At the same time, Colorado’s Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception — the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a “guns, god and gays”-focused agenda to electoral victory.

But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country’s story is the story of multitasking — a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.

In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.

That’s the same objective of today’s GOP when it comes to rights for same-sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman’s right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can’t even discuss equal rights because of a recession.

The language changed not because the new “can’t walk and chew gum” mantra makes sense (seriously — would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today’s Republicans are now most committed to stopping — no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.

At almost exactly the same time these numbers were being released, a top Republican lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., was making national headlines with a leaked audio recording of him publicly declaring that the first African-American president is “not an American.” Here’s the audio and full quote from Coffman’s remarks at a Republican fundraiser:

“I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.”

Coffman has since issued a non-apology apology, saying that while he misspoke in questioning Obama’s birth certificate, he stands by his “not an American” declaration because Obama doesn’t “share my belief in American Exceptionalism — his policies reflect a philosophy that America is but one nation among many equals.”

It’s a deft misdirect — caught on tape making a nakedly demagogic play to White America’s reflexive fears of the “other” (in this case, denigrating a minority president as literally the “other” — i.e., a non-American), Coffman is pretending he was merely voicing his disagreement with Obama’s foreign policy. But don’t be fooled: The nation’s shifting demographics, as epitomized by today’s census numbers, is exactly what this is all about.

Coffman is running in a newly redrawn suburban Denver congressional district — one that is expected to be among the most contested in the 2012 election. Following the larger Republican strategy of racial fear-mongering, he’s spent the last year following in the footsteps of his anti-immigrant predecessor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, championing legislation to repeal parts of the Voting Rights Act and prevent non-English ballots and end birthright citizenship for immigrants.

Put Coffman’s record together with his attack on Obama (an attack that has become all too common among top GOP leaders), add in the fact that his GOP neighbor U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn recently made headlines calling the president a “tar baby,” and remember the GOP’s successful opposition last week to a high-profile civil unions bill. It becomes clear that even in the swingiest of swing states, the national Republican Party sees its path to victory as one that eschews inclusiveness and equal rights, and instead stirs fears and resentment over the quickly changing definition of Americanness.

Ultimately, that’s what all the debates over almost every policy really comes down to. We can tell ourselves we’re fighting over taxes or contraception or abortion or gay rights or immigration or food stamps — and at one level, we most certainly are. But when policy disagreements become a justification for Republicans to claim an opponent isn’t a fellow countryman, it’s clear what we’re really fighting over is the root idea of “American.” Looked at this way, almost every policy battle has been transformed into a proxy in a Republican war to define “American” as white, straight, male and wealthy — an us-versus-them war being waged ever more intensely in 2012 because changing demographics threaten to define the term on far different terms.

We can thank today’s news cycle for making that war so crystal clear; at least it’s now painfully obvious what this moment’s political conflict is truly all about.

And yet, as relentless as the obesity crisis appears to be, its expansion doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. That’s because, unlike a naturally occurring epidemic, it’s almost completely human created — a reality that allows for the possibility of a human-directed reversal.

What does such a reversal require in practice? First and foremost, awareness, and thanks to everything from Michelle Obama’s fitness campaign to HBO’s new documentary “The Weight of a Nation,” that prerequisite is finally starting to be met. But then what? As GI Joe said, “knowing is half the battle” — but it’s only half. Once more of us are aware of the emergency at hand, what will be the most reliable way to address the problem?

In an instant gratification culture obsessed with extreme makeovers and get-thin-quick diet schemes, it’s easy to feel confused about a path forward. But a tranche of new science, data and public policy proposals that cut through the fog of misinformation suggests that path is there — if we’re willing to take it. Here are five of the most promising ways forward.

1. Tax Junk Food

Over the last four decades, we went from spending $3 billion a year on fast food to $110 billion a year on fast food. At the same time, there’s been an explosion in the amount of chemically enhanced, calorie-packed processed foods Americans eat at home, at work and in the school cafeteria. Not surprisingly, in predictable cause-and-effect fashion, this has all happened as obesity became a public health epidemic.

The response from some policymakers has been to champion junk-food taxes, initiatives whose supreme press-release-worthiness can make them seem a bit gimmicky, but whose merits are nonetheless rooted in substance. Indeed, a bevy of new studies show that such levies, when structured properly, can disincentivize junk food consumption on a large scale.

In one University of North Carolina study, ABC News reports that “Patients got significantly less of their calories from soda or pizza when there was a 10 percent increase in the price of either.” In another study of college-age adults, “researchers found that the students generally bought fewer lunchtime calories when sugary, high-fat fare came with a tax of 25 percent or more.” In yet another study, this one from the University of Buffalo, it was much the same result: Higher taxes meant more healthy consumer choices.

New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman has noted that while taxes alone won’t solve the obesity crisis, they are an important part of a multifaceted attack on the problem — and they will also raise much-needed public revenues at a time of crushing deficits:

A study by Y. Claire Wang, an assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, predicted that a penny tax per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes and bring in $1 billion annually. Another study shows that a two-cent tax per ounce in Illinois would reduce obesity in youth by 18 percent, save nearly $350 million and bring in over $800 million taxes annually. Scaled nationally, as it should be, the projected benefits are even more impressive; one study suggests that a national penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would generate at least $13 billion a year in income while cutting consumption by 24 percent…A 20 percent increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20 percent decrease in consumption, which in the next decade could prevent 1.5 million Americans from becoming obese and 400,000 cases of diabetes, saving about $30 billion.

Put it all together, and junk food taxes should be about as close to a no-brainer as you’ll find in the public policy arena.

2. Stop Subsidizing Junk Food

There’s no scientific reason junk food should cost less than whole grains, fruits and vegetables. After all, the former are the product of a mechanized process relying on an entire industrial system, while the later can be grown directly out of the ground by almost anyone.

Yet, junk food consistently beats natural foods in the price competition. Why? It’s all about the subsidies.

As a the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s “Apples to Twinkies” report shows, your taxpayer dollars subsidize junk food and artificially deflate the cost of that junk food so that it undersells everything else. “Between 1995 and 2010, $16.9 billion in tax dollars subsidized four common food additives—corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, and soy oils.” At the same time, PIRG points out that “taxpayers spent only $262 million subsidizing apples, which is the only significant federal subsidy of fresh fruits or vegetables.” To put those numbers into real-world terms, “if these agricultural subsidies went directly to consumers to allow them to purchase food, each of America’s 144 million taxpayers would be given $7.36 to spend on junk food and 11 cents with which to buy apples each year — enough to buy 19 Twinkies but less than a quarter of one Red Delicious apple apiece.”

While studies show that changing this subsidy structure would be no cure-all for obesity, there’s no evidence to suggest that keeping it in place does anything but make the obesity crisis worse — and there is evidence that changing the subsidies would make things better. This isn’t surprising; it’s basic economics.

Think about it: If subsidies for commodity crops that create junk food were redirected into subsidies for natural foods, it would radically change the market incentives for healthful eating. Sans the subsidies, industrial food corporations would no longer be able to price processed foods at artificially lower prices than their natural competitors. Instead, healthful foods would have the price advantage — and, quite likely, bigger market share.

3. Ban Junk Food in Schools

The Obama administration has been trying to reduce the amount of obesogenic foods in school cafeterias, under the theory that stopping obesity-inducing eating habits at an early age might stop the obesity crisis in its tracks. It’s been an uphill fight. According to the Associated Press in February, “Junk food remains plentiful at the nation’s elementary schools,” with “nearly half of public and private schools surveyed sold sweet or salty snack foods in vending machines or other places.”

Nonetheless, new data proves the administration’s efforts, in conjunction with local school districts, are indeed worthwhile. As the New York Times recently reported:

Five years after California started cracking down on junk food in school cafeterias, a new report shows that high school students there consume fewer calories and less fat and sugar at school than students in other states…The study found that California high school students consumed on average nearly 160 calories fewer per day than students in other states, the equivalent of cutting out a small bag of potato chips. That difference came largely from reduced calorie consumption at school, and there was no evidence that students were compensating for their limited access to junk food at school by eating more at home…

To study the effect of this policy, the researchers examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the eating habits of high school students in California, comparing it with data on students from 14 states that did not have nutrition standards for vending machine snacks and other foods sold outside of school lunches and other meal plans…California students had the lowest daily intake of calories, fat and, especially, added sugars.

In light of this, it’s hard to imagine anyone still defending the American school system’s role as glorified junk food machines.

4. Stop Glorifying Unhealthy Eating Habits

In his endorsement of the campaign to legalize gay marriage, Vice President Joe Biden said that “when things really began to change is when the social culture changes … I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anybody’s ever done so far.” It was an acknowledgment that televisual images often play as big a role in our society as ironclad policies — and the same truism relates to the obesity crisis.

Today, our political culture regularly equates unhealthy eating habits to Americanness and authenticity. As evidence, recall that the party nomination fights have become a kind of televised eating contest, with candidates trying to one-up their competitors with photo ops stuffing corn dogs and cheesesteaks.

The committee now has a White House petition calling on the president to stop undermining his wife’s crusade against obesity and end such photo ops. It’s the least the administration can do.

5. Start Broadening Our Understanding of Obesity

Conventional wisdom holds that a calorie is a calorie, and that if Americans simply take in fewer calories and use more via exercise, obesity can be stopped. But journalist Gary Taubes reports that science now suggests that this formula may be fundamentally flawed — that obesity is a product of specific kinds of calories from sucrose and fructose:

There is an alternative theory, one that has also been around for decades but that the establishment has largely ignored. This theory implicates specific foods—refined sugars and grains—because of their effect on the hormone insulin, which regulates fat accumulation. If this hormonal-defect hypothesis is true, not all calories are created equal…

Sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup have a unique chemical composition, a near 50-50 combination of two different carbohydrates: glucose and fructose. And while glucose is metabolized by virtually every cell in the body, the fructose is metabolized mostly by liver cells. From there, the chain of metabolic events has been worked out by biochemists over 50 years: some of the fructose is converted into fat, the fat accumulates in the liver cells, which become resistant to the action of insulin, and so more insulin is secreted to compensate. The end results are elevated levels of insulin, which is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes, and the steady accumulation of fat in our fat tissue—a few tens of calories worth per day, leading to pounds per year, and obesity over the course of a few decades.

He goes on to note that “back in the 1980s, the FDA gave sugar a free pass based on the idea that the evidence wasn’t conclusive” — but that now, the evidence can’t be ignored.

This isn’t to say that the theories about sugar are 100 percent correct; it is only to point out that if we are going to reduce our consumption of junk food in order to stop the obesity epidemic, we need a better understanding of exactly what junk food is. That means broadening our understanding of obesity’s roots and rejecting the reductionism that says simply that “a calorie is a calorie.”

Yes, of course, in the intervening years I’ve had the chance to drive an automatic transmission. But that has always felt a bit like playing a post-Konami Code game of Contra — a bit too easy, a bit too idiot proof, a bit too, shall we say, inauthentic. On top of that, the automatic always seemed like a wasteful luxury because it always was more expensive and less fuel-efficient. That difference consequently added an ascetic populism to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission.

No doubt, for stick shift enthusiasts, these factors have all conspired to create an alluring mystique around the manual transmission — one that, according to new data, is on the rise.

Last week, USA Today reported that while “the percentage of new vehicles with stick-shift gearboxes remains a small slice of the new vehicle market,” the “the first quarter this year manuals were in 6.5 percent of new vehicles sold, and that’s getting close to double each of the past five years.” The stick shift is back in a big way — but is that really such a good thing?

Upon hearing the news, my initial thought — for aforementioned reasons — was that, yes, of course it’s a good thing. In an ocean of bad drivers and wasteful vehicles, the news seemed like a distant island of hope. I thought that perhaps more motorists are being converted to the automobile religion (cult?) I first was exposed to in Dad’s Datsun 280 ZX. And maybe, just maybe, that’s a sign that American drivers are wising up, both stylistically and efficiency-wise.

Then I did a bit more investigation, and realized the news might not be so good, and that my quasi-religious fervor for the gearbox may have blinded me to my catechism’s new downsides.

In the past, the stick shift was an all-but-guaranteed fuel saver. But not anymore. As AOL Autos notes, computer technology has advanced to the point where “automatics have become so efficient that most of the time their fuel economy is on par with manuals — and in some cases even better.” USA Today notes that such a trend may eventually erase the long-term price differential between manual and automatic transmissions, meaning the manual will lose its frugal-chic appeal. Meanwhile, according to AOL, new technology also boosts automatics’ overall performance (read: speed), meaning many driving aficionados have come to prefer the automatic over the manual.

Thanks to all this, on the days I don’t bike to work and instead fire up my 11-year-old Saturn and shift it into first gear, I no longer feel so righteous or populist. I feel like part of the problem — not just because I’m driving a fossil fuel-dependent vehicle, but also because the manual transmission seems like a silly relic. Likewise, word that manual transmissions may be coming back no longer seems like such great news; it seems like more proof that when it comes to transportation, we’re still prone to making shortsighted decisions.

And yet, I can’t let go of my love for the stick — or maybe “can’t” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “don’t want to” is more appropriate. If the automobile is still one of the key chronological markers in a typical American’s life (and, unfortunately, it still is), the stick shift is a special symbol of our general heritage, and my specific family traditions.

That’s why I was happy to see that there remains one significant reason to still love the manual transmission — a reason that’s substantive, rather than just aesthetic or experiential. In the age of distracted driving, many believe the stick shift might encourage kids to stay focused on operating their vehicles, rather than operating their smartphones. The idea is that because a manual transmission requires special attention to operate, it doesn’t allow for as much multitasking as an automatic.

While there’s no science (yet) to prove the manual-transmission-as-deterrent-to-distracted-driving hypothesis, the memory of those first harrowing stick-shift lessons — with my dad imploring me to “really focus, goddammit!” — suggests to me that there’s something to the theory.

At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself to justify my stick-shift fetish — that is, until the automatic fully surpasses the manual in every other way.

At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we’re building.

The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that “the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons.” Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the “stuff” theory of exports to ignore the objections.

This is part of a larger pattern since President Obama took office. During Obama’s first year in the White House, he began to gut the Pentagon’s approval process for arms exports, weakening controls on what could and could not be sold. Later, diplomatic cables uncovered by WikiLeaks showed, as Fortune magazine put it, “American officials act(ing) as de facto pitchmen for U.S.-made weapons.”

The result is that America has become the true “Lord of War,” as the arms dealer motto goes. We are the leading arms supplier to the developing world and we are responsible for the majority of all weapons sales across the globe. Yes, we are so committed to selling instruments of death to the rest of the planet that military industries have almost tripled their share of the U.S. economy in just a decade.

The second bit of news came from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, whose new study shows that America is exporting our obesity crisis to Mexico. Coupling health statistics with U.S. export data since the North American Free Trade Agreement tore down Mexico’s agriculture trade barriers, researchers found that the Mexican market was flooded by American agribusinesses’ taxpayer subsidized commodities (corn, soybeans) and their processed derivatives. According to the report, that quickly wiped out Mexico’s local food economy, leaving its food system exactly “like the industrialized food system of the United States — characterized by the overabundance of obesogenic foods.” Not surprisingly, Mexican obesity rates have consequently skyrocketed.

Taken together, these export booms represent what could be called America’s new Guns and Butter economy. We are so desperate to export any “stuff” we can, we are now fattening up the world and arming it for permanent bloodshed.

Seeking to short-circuit any objections to this trend, President Obama has said simply that “we’re at a moment where necessity has tempered the old debates” over exports and economic policy. In terms of history, he’s not wrong — during the previous century, America witnessed fevered fights over what constitutes a moral farm policy, and in the 1930s the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee held almost 100 hearings into “greedy munitions interests” that were unduly influencing public policy. Sadly, Obama is correct – those debates have been silenced.

But should they be? Should we simply say that any exports — no matter their moral, ethical, environmental or health implications — are inherently good? Does “necessity” really mean that “stuff” for stuff’s sake must be the basis of our export economy?

Washington and profit-at-all-cost industries certainly say yes — but that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.