Way down in Christina Bellantoni’s story about black voters in North Carolina being intimidated heckled is a little nugget about the distribution of a particular flier:

One group was handing out fliers “comparing” McCain and Obama on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Among those listed on the sheet were:

Opposes gay pride?	McCain	YES	Obama	NO
Supports human cloning?	McCain	NO	Obama	YES

Bellantoni then notes, “The flier is a lie, Obama does not support cloning. Also, I know the McCain camp would dispute him ‘opposing gay pride.’” Which are both true enough observations, but the flier is so much better than that.

In fact, what Bellantoni is describing is the Voter Issue Guide developed by WallBuilders, the corporation that “historian” David Barton established to ensure that the Christian white men of American history would never be marginalized or forgotten. (I have written about WallBuilders three times before.) It is a lightweight thing, a list of issues that Christians presumably care most about, such as health care, the economy, originalist Supreme Court justices, opposition to bans on assault weapons, the ability to discriminate openly against gays, the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and so forth. Each candidate’s support for the issue is summarized with a simple “Yes” and “No.”

To WallBuilders’ credit, the flier is not too misleading: whether or not readers are supposed to want the United States to withdraw from Iraq remains ambiguous, and no horns have been drawn on Obama’s forehead. Wallbuilders even tries to ground the flier in research. On the flier’s verso is a reference for each candidate’s stance on the issues. Do all of the links make sense with no context? Well, no. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that John McCain, the candidate who, with an emphatic red “Yes” opposes gay pride, opposes gay pride with this much conviction:

(Via Yglesias.)

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