J K Rowling and the Religious Right

I sometimes think America is another country. I've just been reading that JK Rowling was denied the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of pressure from the religious right, who thought she promoted witchcraft in her books.

Well, duh! But then again, these were works of fiction, because, and if you're reading this you complete morons, witchcraft itself is fictional, otherwise, you can be sure, I'd be disparating right now and appearing in your living room armed with my wand exclaiming

'Confundo!'

at you, oh no, wait, it looks like someone already did that.

I mean are they really really that stupid that they believe in witchcraft? I realise of course, that these people already - to quote the Queen of Hearts - believe 6 impossible things before breakfast being fundamentalist christians, but why pick on witchcraft? Are the Lord of the Rings books evil too, do they put the wind up Christians?

What I reckon, is that they are, of course, running scared. They've managed to delude themselves for a long time, and have brainwashed their own children to believe the same crap, even though it flies in the face of reality or the facts. Creationism, for instance, requires the most tortuous twisting of reality for it to work - it requires the entire scientific establishment, with all their high IQs to be wrong or deluded or actually conspiring against christianity. It requires that the speed of light to have been hundreds of times faster in the past, but at some point it stopped slowing down and has remained stable ever since - and that's just one of the laws of physics that would have to be wrong.

When you've gone to all that trouble of convincing yourself you're right against all the evidence, you must end up feeling hounded and surrounded on all sides by 'enemies' - but when fantasy books of the quality of the Harry Potter books are an enemy to your religion - then you really should be having a re-think.