Having tied the fate of American religious liberty to Pat McCrory's, an astonished Maggie Gallagher takes one on the chins.

Modest to a fault, author and commentator Maggie Gallagher tells readers of her Official Website this:

For 25 years, Maggie has been a thought leader on life, religious liberty and especially marriage. She is the author of four books on marriage (including “The Case for Marriage” with University of Chicago Prof. Linda J. Waite); her latest book “Debating Same-sex Marriage” (co-authored with Prof. John Corvino) was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. After founding and running a think-tank on marriage (the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy), Maggie went on to co-found the National Organization for Marriage in 2007, which the Washington Post called the “pre-eminent organization” fighting the legalization of same-sex marriage. Her Weekly Standard piece “Banned in Boston” launched a national debate over the religious liberty consequences of same-sex marriage. Maggie stepped down from the board of NOM in the summer of 2012.

Maggie currently serves as a senior fellow with the American Principles Project.

In fact, Maggie Gallagher is an angry slag who vies with George W. Bush for the title Yale’s Dumbest Graduate (she’s a lapsed, then born-again Catholic who, during a lacuna as a “pro-life atheist” got her worldview from Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, and, during the 1991 Murphy Brown TV outrage, published an op-ed called “An Unwed Mother for Quayle”, which makes her as effective an advocate for marriage as, say, Bristol Palin is for abstinence), and who makes a handsome living in the Right Wing American Anti-Gay Thought Complex. In her “senior fellowship” at the APP’s broom closet office, she does the wet work and second-story activity for the antigay campaigns of Princeton's Prince of Darkness, Professor Robert P. George. For decades she has been a human vinegar distiller, taking George's highminded nostrums and spewing them out as scorn, spite and hypocrisy, and all for top dollar.

Thought leaders, after all, don't come cheap.

Well, at least their thoughts don't.

George is a ferociously intelligent man, so bright he cannot imagine people will see through his fantasy explanations of how President Lincoln’s opposition to the Dred Scott decision proves Americans can ignore the US Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision.

Fastidious to a fault, a priestly philosopher-king, George writes fawning letters to the Vatican, proffering his wisdom on how to throttle modernity, while payrolling James Callender-like thugs like Gallagher and Brian S. Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (another of George’s favorite bottom-feeders was the Watergate enemies list compiler, felon, and pachydermatous God-botherer, Charles Colson, who spent his last, pre-Hell years peddling George’s truly nasty and borderline insurrectionist Manhattan Declaration).

George started NOM with Gallagher and Brown. They enjoyed a high-riding time for a few years, bankrolled by the Knights of Columbus and a billionaire family of Michigan, whose leading public servant, Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos, now awaits the call of Republican Senators to go and hasten the Kingdom of God on earth in our schools.

But after a few wins, they saw their strategy go up- and down- like the Hindenburg. They ruled out civil unions as a sellout to Satan, a position that, looking backward- as they always do- must have looked better in the light of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. They have spewed donor money on losing lawsuits defying state campaign finance disclosure laws, arguing that their vitriolic gay-bashing will leave them and their suddenly disclosed supporters- scurrying out from under rocks, antennae quivering with suspicion- liable to unfair bashing back by their targets. Between basher and bashee, they like the former way more, and so, they say, does Jesus.

Brian Brown occupies his days issuing fundraising appeals and running NOM into the ground, and fronting for Vladimir Putin as president of the Moscow-based World Congress of Families. In between, he issues fatuous wet-dream prophecies of how he will lead NOM- and through it, the Trump Administration- to a true, sea to shining sea, riddance of America of what Vice President-elect Pence likes to call “the gaydom.”

Maggie moved on to her APP sinecure, and has spent the last few years issuing diatribes announcing her readiness to lead American conservatives back to righteous gay-bashing: rescuing them from the very ditch she drove them into.

Expanding her brief, she took on critics of “reparative therapy,” a grab-bag of tortures, medicine show drug treatments, and shaming designed for parents willing to pay top dollar to get the gay prayed beat, bled or exorcised from their boys. She ran a long campaign in defense of the JONAH Project, a reparascam that flourished in New Jersey until two of its victims took it to court, won a judgment for consumer fraud, and got it shut down; but never, that I have found, did she ever reveal she also sat on the JONAH Project’s board.

A Jonah, indeed, our Maggie: whatever cause she announces she will lead, promptly dies.

At the end of August 2016, her pulsing mind febrile with teeming images of massive, legally-active male members, she etched a column in home-brewed venom and despatched it, via flying monkey, to the offices of National Review. Since the death of William F. Buckley Jr in 2008, his heirs at the magazine, now in its seventh decade of not turning a profit, have done a Rupert Murdoch on the one-time Arbiter of All That Was Right and True Right. Where once it was The Times of London, now National Review is the Daily Mail, the Mikey of the Right: they’ll print anything to stay relevant in the Age of Breitbart.

So Mags launched her screed with this fire bell:

The future of religious liberty for traditional religious believers hangs on what happens to North Carolina governor Pat McCrory’s bid for re-election this November, and he is down six points in the latest CNN poll.

As I wrote at the time, Gallagher whinged that a victory for “the Left’s interpretation that people with penises can be women, too” will be dispositive proof that conservatives have no balls:

Part of the process the Left has discovered to quickly change the culture involves, first, controlling the framing of issues in mainstream media; second, bringing in entertainment media (including sports) to validate and repeat the idea that outrageous things are being done to gay people by letting gay-marriage dissenters keep their jobs; and, three, persuading GOP elites to shut up about the issue, leaving the pathway to cultural change uncontested.

Politics is really not a separate thing from culture; it is part of the way conservatives contest, and Liberals complete, the Left’s cultural domination. Its most important cultural effect in a democracy is to determine which views are “inside the mainstream” and which are “radical and outside the pale.” Thus, persuading Republican elites to shut down on an issue has enormous cultural, as well as political, consequences. That is how “consensus culture” is created.

(Phallocentrism means a lot to Gallagher: at the article’s end she rears its ugly head again: “The particular issue in North Carolina is whether schoolgirls should be forced to shower with people with penises”).

Take away their lurid bathroom sex fantasies, Gallagher argues, and the GOP will be left a desiccated shell:

Once gay issues are out of the way the Left will use these same techniques on the other things it cares about most, hoping to reduce the Republican party to a sterile and politically impotent quasi-libertarian, pro-business economic message.

In Georgia and elsewhere, GOP politicians are watching: If McCrory loses, the GOP will concede whatever the Left demands on gay rights, including the right to fire gay-marriage dissenters from public position  and deprive us of our right to form nonprofit schools and charities and organizations on an equal basis with other Americans.

“The Left knows it’s that serious and they are acting like it,” she screeched, to a halt. “Where are we?”

Well, now we know: with a stranglehold on governance the likes of which America has not seen since 1928, when GOP control of all three branches of government frittered away the inherited prosperity of the Harding/Coolidge years to usher in the greatest economic collapse this side of the Great Flood.

Donald Trump, against whom National Review martialed the thoughts of 21 of its most boring writers in a special issue last spring, is now President-elect. While his views on every subject except the sexual allure of his daughter, his greatness (including that of his penis, on which he has as specific an obsession as Maggie Gallagher has on the worldwide generality of male genitalia), and Carrier air conditioners, remain as vague as ever, he has, so far, managed a perfect 1.000 batting average selecting a dazzling array of zanies and mountebanks for his cabinet and staff who, despite presenting a full atomic chart of eccentricities and preferred methods of predation on the resources of the Republic, are united in their loathing of abortion and gays.

Yet Gallagher- who could write this with a straight face:

Democratic forms of government are vulnerable to mass prejudice, the so-called tyranny of the majority.

-yoked the future of the Republic to the fate of North Carolina’s gladhanding, frat boy governor: the very Platonic form of virtue.

Governor McCrory got wind of Gallagher’s cri de coeur, and liked it so well he started repeating it in the plaintive, hangdog vote-begs of his campaign’s last days, notably at the famous conference of evangelicals convened by the hate group Family Research Council, where he whined about how he and his wife were being shunned by their friends over HB2, his signature legislative achievement. He found a ready shoulder to cry on in appearances on FRC head Tony Perkins’ radio show as well.

Having hit bottom in that August 26 column, Gallagher rollercoastered her way through another episode of political bipolarism, declaring a new day just 24 days later:

For weeks, polls have shown Democrat Roy Cooper leading North Carolina’s Gov. Pat McCrory. But a September 11-12 Civitas poll found McCrory had fought his way back to a two-point lead. Pundits began saying opposition to all things transgender was a political death knell.

Now, a second new poll from Elon University of 644 likely voters surveyed from September 12-16 confirms that McCrory leads Cooper by 2.7 percentage points: 48.7 percent to 46 percent, as independents break strongly for him.  This poll was taken after the NCAA decided to strip the “March Madness” games from Greensboro, N.C., as punishment for the state passing HB 2.

Three weeks later, she breathlessly reported McCrory “trounced” his opponent in debate:

The consensus seems to be that Gov. Pat McCrory did a much better job in this week’s North Carolina debate than the robotically-programmed, soundbite-stuffed Roy Cooper.

By November 2, Gallager was aquiver over a poll showing Donald Trump up by six in the Tar Hell state, and adding,

Meanwhile, the same poll shows Gov. Pat McCrory virtually neck and neck with Roy Cooper, 47 percent to 48 percent.

Though McCrory- aided by Hurricane Matthew, to whose landfall he delayed attending in order to attend the pastors that weekend- made up the six-point faith deficit that so fretted Maggie Gallagher in August, he still lost. After a month of sending his aides out to slander voters by name, and crying voter fraud in Durham County- where a recount of 90,000 votes delayed by a computer glitch resulted in a shift of totals you can count on one hand- McCrory threw in the towel yesterday.

The opera buffa’s impresario has shuttered his 2016 tour not with a bang, but with a YouTube video, and left the fat lady lumbering about somewhere backstage, nowhere close to singing. Having mastered The Mikado's "I've Got A Little List", she finds herself dropped into the Mad Scene of Lucia.

She was wrong predicting he’d lose.

Then she was wrong predicting he’d win.

It never seems to have crossed her fever-swamped mind that McCrory was simply a popular jock who transferred from Charlotte Prep- where he was the beloved "Mayor Pat"- to Raleigh Public High, where toughs like Phil Berger, Tim Moore and their gang, the Super Majority, roughed him up mercilessly from Day 1, dunking his head in reservoirs of Duke Energy coal ash.

Conservatism, and religious liberty, has not fallen: they have mutated into a loathsome new Brundlefly of rage and radicalism. The Republican General Assembly rules Raleigh still, and still veto-proofly. The day that science- if not outlawed by next summer- announces proof that there is, in fact, a multiverse, their second announcement will be that they can prove Maggie Gallagher was simultaneously wrong in all of them when she prophesied American religious freedom dying with Pat McCrory, crucified on a cross of penises. And while she jabbers, triumphantly-elected conservatives and donation-flush politicovangelicals are gathering in Raleigh and Washington, salivating over the old, long-stashed texts of discriminatory legislation now guaranteed passage and signature into law. Every indication says Maggie Gallagher is peering into her promised land, but she wouldn't know it if God Himself sent a flaming bush shouting, "Hey, dumbass! Look around you!"

Doubtless she’ll issue a new jeremiad explaining it all- how she was always right all along- in a few days. Until then, I offer a toast to the Delphic sibyl of traditional marriage’s siren song, the prophetess who makes charlatans like the late Jeanne Dixon and The Great Criswell seem more infallible than a pope: Maggie Gallagher.

In the words of a character in Neil Gaiman's American Gods,

“You’re a big one,” said Nancy, staring into Shadow’s light gray eyes with old eyes the color of mahogany, “a tall drink of water, but I got to tell you, you don’t look too bright. I got a son, stupid as a man who bought his stupid at a two-for-one sale, and you remind me of him.”