U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the keynote speaker at the August 18 Iowa LGBT Rural Summit on the campus of Drake University, told assembled participants that he beams with pride about the “amazing cultural transformation” he has overseen during his seven years at the Department of Agriculture. “We are a much more functioning, better department because we represent the entirety of America.”

As part of the LGBT Rural Summit Series and the #RuralPride Campaign, Vilsack discussed  information relating to policies, programs, and services that exist to protect, promote and strengthen LGBT rural communities, including issues ranging from rural housing loans, community facility grants and bullying.

Various conservative blogs picked up the event, including Rush Limbaugh, and promptly spun it into something very strange and surreal. His comments, if you are so inclined to read them, are posted below. In summary, Rush’s complaints spanned from the current administration’s inclination to give out agriculture subsidies to farmers, to the notion* that rural America doesn’t want or need the federal governmnets involvement in their traditionally conservative communities.

*  the US is on track to spend nearly a trillion dollars this decade on agricultural subsidies, largely to commodity farmers growing corn, soy, and wheat. No other industry is as heavily influenced by government money, from price guarantees to insurance to buybacks of surplus goods.

Despite the neck-breaking amount of spin conservative blogs have placed on the USDA conference, modernfarmer.com adequately summed up the situation, writing, “We welcome our lesbian farmer overlords, and hope LGBT farmers really do take advantage of the USDA’s programs, even if that’s an egregiously poor reading of the actual event.

If you, too, support lesbian farmers, you can purchase a shirt inspired by Rush Limbaugh’s comments from Raygun Shirts, here.

“Here comes the Obama regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up. I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers. I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing. I never knew it. … The objective here is to attack rural states.” -Rush Limbaugh