Jesus and the national parks.

You might have guessed that George W. Bush's evangelical armies would wreak havoc upon governmental health agencies, where they can have an impact shaping policy on abortion, contraception, safer sex and other social issues. But surely they'd have little interest in the National Park Service, right?

Guess again. Last week a watchdog group charged that the park service is caving in to zealots intent on a theocratic remake of American history and geology recorded at historic sites from the Lincoln Memorial to the Grand Canyon National Park. It's a story that has been simmering for a while, never quite boiling over in the media, like so many stories these days regarding the Bush administration. And it certainly wasn't going to finally bubble up last week in the middle of cow madness and terror scares-not to mention the endless, schmaltzy Christmas stories-though it represents a further scary slouch toward theocracy.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a non-profit group that represents park workers and public employees, charged in a release last week that the National Park Service is hell-bent on removing images of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, pro-choice marches and gay rights marches from an eight-minute video tape located at the Lincoln Memorial covering historic gatherings that have taken place there and on the Washington Mall.

"The park service leadership now caters exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch in his group's release. "The Bush Administration appears to be sponsoring a program of Faith-Based Parks."

The park service, inundated with calls after the release was reported on 365gay.com and a few other gay news sites, denied the charge and called PEER's report "erroneous," though it did admit that it intends to add images to the tape for "more balance," which the Washington Post had reported recently. Park service spokesman Bill Line told PlanetOut.com that pressure to replace gay and pro-choice images with Christian and pro-life ones had come from conservative Kansas Republican congressman Todd Tiahrt, who'd joined a vocal conservative campaign against the park service last February.

The new tape will reportedly contain footage of a 1997 "Promise Keepers" rally and a march supporting Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Neither event took place at the Lincoln Memorial or on the Washington Mall, which would still make the alteration an ugly, ideological and inaccurate revision of history-even if nothing is being removed from the tape.

PEER's Jeff Ruch told me that he believes the park service, by now denying any attempt to actually cut out some images, is doing damage control, having been caught red-handed. His group's claims about the scrubbing of the tape, he says, were based on several sources inside the park service who told him that deputy director Donald Murphy had sent down a directive. Ruch was also following what theocratic gasbags had been claiming regarding the success of their pressure campaign to get the tape excised and altered.

The Culture and Family Institute's ever-grimacing Robert Knight had been thundering against the tape for months, calling it "pure propaganda designed to equate abortion and gay rights with the civil rights movement." And the odious Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition attacked it as "first-class?perversion of Abraham Lincoln" and charged that "tax dollars are paying to promote such a lie that Lincoln would have supported gay causes, abortion rights and feminism." Rev. Sheldon's rantings are more hilarious in light of the fact that Honest Abe has been conjectured-by Gore Vidal and others who've studied his public writings and private diaries-to possibly have been gay or bisexual himself, and a book to be published next year, written by the late sex researcher C.A. Tripp, is said to provide the smoking-gun diary that will confirm this beyond a reasonable doubt. (Fasten your seat belts!)

Anyway, Sheldon's group called on the park service to stop showing the video until it could be re-edited. His son Phil Sheldon put out an order to the minions to "flood the park service office with petitions to stop this lie from being shown." Fox News.com then reported on Sheldon's bragging that a phone call from him to the White House got the park service to acquiesce.

You only have to look to the history of park service under the Bush administration to see the proof of its pandering to the fundies. This summer the Grand Canyon National Park's bookstore began selling The Grand Canyon: A Different View, which offers a creationist account of the canyon's origins. As a river guide, author Tom Vail used to tell people that the Grand Canyon was formed over millions of years, as modern science and geology explain its evolution.

"Then I met the Lord," he writes in the introduction to the book. "Now, I have 'a different view' of the Canyon, which, according to a biblical time scale, can't possibly be more than about a few thousand years old."

Even the conservative, Bush-supporting website Newsmax.com seems to be getting the creeps from all of this, reporting last week that, "Earlier this year, the Bush administration prevented park rangers from publishing a rebuttal to the book for use by interpretive staff and seasonal employees, who are often confronted during tours by creationist zealots."

Last July, deputy director Murphy overturned a decision by the Grand Canyon National Park's superintendent to ban three bronze plaques with biblical verses that had been placed on viewing platforms. The plaques were made by the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, whose convent, called Canaan in the Desert, is located north of Phoenix. The convent was founded by Mother Basilea in 1963 after she had visited Mount Sinai and met the Lord, who "spoke to her about His commandments," as described by the sisterhood's website.

"The avalanche of moral decay is upon us," the sisters say on their site. "God's commandments are no longer considered relevant for today and as a result our society is disintegrating. Recently this country watched as in Montgomery, Alabama, a monument of the Ten Commandments was taken down, pushed into a back room and locked away because of the deplorable decision by a judge."

And like Judge Roy Moore, the man who'd put the Ten Commandments in the Alabama courthouse rotunda and was eventually rebuffed and removed from his job, the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary has become adept at using the media to mobilize Christian armies to influence the Bush administration.

"We Sisters hardly knew which interview to take first," they state with glee on their site regarding the biblical plaque controversy, proving that even the most chaste and pious can quickly become lascivious press whores. "Talk shows, radio hosts and Pastors encouraged people to write to the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service."

After that bit of media activism, the Bushies decided exactly who would dictate public policy in the park. "We were kindly invited to put up the plaques again," the evangelical sisterhood reports on its site.

Michelangelo Signorile hosts a daily radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio, stream 149. He can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).