And on the right...

Mike Huckabee says that the gay rights movement won't stop until "there are no more churches." He thinks that laws against discrimination are laws against Christianity.

He said these things during a radio interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. (Every time I see that name, I hear Bernard Herrmann's famous score: Shriek shriek shriek shrack shrack shrack...)

Perkins contended that gay people who are denied service by a business should simply try to find another shop that will serve them rather than filing a lawsuit against discriminatory business owners.

I'm old enough to remember a time when people made precisely similar arguments to justify a restaurant's "right" not to serve black people.

Meanwhile, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty says that American liberals are Satanists who have killed more people than did Hitler and Stalin combined. If you can make sense of this argument, you should become a psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia, because you have a demonstrated talent for comprehending the ramblings of seriously deranged individuals.

In a similar vein, you may want to check out the work of the Gatestone Institute, a right-wing think tank usually associated with the Muslim-hate movement. The Institute pushes the idea that parts of England and France are now "no-go" zones for non-Muslims. As you will recall, Steve Emerson got laughed off stage when he repeated this Gatestone nonsense.

Chaired by John Bolton -- the fellow who recently demanded war with Iran -- the Institute's head honchos include some very intriguing names, including Alan Dershowitz, Richard Kemp (mentioned in the comments a couple of posts down), James Woolsey, and Baroness Caroline Cox.

(The last-named aristocrat also heads a group called One Jerusalem, which holds that "The establishment of a Palestinian State must removed from the international agenda." I admire the honesty on display here. When talking among themselves, the Israel-firsters admit that the two-state solution has never been more than a fiction.)

In their own droll fashion, the Gatestoners are so far to the right as to make Tony Perkins look like Noam Chomsky. Stoners -- may I call them Stoners? -- say explicitly what our own right-wingers dare to indicate only in whispered suggestions. Check out this piece, which claims that an influx of Somalis has transformed Sweden into the "rape capital of the west."

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%.

Over the past 10-15 years, immigrants have mainly come from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Might this mass influx explain Sweden's rape explosion?

It goes on and on like that. The Gatestoners provide the concentrate from which Pam Geller makes her orange juice. Yet Alan Dershowitz still has a reputation as a liberal...!