The devil of Tangipahoa parish

Nice job Bruce Nolan, writer for the Times-Picayune, who has this profile of Joe Cook, the Louisiana ACLU representative who has almost singlehandedly taken on the creationists, racists, and school prayer advocates:

To many of the people of Tangipahoa Parish -- to the merchants, teachers and small farmers around Ponchatoula, Hammond and Loranger -- the figure of Beelzebub himself, the demon enemy of faith and destroyer of community, is embodied today in Joe Cook, a slight, trim fellow Southerner with gray hair, glasses and a heavy Arkansas drawl. ...

Not surprisingly, the largest ornament on the wall behind Cook's desk is a framed copy of the Bill of Rights. It is defaced by a bureaucrat's red stamp that reads, "Void where prohibited by law." ...

"People shouldn't put their faith in any political party to do the right thing," he said. ...

"Government is not in the business of granting rights. It is in the business of taking them away. And once they're lost, we'll never get them back," he said. ...

At home and in the Baptist church of his youth, Cook said, he was taught that Catholics were damned, black people were inferior, and women had certain well-defined roles in family and society. ...

Cook believes this out of his own youthful experience, when deacons made sure no African-American worshippers arrived at the door of his church, and where the Bible, he said, was served with a full measure of hypocrisy. The skeptic in him recoils at the memory. Today, he said, the golden rule is his sufficient guide. ...

"My daddy used to say somebody's got to stir the pot to keep the little guy at the bottom from getting scorched," he said.