Over the weekend, President Obama did something that all American presidents are called upon to do. Defend the Constitution of the United States.

One of those tenets is Freedom of Religion. Not amend section A: popular religion [this week] only.

It’s how and why I feel free to tell folks I’m an atheist – or introduce someone in my family as a student of Buddhism – or note in the course of a conversation about San Antonito Chapel down the road that most of my neighbors are Catholics.

But, right-wing nutballs and the proto-fascists who infest the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party go crap out of their mind if Christian godliness and morality ain’t the only way endorsed to fly straight to heaven. Much less catch a tax break from the IRS.

So, combine all the hypocrisy into one big ball of cigar-snot and mealymouthed punditry – and you get this weekend’s tempest in a teabag.

Here’s a copy of the dangerous sedition uttered by Obama.

I’m not getting into cutting and pasting and commenting line-by-line because, frankly, it’s just the usual straight-up rhetoric required of any official who’s trying to explain our Constitution to people who don’t think it’s worth defending. The whole point of having a standard by which to govern a nation is that it is a standard to be upheld – not amended every time someone asks a hard question or a tough challenge comes along.

Our Founding Fathers realized that and fought and died for it. Now, because some terrorist gangsters come along and say our standards are worthless – a certain portion of our population is willing to prove them correct.