What happens when 'The 700 Club' meets 'The Weather Channel'? It's the 'Gathering Storm', of course!

I'm sure you've all seen the NOM (National Organization for Marriage) Commercial "Gathering Storm." You may have also seen the veritable torrential rainstorm of parodies and responses to it.

It's the funniest damn stuff I've seen in a long time.

Here's what New York Time's Frank Rich wrote about it on April 18:

"WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism."

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

My personal favorite is "Interracial Marriage: The Gathering Storm." It's a 'justice twofer'. I always love it when one prejudice is dismissed by another.

What's really wonderful about these parodies is that they give credence to one of the most important things I learned from my years on the front lines of the AIDS pandemic:

Laughter, in the face of the Evil of bigotry and prejudice, is a statement of authentic faith.

I mean, if you don't believe in God and the power of God's unconditional love, you would be too afraid to laugh in the face of Evil. You know?

Besides, Evil really loathes the sound of laughter - except, of course, for its own. When you turn the laughter-tables on Evil, it tends to shrink and then tries to slither away.

(Ah, if Eve had only known that in The Garden. Then again, how could she have known that before taking a bite of the Apple? Which, of course, prompts the age-old question: Which came first, the Knowledge or the Apple? Sorry. When I get in 'laughter mode' it's just so hard to stop, and there's just so much Evil around these days.)

My girl Rachel does her part in the clip above. You just can't make this stuff up. Although, I must say, I do wish she'd stop already with the 'teabagging' comments. It's the smirk on her face when she says 'teabagging' that always does me in. Ewwwwwhhhhhh!!!!

Don't be afraid, children. That sound you hear is not a storm gathering. No, my lambs. That is the sound of a toilet flushing the $1.5 million dollars it took to put commercials like this right where they belong.

I only wish the folks in California had started laughing at the very beginning of the Evil of Proposition Eight. Quick! Lets send the California Supremes a bushel basket of Apples. It may be the only way they get the "knowledge" about "forbidden fruit."

Rich ends his piece with this:

As marital equality haltingly but inexorably spreads state by state for gay Americans in the years to come, Utah will hardly be in the lead to follow Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont. But the fact that it too is taking its first steps down that road is extraordinary. It is justice, not a storm, that is gathering. Only those who have spread the poisons of bigotry and fear have any reason to be afraid.

Somebody give the man an "Amen!"