It would have made today special enough just to be able to bring you the "humorous" video embedded below, in which a spokesman for the evangelical conservative group Focus on the Family outlines a hilarious plan to pray for "abundant, torrential" rain to wash out Barack Obama's open-air nomination acceptance speech in Denver later this month. But that was only the start of it, because finding this clip led me, like Quatermain discovering King Solomon's Mines, to an entire treasure trove of footage in which Focus on the Family attempts to use the exciting new medium of online video comedy to spread its hardline messages. It's all rather too fantastic to put into words, but after the jump, I'm going to try.
UPDATE: Focus on the Family pulled the video from their site, but here's a YouTube version.
For too long, I'm sure we can all agree, there's been something unnecessarily po-faced about the religious right's campaigns to stop unmarried people having sex, deny women reproductive rights, and stop gay weddings because of the risk of straight people becoming instantly divorced as a result. Well, don't worry: the era of earnestness is over. Focus on the Family has a comedy saviour, and his name is Stuart Shepherd. (You can find the whole collection here.)
In this video, Shepherd deploys his range of cheeky facial expressions to mock Congress for funding something as ridiculous as "the search for extraterrestrials" when it could be funding abstinence education. (He delivers part of this video while crouching behind some trees, but never explains why.) In this broadside against Al Gore and the human role in global warming, he uses Chaplinesque slapstick humour to explain why liberal scientists have got it all wrong. And here, he introduces a side-splitting prop -- a copy of "The Wild-Eyed Liberal Mainstream Media Dictionary" -- to explain why we don't need to worry about the poor. (That's roughly what Jesus said about the poor, right?)
Finally, British readers may particularly relish this episode, in which Shepherd waxes furious at the campaign to de-Christianise Christmas, and especially at the retailers who send him catalogues that use the non-specific word "holidays" instead. His habit is to toss these catalogues in the garbage, which leads him to coin a satirical alternative holiday, "just for retailers". He calls it Merry Tossmass. I'm 99% sure he's not aware of the British slang meaning.
