Austin, Texas residents famously want to “keep Austin weird.” It looks like many of them also want to keep Austin a part of the United States.

I’m sure you’ve been following the saga that is the secessionist agenda playing out on the White House’s online “We the People” petition site. Starting one day after President Barack Obama was reelected to a second term, petitions began to appear on the site asking if specific states could “peacefully” leave the union to form their own governments. At first, it was only a couple states being represented – Texas and Louisiana. But it quickly grew to over 50 petitions representing nearly every state in the country.

In response, we saw new petitions created that sought to punish the secessionists and other that simply wanted to unify the country.

Now, in another hilarious wrinkle, the city of Austin, Texas has decided that they don’t want to go along with the rest of Texas (Texas’ secession petition is the most-popular on the site, with nearly 100,000 signatures). Some residents of Austin are formally requesting that they be allowed to “withdraw from the state of Texas & remain part of the United States.”

Here’s their reasoning:

Austin Texas continues to suffer difficulties stemming from the lack of civil, religious, and political freedoms imposed upon the city by less liberally minded Texans. It is entirely feasible for Austin to operate as its own state, within the United States, in the event that Texas is successful in the current bid to secede. It is important for Austin to remain in the union as to do so would protect it’s citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers.

Like I’ve said before, these secessions petitions, anti-secession petitions, and modified secession petitions are simply serving to discredit the White House petition site, if it had any to begin with. Sure, there are some serious requests that at least deserve a response. But alongside the now 50+ secession-related petitions we have “Make the President attend a Fark.com party…if shceduling does not permit, at least have a beer with Drew Curtis” and “legalize crystal fucking weed.”

As of right now, a half-dozen or so of the secession petitions have hit the threshold (25,000 signatures in 30 days) and now demand an official White House response. That includes the secession requests for Texas (95,000), Georgia (27,000), Tennessee (25,000), North Carolina (25,000), Florida (28,000), and Alabama (26,000). I wonder if the White House will just tackle them all with one response or if they’ll just raise the signature threshold. Who knows? All I do know is that this has slowly but surely devolved into a sideshow.

I think we need a petition to get rid of this petition site and start over, what do you say?