Beware the vegans! / The evil gay agenda is nearly complete. Who poses the next horrible, godless threat?

This much we know: We gotta have an enemy.

It's just a basic, nation-defining requirement. We must, as a culture, as a people, always find some sort of scapegoat upon which to blame all our ills. It's just how we roll.

We have our standards. It needs to be a truly nefarious threat, some unsavory group whose members, through covert recruitment techniques and/or by flaunting what they like to do to each other with their genitalia, are secretly trying to undermine the American way of life, destroy families, prey upon 'tweens and turn our children into heathen pervert socialists who want to smoke Cuban cigars, wear sequined turbans and marry livestock.

You know the type? Of course you do.

Communists had their turn. Feminists. Hippies. Then came the evil homosexual people, with their famous, much-lauded agenda to destroy the holy sanctimony of Christian marriage via encouraging girls to smoke and listen to punk rock, teaching interior decorating to straight boys and convincing innocent church pastors and Republican senators to fellate them in cheap motel rooms. The horror!

But no longer. Proposition 8 and The Ugly Mormon Uprising of 2008 notwithstanding, the gays have nearly completed their vile mission. They are everywhere. They are almost normal. Gay marriage, the last civil right, is now less an impossible dream and far more a foregone conclusion. It's merely a matter of waiting for bitter old homophobes to die off.

Which leaves us a gaping hole, an urgent question in need of an answer. Who's next? Whom will the pseudo-moralists in America accuse of trying to convert our innocent children to their depraved ways? After all, it's only through clearly identifying those things we hate and fear and don't understand that we become better parents, Americans, Christians. Wasn't that Jesus' message? Damn right it was.

Will it be, say, the polyamorists? Vegetarians? Yoga teachers? Polyamorist vegetarian yoga teachers who like anal sex and Ecstasy and really strong coffee? We must ponder. We must find out.

Some possibilities:

The rich. An obvious choice, given the current climate, the witch hunts, the fact that gaggles of furious citizens are actually picketing outside the homes of millionaire AIG jackals, as if the latter were wearing puppy-fur trench coats and the former were screaming and hurling fake blood outside Neiman Marcus. Weird.

But it's also a very bizarre choice, insofar as hating undeserved wealth is a bit like hating your nose to spite your face. Protesting the dark art of making lots and lots of money in the rigged capitalist system is downright un-American, is it not? It's all sorts of fun hypocrisy. Put it this way: Offer any one of those protesters $5 million to walk away and never come back, and watch how fast their ire vanishes. In other words, we can't truly loathe and fear what we all secretly want to become. Or can we?

Vegans. Let's see: Often self-righteous? Check. Preachy? Check. Like to gather in suspicious little clusters and share weird tips about the best ways to cook kale as they hand out flyers at the New Life Expo and smoke lots of pot and twirl flaming Hula Hoops at Burning Man? Check. Plus, they can be sorta whimpery, frail, taste like kombucha. Could they take over?

Nah. Fearing a vegan revolution is like fearing a takeover by Muppet squirrels. Plus, they actually do have very good intentions and can be wonderfully nice, happy people, despite being no fun at barbeques and always bringing that weird seitan dish to the potluck. Plus, the lack of animal protein in their diets means they have little muscle mass and brittle bones and, if you have to, you can snap them like twigs.

Buddhists/Hindus. Were you thinking Muslims? You're so retro. Fearing militant Islam is so 2005. "The Muslims are coming!" hysteria is now the sole domain of frothy right-wing conspiracy nutballs who think Obama is a terrorist mastermind and "The Audacity of Hope" is secret code for "Allah is going to eat your face."

No, the real threat is, of course, the supposedly peaceful, ancient, non-dualistic philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism. What with China and India growing like demons and stealing all our precious water, oil, sunlight and the Internet bandwidth we desperately need for porn, it's just a matter of time until the Eightfold Path sneaks into your bedroom at night and whispers that all life is just a silly illusion and you should breathe through your eyeballs. Buddha lunchboxes! Shiva shampoo! Zen liquor! Yoga in every mall! Oh crap. It's already here! We are so doomed.

Journalists. I know what you're thinking. "What? You mean those pale little writer people who never go outside? How can they possibly be a threat?" Oh you poor misinformed peasant.

As newspapers shut down and thousands of talented reporters are ruthlessly laid off across the country, these underappreciated scribes could easily regroup and rise again to undermine the very foundations of the new, bite-sized, malformed Twitter/ADD info society. In short: They're a threat because they might try to infiltrate the dominant OMG paradigm and make us smarter and more informed about the world around us. And who the hell wants that? Not the GOP or the church, that's for sure.

Old people. Oh my God, of course! Generation Boomer is just about to swarm into retirement, destroy Social Security, ruin Medicare and collectively forget where they parked their golf cart. Their nefarious agenda: black socks with sandals, "Mama's Family" reruns on prime-time, and turning the entire country into south Florida. Watch in horror as grandma lures your children into compliance with stories about long-play records and Pontiac Trans Ams and giving blowjobs to the Grateful Dead. Our country's fallen and it can't get up!

Babies. That's right, I said it. Endlessly needy, ruthlessly selfish, utterly self-absorbed, spreading like a virus, these resource-sucking drool factories are clearly a massive drain on every true American value, like porn, toxic Glade air fresheners and prescription medication.

Think they're far too cute and helpless to have an agenda? Wrong. Their evil plot is painfully clear: To induce guilt, mountains and mountains of guilt. Their very existence is an excruciating reminder of just how horribly we've f--ked up the planet for their generation, and how lousy we should feel about it. Can they be stopped? Shall we make the planet a better place so they quit all that damn screaming? Nah, screw it.

Smart people. And now, the most sinister threat of all. Is there a darker menace to the American way of life, to Christian panic and Republican clenchiness and widespread hysteria, than lots and lots of calm intelligence? After all, knowledge is power. Knowledge is the ability to see past the knee-jerk reactionaries, the sexual panic, the shrill, God-thumping nonsense. Knowledge is, therefore, evil like candy.

It might be too late. The disturbing agenda of President Obama, already one of the most calmly intelligent humans in U.S. political history, is beginning to have a truly nightmarish effect, as he inspires millions to take more responsibility, not merely for their lives, but for their choices, for their kids' future, for the health of their very own brains.

He is, in short, well on his way to destroying the very ideas that made this country great: insularity, fear of the Other, gluttony, lousy grammar and generally not knowin' much 'bout nuthin'. Hide the children.

Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.

This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.