The Civil War was a fight over the right to own slaves (and other links)

I recently mentioned a right-winger equating Southern secession with leaving an abusive husband. Now a right-wing pundit says the war was really over states’ rights, not race and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address would have been better if he’d addressed it to the heroic Southerners fighting tyranny by seceding.
The pundit, Dave Daubenmire, is either ignorant or lying, because the right at issue was the right to own slaves. Period. It wasn’t some abstract philosophy about state power, it was about the federal government having “denounced the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection … A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
In case you’re wondering, that’s from South Carolina’s secession declaration. Back then, they didn’t make any bones about their intentions. Why would they? Slavery was something they were proud of. In fact the declaration says specifically they’ve been holding back on seceding out of deference to other “slaveholding states,” not free states, not Southern states, just slaveholding.
•A Bible-based claim for gay rights is by definition unbiblical, according to one right-wing religious group. Slacktivist weighs in.
•A great linkpost from Slacktivist. Topics include a school district that says students who don’t want to hear Christian prayers should go to another school; Tom Delay declaring God wrote the Constitution; an official who says he’d never vote for a non-Christian to offer an invocation because that would violate his rights; and this post by Americans United for Separation of Church and State pointing out American religion is anything but oppressed.
•And no, the rich are not oppressed either. Nor are straight people.