In February, Ohio televangelist Rev. Rod Parsley endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain called Parsley — who once said Allah was a “demon spirit” — his “spiritual guide.” In an interview with the AP today, McCain finally said that he rejected Parsley’s support:

I believe there is no place for that kind of dialogue in America, and I believe that even though he endorsed me, and I didn’t endorse him, the fact is that I repudiate such talk, and I reject his endorsement.

Watch a Brave New Films video highlighting the relationship between McCain and Parsley:

McCain’s statement on Parsley came after the senator earlier in the day rejected the endorsement of radical pastor John Hagee.

John McCain decides he can quit John Hagee after all. In one interesting possible future, McCain reaches the conclusion that he’s got the GOP nomination and conservatives have nowhere to go so he brings back the “agents of intolerance” talk, maybe picks a pro-choice running mate, and makes a serious high-risk high-reward effort to definitively separate himself from the mire into which the rest of the party is sinking.

AP reports on a troubling development in Iraq:

Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible — a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad.

The edicts, or fatwas, by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani suggest he seeks to sharpen his long-held opposition to American troops and counter the populist appeal of his main rivals, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

So far, American officials have considered Sistani a “key stabilizing force in Iraq for refusing to support a full-scale Shiite uprising against U.S.-led forces or Sunnis — especially at the height of sectarian bloodletting after an important Shiite shrine was bombed in 2006.”

Reacting to the California Supreme Court’s decision overturing a same-sex marriage ban, the far right group Campaign for Children and Families compares county clerks issuing same-sex marriage licenses to Nazis gassing Jews during the Holocaust. Here’s what they say on their website, SaveCalifornia.com:

Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they? At the Nuremberg trials, they would have been convicted of murder for following this immoral order.

(HT: Andrew Sullivan)

Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer column by former Republican senator Rick Santorum is a shrill rant against the California Supreme Court for its recent ruling allowing gay marriage. Santorum worries about the “future of marriage as the union of husband and wife” and points out that he was “sounding the alarm about marriage” back in 2003.

To underscore his assertion that gay marriage = the collapse of civilization, he points to Norway:

Look at Norway. It began allowing same-sex marriage in the 1990s. In just the last decade, its heterosexual-marriage rates have nose-dived and its out-of-wedlock birthrate skyrocketed to 80 percent for firstborn children. Too bad for those kids who probably won’t have a dad around, but we can’t let the welfare of children stand in the way of social affirmation, can we?

But what about love? That’s the question a student asked this winter when I spoke at Georgetown University.

Is anyone saying same-sex couples can’t love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too? Marriage is and always has been more than the acknowledgment of the love between two people.

Conveniently, Santorum gives no sources for his inaccurate statistics. Norway began allowing same-sex civil unions in 1993. But according to M.V. Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Norway’s “big surge” in the nonmarital birth rate occurred in the 1980s, jumping from 16 percent to 39 percent. In the decade after Norway authorized civil unions, the nonmarital birth rate rose only “slightly,” and then, “after a couple of years, leveled off at 50 percent.” These rates are similar to those in countries without such laws.

Additionally, in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed, William Eskridge, Jr., a Yale professor, and author Darren Spedale found that heterosexual marriage rates have actually risen 12.7 percent in Norway since 1993. Similarly, divorce rates amongst heterosexual couples have fallen 6 percent.

Joe Klein seems kind of pissed — “I’m mentioned in two columns today with similar themes: that people like me–the liberal elite media, we’re called–are playing into Obama’s hands by insisting on accuracy from John McCain (according to Bob Novak) and by hoping that, given the mess we’re in, this can be an election about big issues (Steven Stark).”

This has been going on for so long that it hardly even phases me anymore, but it’s striking the extent to which the conservative discourse about Iran hinges crucially on misrepresenting uncontroversial facts about Iran. How many articles or speeches have you read on the subject of the Iranian nuclear program that dwell at length on inflammatory rhetoric from Ahmadenijad without noting that he doesn’t control the relevant aspects of Iranian policy? Beyond that, I recall at least one Weekly Standard article that was unable to make due with outrageous things Ahmadenijad actually said and just decided to attribute some additional conduct to him. Beyond that, it’s been over two years since Charles Krauthammer said Iran was months away from nuclear capacity almost two years since Bernard Lewis confidently stated that Iran would unleash the apocalypse on August 22, 2006, etc.

There’s just no concern — at all — with facts or accuracy on this issue.

In 2003, Bush administration officials took down historic photos depicting significant moments in American diplomatic history. They replaced them “with huge color glossies extolling the diplomatic feats” of the Bush administration. Recently, however, things have taken “a turn for the worse” as unhappy State Department employees took matters into their own hands:

Outside the State Department ‘s press briefing room on the department’s 2nd floor hang large official photos of Bush, Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney. The pictures were, er…modified by persons unknown. (We did not personally witness this, we must admit — or we’d have a photo to post). We’re talking fake mustaches and the like. The defacements were promptly cleaned up. They reappeared.

McClatchy’s “Nukes & Spooks” blog asks, “Further evidence that the Bushies are losing control as they enter their final months?”