An anonymous group in Grand Rapids, Michigan is distributing flyers depicting President Obama as a white man with a black mask and a Nazi swastika. “The Holocaust is coming,” the flyers read, “Hitler’s Nazi Germany has been revived in the U.S. and the target is Americans.” Voters are referred “referred to a website to sign a petition that espouses tea party ideas and urges people to support Ron Paul”:

The flyer spouts the idea that there are military checkpoints throughout the country and that it “is legal to assassinate Americans.”

“Obama’s health care bill is not a health care bill, instead it’s a total government takeover of every area of life (read the fine print) like gun confiscation, euthanasia and so on (euthanizing the poor, the elderly, the ill, those who’ve maxed out their health insurance and so on) there are no jobs and everyone will eventually be poor,” the card states. [...]

The literature offers no clue on who authored and distributed it. The image of Obama on the front comes from the two-hour political documentary “The Obama Deception.” The film from Alex Jones claims Obama has been installed by powerful families to act against the interests of the people.

Tea Party activists have long depicted Obama as a Nazi, and a Catholic Bishop recently claimed that Obama is following in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler. The view is even echoed by mainstream Republicans like Newt Gingrich. In his 2010 book To Save America, Gingrich argued repeatedly that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are a “secular-socialist machine” that “represent as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”

The Los Angeles Times offers this review of Mitt Romney’s response to Massachusetts’ Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Romney used the issue as an opportunity to build a national profile among conservative voters — and despite running on a platform of expanding equal rights for gays and lesbians, sought to defuse the Court’s decision and supported a federal constitutional constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

The tactic surprised some voters, who believed Romney’s campaign pledge to make domestic partner benefits a “hallmark of my leadership as governor,” as he himself seemed to indicate an early willingness to accept the pro-gay ruling:

Then came the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in November 2003 that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry. In its 4-3 decision, the court gave the Legislature 180 days “to take such action as it may deem appropriate.” Opponents of same-sex marriage — citing a quirk in the state’s colonial-era Constitution that gave the governor authority over matters related to marriage — argued that the court’s decision was not binding and urged Romney to ignore it.

But Romney did not want to trigger a constitutional crisis — seeking, his advisor Flaherty said, to be “respectful of the law and respectful of people at the same time.” Initially, he struck a balanced tone with his two-track move to find a legislative solution that would satisfy the court while corralling support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. “We certainly have to follow the law, and the Supreme Court has laid down what we must do,” he said on NBC’s”Today” show the day after the ruling. “But in my view, the right action is to follow two courses at the same time.”

But the governor quickly dropped all talk about complying with the ruling. Behind the scenes, Romney advisors worked to come up with ways to head it off, according to those involved. They consulted conservative constitutional experts such as historian Matthew Spalding, who works closely with former Reagan Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III at the Heritage Foundation.

It was soon clear that Romney could not push a gay marriage ban through the state’s liberal-leaning Legislature. So he helped persuade Republicans to support a compromise amendment that barred same-sex marriage but legalized civil unions.

Romney eventually seized on an obscure 1913 law (originally intended to limit interracial marriage) to keep out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts and “endorsed a separate citizens’ petition for an amendment to ban gay marriage. Still, some conservative activists criticized Romney for opening the door to civil unions,” accusing him of being “everywhere on this issue” and even going so far as to claim that he personally issued marriage licenses to gay couples.

By 2005, however, Romney was appearing before conservative groups in South Carolina and declaring, “From Day One, I’ve opposed the move for same-sex marriage and its equivalent, civil unions.” Calling the ruling “a blow against the family,” he said that some gay couples “are actually having children born to them.”

Christian conservative groups are condemning Dan Savage — the founder of the anti-bullying It Gets Better project — for “bullying” religious students who walked out of a recent lecture in which the popular sex columnist pointed out “the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting that we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”

Savage made the remarks at the National High School Journalism Conference, causing a group of students to walk out as he began discussing the moral problems contained within the religious document:

SAVAGE: We can learn to ignore the bullshit about gay people in the Bible the same way have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish about slavery, about dinner about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waived Bibles over their heads during the civil war and justified it…We ignore what the Bible says about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong. …If the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, slavery. What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100 percent.

“You can tell the Bible guys in the hall, they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible,” Savage said before moving on to his next topic, “It’s funny as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-ass some people react when you push back.” Watch it:

Savage has since apologized for describing his detractors as “pansy-ass.” “I wasn’t calling the handful of students who left pansies (2800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walk-out itself,” he said. “But that’s a distinction without a difference—kinda like when religious conservatives tell their gay friends that they ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’… Likewise, my use of ‘pansy-assed’ was insulting, it was name-calling, and it was wrong. And I apologize for saying it.”

Ironically, this story about Savage’s comments broke on the same day that Joel Osteen — the leader of the nation’s largest Christian Church — told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that he believes homosexuality is a “sin” because “my faith is based on what I believe the scripture says and that’s the way I read the scripture.”