"You're in Georgia Now, Boy"

I knew when I moved to Atlanta in 2000, we'd have to deal with what I jokingly referred to as the "cracker factor". Georgia is a so-called 'red' state, Republican and conservative and Christian through and through once you get out of the urban and educated pockets that dot the state. The big scandal soon after we got here was the crematorium owner who left corpses lying around his property. That was odd and gruesome in a black humor kind of way.

This latest conservative, religionist offense against basic human decency is just odd—and a little scary. Seems there's a gubernatorial candidate name of Neal Horsley (remember that name) from the Creator's Rights Party. I refuse to link to them, but if you're interested you can find them on the web. They are, needless to say, an anti-abortion, anti-choice, anti-Roe v. Wade party. Nothing too strange about that. That attitude is not isolated to the South.

Horsley, however, took things one step further, though. He once ran a website called the "Nuremberg Files". Again, I will not link to it. What he did on that site was list the names and addresses and phone numbers of abortion doctors, and then cross them off as they were killed. Eric Rudolf must've been a regular.

Now, Horsley is making news again. He's running for Governor of the great State of Georgia. What he wants to do, it seems, is get elected governor, then secede from the United States. As you may know, we in the South have had some experience with that particular political strategy—to disastrous results, I might add, that have only recently begun to truly heal. "That's the only way, he says [here], to overturn Roe v. Wade. The candidate for Governor for the Creator's Rights Party says, people have to be willing to die. The idea is to take over a state, then hole up and wait for the United States army to come for a kind of Alamo last stand." He even says that if his son, an Army sergeant, were to try to stop him he would kill him, as he nearly did on another occasion. Of course, Horsley cites the Bible as proof text to justify these attitudes and feelings.

Now, the Christers have made a lot of hay over the last few years about the Pledge of Allegiance which, in the 1950s, added the phrase "under God". They don't want it dropped and condemn as unpatriotic any who do. They conveniently forget all about that "indivisible" part, which, to my mind, has more to do with patriotism.

But even that bit of hypocrisy is not the truly weird part. We expect it from them, and we love them for it. Here's the part that's cinches the deal. The title of the story pretty much says it all: "Georgia candidate for governor says sex with mules, watermelon behind him." Who says there are no second acts in American lives?*

So as not to distort things, I'll quote the 2005 interview transcript from Alan Colmes's FOX News radio show for this part:

AC: "You had sex with animals?"
NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."
AC: "I'm not so sure that that is so."
NH: "You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?"
AC: "Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?"
NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality... Welcome to domestic life on the farm..."

The article continues: "Colmes said he thought there were a lot of people in the audience who grew up on farms, are living on farms now, raising kids on farms and 'and I don't think they are dating Elsie right now. You know what I'm saying?' Horsley said, 'You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. You're naive. You know better than that... If it's warm and it's damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it.' [The details about how he accomplished this feat can be found in the The Examiner stories—if you can get past the ickiness factor.]

And, you know something? The man will get votes here. How many? It's hard to say. But that's Georgia for you—at least one gothic, Flannery part of it anyway.

I guess the point of this is that when people like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and conservative talk radio rabble-rousers (you know who they are) and FOX News demagogic hysterics (like Glen Beck) start talking about secession and saving this country from socialists and democrats and all the other right-wing propaganda they spew, they incite people like this Horsley guy to action.

Horsley. Neal Horsley. Remember that name (I'm sure the mules did). It's a name worthy of Dickens or Pynchon. Seriously, you can't make this kind of stuff up.

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* For those of you keeping score at home, that would be F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald. "There are no second acts in American lives."