So here it is, Thanksgiving week, and here this corner of Art Scatter sits, tied to the care of two adolescent and near-adolescent boys who’ve been ruthlessly cast out by the public education system on the flimsy excuse that teachers are entitled to a holiday. Ha.

Still, that hasn’t stopped us from reading. And curiously, what we’ve been reading about — in family newspapers, no less — is S-E-X. Or, as some quarters would have it, something to be thankful about.

First, to the Willamette Valley town of Silverton, a pretty little village that’s the gateway to the fantastic glories of Silver Falls State Park and also happens to have a mayor who’s a very public cross-dresser. Silverton seems to be just OK with that, and more power to the town. Personally we never get farther than the L.L. Bean catalog when it comes to dressing up, but we always appreciate a little black dress and some scarlet high heels on someone else. Even if it’s the mayor, and his name is Stu.

The Oregonian’s Kimberly A.C. Wilson reports on Oregon Live about what happened when a group of ultra-conservative church folk from Topeka showed up in town to denounce the mayor’s evil-doings. Silvertonians pretty much told them to shut up and go home. Seems they weren’t in Kansas any more — at least not the truculent and loony Kansas of the Westboro Baptist Church, which makes a habit of sending moral storm troopers out into the Gomorrah that is the rest of America. As for the rest of us, we’ve come a long way, baby. And that includes Silverton.

Meanwhile, down in Grapevine, Texas, the Rev. Ed Young of the evangelical Fellowship Church is preaching the gospel of love. And by love, we mean love — the scattering, as it were, of the good seed.

Rev. Young and his congregation of 20,000 (and growing bigger every day) have embarked on a quest he calls Seven Days of Sex: All the church’s husbands and wives are challenged to have sex every day (with each other, of course) in order to strengthen their marriages and ward off the temptation of extramarital affairs. Word is, according to Gretel C. Kovach in the New York Times, things have been going swimmingly, or maybe glowingly. It’s a great way to build up your congregation, and actually, Rev. Young makes a terrific theological case for his position on the subject. In Portland he’d be called a Young Creative. Which is our excuse for mentioning him on our esteemed cultural blog.

Moving on from sex to death and Thanksgiving dinner, the Web’s atwitter with the “news” of Gov. Sarah Palin’s “pardoning” of a turkey slated for slaughter (a pretty darned common seasonal photo op for politicians across the land) and subsequent three-minute on-camera chat while other turkeys were methodically meeting their maker in the background. The Huffington Post huffed. Wizbang responded with the neocon view. The nonsacrificial turkey didn’t have a clue its life had just been spared. And here in the Art Scatter kitchen, we’re looking forward to that savory vegetarian mushroom bread pudding we’re going to whip together in a couple of days.

As they say in spin-land, happy holidays. And keep America weird.