Amidst all the noise, there are some quietly dramatic developments unfolding in Washington, DC that may change the course of the battle over access to reproductive health care.  There is an organization that recognizes that what they and allied groups have been doing has not been working, or at least not well enough.  They also recognize that the Religious Right has gained the upper hand in the states where antiabortion regulations and legislation are being proposed, and sometimes passed, at an extraordinary rate.  And to take these realities head on, they are changing what they do, and how they do it.

As North Carolina voters prepare to vote on an amendment that would constitutionally prohibit recognition of same-sex marriages (along with civil unions and domestic partnerships), I am reminded of a similar battle that took place in the state of Oregon exactly twenty years ago.

On May 8, a group called Come Pray With Me plans to hold a prayer service in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.

This is kind of a big deal. Statuary Hall isn't some sort of public facility that anyone can use. Groups have to get permission from the congressional leadership to hold events there, and it's not often granted.

He is a billionaire several times over, a supporter of conservative causes, candidates, and organizations, including campaigns of the anti-immigrant former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo and the Intelligent Design-peddling Discovery Institute, and he's been a backer of anti-gay rights initiatives. He owns The Weekly Standard, a highly partisan conservative magazine, recently sold the conservative Examiner newspapers, but rarely will speak to the press.

After devoting years of building a massive Disneyesque entertainment complex in Los Angeles called L.A. Live - which tapped into tens of millions of government dollars -- he now has his eyes on building a $1 billion stadium in L.A. and securing a National Football League team for the city. He's also been putting the finishing touches on a deal that would have his company running the Coliseum complex in Oakland, California.

He is a native Kansan, and although he's not related to the multi-billionaire Kansas Koch Brothers, he certainly shares many of their interests.

We're talking Philip Anschutz, who, in 1999, was labeled the nation's "greediest executive" by Fortune magazine.

Anyone who saw Jon Stewart's interview of Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton on The Daily Show last night probably noticed something missing -- there was almost no discussion about what's actually in Barton's new book, The Jefferson Lies. Instead of talking about the book, Stewart opted for talking about more general topics, and Barton was able to walk away completely unscathed.

When I first got Barton's book a little over a month ago, I decided to do what I usually do with Barton's crap, and made a video debunking some of the book's many lies. This was when I did not anticipate that Barton's book would become a bestseller and make the leap into the mainstream, climbing to #11 on Amazon and #25 on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Yesterday Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), issued a rather hysterical email appeal for funds. No news there. Perkins does that all of the time.

This particular message, headlined "Help stop secular tyranny," took a line that's increasingly popular with the Religious Right these days: "Woe is me! We're being persecuted."

To get a sense of where David Barton is at, consider: last October 2011, before a Florida audience that included Newt Gingrich, David Barton made the claim that the founding fathers based key concepts in the United States Constitution upon scriptural passages from the Old Testament, including from Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

This past week we learned that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has had an Aquinian epiphany of sorts. The former Ayn Rand acolyte has essentially thrown the controversial author and her philosophy of Objectivism under the bus because of  "her atheism."

But Ryan seems to have changed little except the  labels he uses to disguise his economic philosophy of miserliness.

FROM the Who-Knew-It/They-Still-Existed Dept:

In the land of second and third and fourth acts comes the stories of the Promise Keepers and Jim Bakker.

THE PROMISE KEEPERS -- yes those Promise Keepers -- recently held their first 2012 event in Orlando, Florida. Raleigh Washington, PK's president and CEO, said that "1,000 men experienced the presence of God's Spirit in a very masculine way."

MEANWHILE, The once high & mighty televangelist Jim Bakker, disgraced by multiple scandals that included ripping off his flock -- for which he served time in prison --and cheating on his wife, the late Tammy Faye Bakker, is back on national television.

On a recent episode of his program, he offered viewers a "love gift." The imagination runs rampant thinking about what Bakker's "love gift" might consist of.

For many young Americans, the Westboro Baptist Church has become the face of extreme antigay hatred from the religious right ; Mike Bickle's Kansas City-based International House of Prayer, with its smooth pop-rock driven exterior, would seem almost the antithesis of Westboro Baptist. But today, Friday April 27th, 2012, IHOP is slated, according to a news release from ChristianNewsWire, to publicly screen a movie-length video featuring a Ugandan religious leader, Julius Peter Oyet, who has stated that "even animals are wiser than homosexuals." and has openly called for practicing homosexuals to be hunted down and imprisoned or even executed.

A more realistic reading of the recent Christianity Today headline "Will Evangelicals Vote for a Mormon Candidate?" might be, "Do Bears Shit in the Woods?" It's hard to imagine that such a politically savvy Christian magazine thought that it was posing anything other than a rhetorical question with its headline.

In any case, the answer to that question is the same answer it has been for quite some time; Christian conservative evangelicals (especially white men) appear duty bound to vote for Republican Party presidential candidates.

And this year, after Cain fumbled, Perry mumbled, Gingrich tumbled, and Santorum crumbled, Mitt Romney, despite faring poorly among evangelical voters in many primaries (particularly the early southern ones), will undoubtedly wind up receiving the vast majority of evangelical votes.

The bogus narrative of the Religious Right -- that there is a humanist or secular humanist or secularist "religion" bent on taking over America has already been one of the features of this election season.  We have heard about it from Rick Santorum and from Mitt Romney.  And of course, we have written extensively about this bogus narrative and its variants here at Talk to Action over the years, including a discussion of Mitt Romney's recent declaration:  "I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism."

Happily, historian Rick Perlstein, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, has an excellent take on the matter.