney.

Speaking as an editorial cartoonist, Mayor Naugle was the gift that kept on giving, providing me endless material with his anachronistic spoutings about gays and the poor.

Godspeed, Mr. Mayor...and may you continue to generate waves of discord wherever your journeys take you. I know it will make your day.

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Whatever you think of Rush Limbaugh, he's worthy of your respect...as an entertainer. He knows well his listeners' carnivorous palates, and he throws them the bloody scraps they crave.

What he and his fellow traveler Ann Coulter are doing to the gossamer fabric that binds our nation together, just to make a buck, is another story. For that, there's a special hot love seat waiting for them where they're going.

But this is about Rush the Entertainer, who cannot help but be chortling over the way the Democrats are helping to boost his ratings. Their condemnation is his gravy.

As for the Democrats, their behavior with this idiotic billboard just reinforces my belief that the number-one mission of any organization is self-preservation. If they had just kept their mouths shut, the Republican Party would probably have marginalized Rush on their own, since his cause is not theirs.

But, Rush is also a powerful fundraising magnet. He must not be allowed to sink into obscurity, lest the fires dim in the bellies of checkbook-bearing lefties everywhere.

Sure it's cynical. That's why so many of us are registered as Independents.

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SLEEP TIGHT.

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Yes, everybody is justifiably indignant about the single woman who had all the babies, and whose self-indulgence is going to cost the State of California (which can ill afford it) millions for their delivery and upkeep.

You would think that the pro-life crowd was celebrating the miracle, and sending wads of money to help the poor woman take care of her brood, since she had the courage to go ahead, get implanted, and give birth without "getting rid of the problem." I must be missing something, because the cash doesn't appear to be rolling in.

It's strange the way some pro-lifers, at least the ones who use abortion as a political wedge issue, seem to lose interest in the welfare of children once they're born. Where do all the funds for pre- and post-natal care come from? The subsidies for the actual deliveries? Pre-K programs? College assistance? Day care? Hold on a second- those are programs Democrats tend to fight for.

And another thing, while I'm on the topic: Why does the "sanctity of life" not extend to our use of the death penalty? When I lived in Oklahoma, I met plenty of folks who saw no disconnect between fighting to save a fetus' life and clamoring for somebody to get fried.

I never could figure out exactly at what age a human being's life ceased to be sacred. Asking the experts just stirred up trouble.

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Being the Gringo-centric nation that we are, we can easily forget that another luminary besides Abraham Lincoln was born on exactly the same day as our 16th President. Maybe--dare I say it--somebody even more important, because he helped to define how we view ourselves in relation to nature and the universe.

Certainly, Charles Darwin’s legacy is argued more vehemently in current affairs than Lincoln’s. We’ve settled the slave issue, and the Confederacy lives on only as a welling-up in the eyes of its sons and daughters.

Why is it that evolutionists and creationists can’t live together in harmony? This isn’t a football game, where only one team can win. My view (and not an unusual one, I’m sure) is that the concepts are not mutually exclusive.

I imagine that sitting in heaven listening to celestial choirs of angels and archangels can get a little tedious after a while, even with the likes of Mozart and Bach writing the score. Maybe He set up Natural Selection as a kind of combination ant farm and demolition derby to keep Himself occupied.

Before you go labeling me as an Intelligent Design type, by extension He would have had to set up the system so that it would be random and unpredictable, otherwise He would know how it was going to turn out (see celestial choir, above). Now we’re getting into the doctrine of Free Will, which is beyond my pay grade.

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The latest hot pastime is for kids to send sexually-oriented text messages and nude pictures of themselves to each other on their cell phones as a way of "flirting." Whatever happened to offering to carry somebody's books home?

I was having a discussion about this at work with a friend, who happens to be the mother of two teenagers. "Kids these days have nothing on Sodom and Gomorrah," she said authoritatively. "Read your Bible. You shoulda seen the things they were doing back then. And while Moses was up on the mountain, they were down there making all kinds of stuff out of gold and silver!"

My friend may have conflated a couple of stories, but her point is well taken. Young people have done everything they could to challenge the mores of their societies since "time in memoriam," as one of my old Oklahoma associates would say. Idol worship, dancing the waltz, glue sniffing, psychedelic drugs, love-ins, listening to Elvis Presley records. Now it's body piercings, something called "embedding" that I won't even go into, and "sexting."

All parents can do is shrug and try to stay a step ahead in the arms race.

A word about Sodom and Gomorrah: I was under the impression that the Sodomites (Why is it that they get all the credit? Is it because it looks awkward to add a "y" to "Gomorrah" when you're writing a state morality statute?) were condemned not for their imaginative sexual proclivities, but for being inhospitable to strangers.

I don't purport to be a scriptural scholar, so I'll leave that to the sages to argue. Besides, it could be a subject for another cartoon.

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I remember watching a young adult, barely of voting age, being interviewed on TV early in the primaries. The reporter asked him if the fact that Barack Obama was black would affect his decision, and he answered, "That's something only you older people think about." Talk about generational change.

It's the same with gay issues. Prejudice isn't an entity that can exist on its own. It's a parasite, and it dies slowly...one host organism at a time.

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One thing George W. Bush learned from Karl Rove is that all that high-minded stuff about brotherly love and the Great Melting Pot is dreck.

We're a nation of tribes, prejudices and special interests. If you can cobble together a big enough coalition of angry people by appealing to their basest hot-button phobias, you can get something done in this country, like passing tax cuts for the wealthiest five per cent of our population.

Now comes Barack Obama with an innovative concept: to be a true unifier (I refuse to use the Bushism "uniter"), why not tick everybody off by goring all the oxen at once? It's a little like the martyr who gathers all the spear points into his own body so that his army can break through the lines.

At least, in their mutual disappointment, the factions are talking to one another. This is a lot further than W. got in eight years, and Obama isn't even president yet.

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It's easy to scream about tolerance when you're the one on the outside being excluded. Now that the left thinks they've won the brass ring, they want the whole ride to themselves.

Listen to what one group said (I paraphrase): "Obama's choice of the Rev. Rick Warren means that he doesn't believe gays and lesbians have a place at the table."

Exactly wrong. What it means is that everybody, for a change, has a place at the table. You're never going to heal the divisions in this country by keeping any of the stakeholders out. And the stakeholders are all of us.

Grow up, for crying out loud. Getting even isn't getting ahead.

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First, he was a Muslim. Then, just a plain old garden-variety Pal of Terrorists. He wanted to teach kindergartners how to have sex. Next, there were lawsuits saying the authorities in Hawaii LIED and are part of a cover-up to obscure his true furrin origins.

Now, worst of all, he's going to take away our God-given right to own guns.

One of the things I find most fascinating about the paranoids is the sheer fecundity of their imaginations. I heard some folks, during the campaign, complain that if Obama won the presidency, they were going to move to Canada.

Why don't they hurry up and move, already, or are they afraid of living in a country where everybody has health insurance?

And let's not even discuss Canadian gun ownership laws.

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Remember the fat years, when we could afford to sit back and get voluntarily offended that our own religious symbol was omitted from some public gathering place, or that one representing a creed we didn't like was included along with ours?

That's a luxury for people who aren't worried about their livelihoods, or whether they'll ever get to retire, or whether their kids will ever get to go to college. It all seems so trivial now.

It's a shame, because the annual mall protests were one of the things that gave South Florida its pizzazz. Is it possible that this recession will forge us into one big, disgusting cesspool of brotherly love?

Naah. We're stronger than that.

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I love drawing cartoons like this because the notion that God really cares about the topic of same-sex marriage is so absurd, particularly when He has so much else to worry about, like war, disease, poverty and worldwide hunger.

Even if He did care, I imagine that it would definitely be on His back burner. As we know, same-sex marriage only seems to be a threat to the very survival of the republic once every four years, at voting and fund-raising time. I doubt it is a threat to God, since He created both gays and straights. He probably did it in order to make Creation more interesting for Him to watch.

So far, we haven't let Him down.

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