We have our fair share of headcases in the UK, but when it comes to sheer out and out talent in the field of competitive wackjobbery, you have to hand the gong to the US. The odd thing is the real wackos all claim to be Christians.

Let’s start with Pat Robertson. If you never heard of him, he’s a televangelist with some pretty extreme views. He’s convinced all gays are terrorists, for starters. Just recently he came up with a rehash of an idea (I use the term very loosely) he first mooted in 2015. This is real lunatic fringe stuff.

He’s convinced that witches curse babies in the womb when mothers post ultrasound scans on Facebook. I’ll give you a second to let that sink in. I think that’s a bit extreme. I curse them too, but in a desultory, bored sort of way, a muffled OFFS way.

By the way, he’s at pains to point out that this concept ‘…isn’t necessarily unbiblical.’ If that’s true, please can we have a few covens get on the case of all the bloody pictures of food? If there’s a ‘nom nom’ caption, the poster should be doubly cursed.

Here’s a troublesome one. Lots of the GOP in the US are rooting for the states to follow god’s laws, as written in the Bible. One fuckwit even went so far as to claim that people have forgotten that ‘the Constitution was written by God.’ That’s weird. Both it and the Bill of Rights are deliberately phrased to emphasise the separation of church and state.

Still on the subject of god in politics, nice to see that all of the now ex-contenders for the Republican presidential nomination ran because ‘God told them to.’ He must have had a bit of an off day, because that’s him down 6-0 at full time.

Now some rather more heartening news. There’s an anti-gay activist in the US who goes by the name of Tony Perkins. Like his namesake, he’s a psycho. He’s convinced that natural disasters are God’s way of punishing sinners, gays in particular. This week he and his family had to flee their house in a canoe when they got flooded out in the Louisiana downpours. That karma will bite you in the arse, won’t it?

He went into overstatement mode, saying the floods had been ‘of near biblical proportions.’ I think ten feet of water and your house and cars being flooded doesn’t quite cut it compared with the entire surface of the world being inundated. It just doesn’t.