Here’s a lengthy diatribe on what self-serving hypocrites many evangelicals are — published in Christianity Today‘s Books & Culture.

“Do you know what happened in the United States? They accused me of being a theocon—I don’t know what that means…” Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian politician recently deemed unqualified to be a European Commissioner because he allgedly suggested homosexuality is a sin, comes out of his own private closet.

Sharlet: Years ago I interviewed Wendy Doniger, the U Chicago scholar of mythology. At the time, she was working on a cross-cultural study of getting screwed, literally and figuratively — what happens when you go to bed with a guy you think is Prince Charming, and wake up with a toad. Over her desk she’d pinned an exhortation to stay focussed on her work: “Keep Your Eye on the Ball(s).” That dedication has led Doniger afoul of a fundamentalist strain in contemporary Hinduism, ultra-conservatives who accuse her of — gasp — reading sex into the Kama Sutra, and, more broadly, just being a woman talking about sex and other people’s gods. Such is the subject of her new book: The Woman Who Pretended to be Who She Was.

Spongebob has been pressed into the service of a “homosexual agenda” and Dr. James Dobson has MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on the ropes, about to go the way of Dan Rather. If you believe either of these claims, we have some oceanfront property in Colorado Springs to sell you. Olbermann debunks claims from Focus on the Family that they’ve managed to scare him with a mighty email engine; in fact, he says, they’ve generated a poor showing compared to other critics. Olbermann’s not known for subtlety, which may explain why he earns enemies. But unless he’s flat-out lying, this report on his blog suggests that l’affaire Spongebob really was a cynical ploy on the part of Dr. Dobson, who tried to rewrite the record once it’d backfired.