IS THIS HOW THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WILL GET BACK IN THE GAME?

We've been lately hearing that the religious right has lost its mojo -- that even in evangelical-rich Iowa the Bible-thumping candidates (Santorum, Bachmann, Perry) are struggling, while the leading GOP presidential candidates are a thrice-married Catholic, a Mormon, and a libertarian. This is regarded as emblematic of the religious right's weakness all over America these days. We accept gays in the military. We watch Glee. We don't care about the fundies' issues anymore, and their best-known leaders are dying off.

I'm not sure I fully accept this narrative -- religious-right arguments are clearly winning the day on abortion all over America, and gay marriage struggles to maintain a toehold -- but it does seem that there's been some loss of clout. So I wonder if the religious right will try to regain that clout by shifting gears the way David Caton of the Florida Family Association has:

For the first 15 years of his public life, Mr. Caton aimed almost entirely at homosexuals....

Mr. Caton often used the tactic of pressuring advertisers on shows he depicted as advocating for homosexuality -- "Sordid Lives," "Degrassi High" and "Modern Family." On the Florida Family Association Web site, he posted grandiose claims about the companies that pulled their advertising and the cable networks that canceled shows. He appears to have frequently exaggerated, but he was almost never publicly contradicted.

Within the past two years, Mr. Caton has largely dropped the anti-gay banner in favor of a new villain: American Muslims.

When he was attacking gay people -- the Gay-Straight Alliance in a Florida high school, an openly gay lawyer in the Florida attorney general's office -- he was a footnote, a guy running a one-man operation known to very few people in America. Now he's leading a frontal assault on the TLC show All-American Muslim, and he's famous. He's also making allies and hopping on something conservatively trendy:

... Mr. Caton's new obsession also drew upon the heated comments of such prominent anti-Muslim activists as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. And it coincided with the national controversies about the "ground zero mosque" -- in fact, an Islamic cultural center several blocks from ground zero — and the hearings led by Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican, on alleged subversion by American Muslims.

Is this how the fundies will evolve and adapt? By downplaying sex and emphasizing Islamophobia? I could see it. I could see it working. The lives of ordinary people in this country aren't going to get better very fast in the foreseeable future, if at all. Republicans are going to take power overtly in this country sooner or later, and when they don't improve ordinary people's lives, they're going to need to do some serious scapegoating to distract the restless populace -- and believe me, the next Republican president isn't goingt to say, as George W. Bush said, that our quarrel isn't with the Islamic faith per se. Muslim-bashing is going to increase in this country. And maybe the fundies will be right there to give it -- literally -- their blessing, in part for their own benefit.