Posted inside all the phonebank cubbies at Sharron Angle's Las Vegas headquarters, there’s a sheet that instructs her volunteers how to deal with anyone who has questions regarding Sharron Angle's relationship to the Mormon Church. This is because Angle's pastor has denounced the LDS Church—of which her opponent, Harry Reid, is a member—as a "cult." So concerned people are to be given the number of a "well known leader" and "Friend." I called to speak with this former bishop of the LDS church.

A well-chewed bit of conventional wisdom holds that cultural conflagrations find no better accelerant than a Supreme Court opinion. Under this theory, smoldering social divisions explode into Samuel Pepys territory when the Court short circuits the democratic process and moves definitively to settle a social issue. Exhibit A is typically Roe v. Wade, which, in attempting to remove abortion from the realm of political controversy, instead visited upon us several decades of incessant yelling and pictorial craziness (think sonograms, bloody fetuses and snowflake babies).