Some of you may have heard about the disruption of the first Hindi invocation in the US Senate. Three people in the gallery started shouting about 'idolatry' until they were dragged out. 

Anyway, it turns out that that shameful behavior was sponsored by Flip Benham and his group Operation Save America.

Operation Save America has a significant presence in Kansas, and I wrote a story  on the group for my school newspaper (tried to make it objective, but my disgust probably seeps through.)

Flip Benham and his followers set up outside a local high school, accosting high school girls who they thought were dressed too revealingly and harassing gays. They aimed bullhorns at the school and disrupted classes. So it's not exactly surprising that Benham and his organization would add one more illegal act to their list.

I've spent a fair amount of time around these extremists-- Phelps followers, Benham followers, and run-of-the-mill zealots--but I still can't figure out whether they are doing it because of authentic belief (in my opinion, authentic insanity) or because of a desire for fame.  For the Phelps clan, it is obviously fame, which is why local media doesn't cover their daily outrageous acts. The same goes for Flip.

But I also met followers at various protests, people my own age and younger, who spouted the same lines and put on the same attitude as their parents. I couldn't help thinking,"What kind of chance do they have for a normal life?" One kid I spoke to said that he was home-schooled and that he spent all of his time driving from protest to protest. He seemed perfectly nice, but a conspiracy of adults was systematically wrecking his mind.

While of course I'm angry with these three shouters in the Senate chamber, I also feel pity for them. They've probably always occupied a kind of parallel universe where every adult they know and respect affirms insanity, and everything outside of the cult is deemed the temptation of the devil.

This generation of religious radicals is producing the next as we speak, and I've spent enough time observing the camps, the conferences, and the protests to say with confidence that they couldn't be said to be failing. And there isn't any really good way to break up the party. The current methods of fundamentalists are very effective and are used on the very young.

So we should get used to behavior like what we saw in the Senate. These radicals aren't going away any time soon.