LYING DOWN WITH DOGS: PRACTICALLY MANDATORY FOR THE GOP

A seemingly innocuous item in today's Washington Post:

After firing two senior campaign aides in charge of courting evangelical Christians earlier this year, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took steps yesterday to try to shore up support from religious conservatives.

... the McCain campaign announced the hiring of Mike Fair, a Republican state senator from Greenville, S.C., as a $7,000-a-month consultant to head the South Carolina chapter of his religious mobilization effort, Americans of Faith for McCain....

So who is Mike Fair? A little background:

He is best known for the stacks of bills he has introduced that deal with sex. A recent bill called for jail time and fines for men caught in public with "discernibly turgid penises." Fair has sponsored many bills that advocate treating homosexuality as a crime.

Fair proposed rewriting the 1988 Comprehensive Health Education Act to delete all mention of "responsible sexual behavior." To Fair there is no such thing outside of marriage.

Fair's best show was when he subpoenaed a plastic penis that sex educators used to teach teenagers about condom usage. He forced the device to appear at an education committee meeting.

And there's this:

'Choose Life' plates no-go for licenses

The U.S. Supreme Court last week let stand a ruling that overturned South Carolina's attempt to allow "Choose Life" license plates....

Bill author state Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, said he'll try again to authorize the plates.

If a "Choose Death" plate is what it takes to meet the constitutional requirement, Fair said he would propose new legislation, "if that's what’s required to satisfy this goofy bunch of black-robe dimwits."

(Fair actually did introduce a bill to create "Choose Death" plates.)

And Steve Reuland at the Panda's Thumb has quite a lot about Fair's attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in South Carolina. A sample:

South Carolina received an "A" for its treatment of evolution in the Fordham Foundation's recent report, and this has angered state Senator Mike Fair (R-Greenville), who is presumably afraid that this could ruin SC's reputation as a backwards state. This isn't the first time. Back in 2003, Fair reacted to the Fordham Foundation's report by authoring a bill that would put warning labels in text books containing the following bizarre and plainly untrue statement: "The cause or causes of life are not scientifically verifiable. Therefore, empirical science cannot provide data about the beginning of life." The bill, thankfully, went nowhere. Last June, he filed a bill that would require teaching "alternatives" to evolution, which he specifically said would require teaching ID....

(Never mind the fact that McCain insists that he believes in evolution and says intelligent design "probably" shouldn't be taught in science classes.)

But hiring Fair is utterly noncontroversial: McCain signed him up to work on his PAC last fall, and nobody batted an eyelash.

Remember that the next time a Democrat is pilloried for merely being in the same room with Al Sharpton.

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Oh, and there's this about another '08 GOP candidate:

If former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney suddenly sounds tougher and pithier on immigration issues, thank pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan for it. According to Romney insiders, the man who has flip-flopped on immigration sat down privately with Buchanan late last week to discuss the issue.

Yeah, good old Pat:

"Our ancestors were not paralyzed by guilt. Confident in their culture and civilization, they believed in their superiority over what Kipling had called the 'lesser breeds without the law.'"

Good old Pat:

Almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien. Had this deranged young man who secretly hated us never come here, 32 people would heading home from Blacksburg for summer vacation.

...Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation's doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.

Cho was one of them.

Good old Pat:

What is happening to us? An immigrant invasion of the United States from the Third World, as America's white majority is no longer even reproducing itself. Since Roe v. Wade, America has aborted 45 million of her children. And Asia, Africa and Latin America have sent 45 million of their children to inherit the estate the aborted American children never saw. God is not mocked.

And white America is in flight.

Nothing controversial there, right?

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UPDATE: For more on Mike Fair, go here and (especially) here. (The latter posts talks about the deep Intelligent Design roots of a "scientist" who was chosen by Fair to offer advice on South Carolina's science curriculum -- and whose expenses were paid from Fair's election campaign account.)