SF Columnist Mark Morford's assessment on the pink arches 'scandal.

The man has a way with words.

Hey, remember the angry evangelicals? The quivering clan of militant Christoholics who propelled Bush into office and seized the national narrative for a few terrifying moments about five years back, ran deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and confusion and lust for all things homophobic and saccharine and spiritually denigrating?

Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very soon to be a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch line, blasted to the dustbin of history like dried housefly limbs after a sneeze. You should know this now.

And for those with shorter memories of, or not paying attention to the origin of all that nipple mania. A brief history.

As the Bush era crested, as the neocons’ power reached nuclear levels, when female nipples and f-words and evil gay agendas ruled the news, the evangelical Right, led by the most virulent, spittle-flecked gaggle of mental throwbacks to ever stain the American newswires, the American Family Association and its nefarious leader, the Rev. Donald Wildmon — this group controlled, for a brief, awful moment, the national dialogue.

Mark feels their time may be over. His proof?

Did you know the AFA recently boycotted McDonald’s? That’s right, this once semi-powerful tub of right-wing brain-caulk recently declared a comestible fatwa against America’s foremost purveyor of toxic foodstuffs because, apparently, some high-ranking McD’s VP just joined the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, which, to the AFA, somehow translates directly into free pink condoms and mind-controlling rainbow flags in every toxic God-fearing Happy Meal.

Wondering why it wasn’t all over FOX and other MSM news, his assessment.

No one cared. Well, that’s not quite true. McDonald’s sort of cared, just enough to write up a nice letter of response to Wildmon stating, in essence, that the AFA is a bunch of troglodytic knuckle-draggers with the sociosexual awareness of a fungal spore, and they should crawl away right now before God spanks them even harder with the 2×4 of total irrelevance.

I might be exaggerating. What they actually said was: Thank you, AFA, for your hateful consideration, but we support our employees’ right to join whichever socially responsible and positive groups they like. And thusly did McD’s flick the AFA away like a tick from a dog. Isn’t that amazing?

But here’s the good part. As all good behemoth coroporations do they assessed the ‘danger’ of this new attack and decided:

Nossir, they do so purely for economic reasons, because it’s just good PR, because they are safe in the knowledge that the AFA’s rantings have exactly zero effect on their bottom line and lots of their own employees are gay — and by the way discrimination based on sexual orientation is thoroughly illegal — and therefore it simply makes more business sense to support tolerance than it does to endorse homophobia and general spiritual stupidity. Isn’t that right, Boy Scouts of America? You bet it is.

And it all goes to show that:

Is it not, concomitantly, interesting that no one at all cares a whit for what the hell the AFA has to say anymore? Is this not a sign of something interesting and sea-changing and good? I think it is. McD’s, Wal-Mart, Ford and Disney utterly ignore the Christian Right? What’s next, an articulate black intellectual president? Oh wait.

TA DA! BOTTOM LINE FOLKS… THE BIG BIG BOTTOM LINE.

Hey sorry to say but HRC may be onto a little something! You did see the that in addition to Peter’s list of 20 most wonderful organizations our wonderul Pam is high in, he also posted a list of the 195 companies on the CORPORATE EQUALITY LIST, (Jeremy posts it in a thread on GAY) that now get 100% marks from HRC…and if these needed to be boycotted too.  Well you read the list!  

PS I left a comment, that I had sent his words ‘across the country’, to the best little coffee house the Right Wingnuts hate.