Pence, Buttigieg and the Debate Over Fraudulent "Conversion Therapy"

Throughout the life of this blog I have consistently and vigorously condemned so-called gay "conversion therapy" and those who support it and work to continue the myth that gays can "change" if they want to. I myself was never subjected to a formal conversion therapy regime which involves psychological - and sometimes physical - abuse. I did however, fall for Catholicism's lie that one can "pray away the gay" and I know the self-hatred and suicidal thoughts (and actions) that failure to change can bring about. I've also known many who were subjected to these fraudulent therapies - usually against their will - who suffered greatly and still bear psychological scars to this day and none of them successfully "changed" their sexual orientation.  The practice needs to be banned nationwide.  Now, the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg has brought conversion therapy and the vicious (but financially and politically lucrative) anti-gay agenda of evangelicals  to the forefront, embodied in the person of Mike Pence (and his wife) who make little effort to hide their animus towards LGBT Americans.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Pence's anti-gay actions over the years and his failure to ever condemn conversion therapy and its advocates who are among his strongest political allies.  Here are article highlights:

It’s a Hoosier rumble!  Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg has been calling out Vice President Pence for what he views as animus against gay rights. Buttigieg came out as gay when Pence was still governor of Indiana, after the two had tangled over Pence’s signing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The law was signed in March 2015, and Buttigieg came out in June of that year.

Some advocates of the RFRA expressly said that it would allow businesses to refuse to support same-sex marriages, something Pence denied at the time, saying it only provided a mechanism for plaintiffs to challenge government actions or activities that threaten their beliefs.

[I]n response to the outcry over the law, Indiana lawmakers amended it to clarify that it did not authorize discrimination against gays. Then Pence came under attack from conservatives for caving.

Buttigieg’s attacks have revived one of the most persistent complaints about Pence’s attitude toward gays — that he supposedly backed funding for conversion therapy, also known as “reparative therapy” or “sexual orientation change efforts” (SOCE). CNN, for instance, said Pence “signaled support” for such funding in its report on Buttigieg’s speech to the LGBTQ Victory Fund.

An American Psychological Association task force in 2009 extensively analyzed peer-reviewed literature and concluded that such methods were unlikely to be successful and could harm patients; 16 states and the District of Columbia have acted to ban such therapy.

Buttigieg’s staff insists that he’s not trying to raise the issue, saying his remarks on Pence are tied to the dispute over the RFRA. . . . . “I don’t know what he believes about conversion therapy because he has never given a straight one.”  So what has Pence said?

There is little dispute that Pence has long been a skeptic of laws that seek to expand gay rights. He opposed same-sex marriage and supported a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman. He opposed a law that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace. He opposed the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy that prohibited soldiers from openly identifying as gay.

But the claim of supporting conversion therapy does not come from anything Pence ever said. Instead, it stems from an old campaign website that can only be found on the Wayback Machine. Nineteen years ago, when running for Congress, the Pence campaign website offered a “guide to renewing the American Dream.” . . . . In the section titled “Strengthening the American Family,” there are three items regarding gay rights:

Congress should oppose any effort to put gay and lesbian relationships on an equal legal status with heterosexual marriage.

Congress should oppose any effort to recognize homosexual’s as a "discreet and insular minority" entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and ethnic minorities.

Congress should support the reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act only after completion of an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus. Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.

As far as we can tell, references to Pence supporting conversion therapy began in 2015, after the fracas over RFRA, when they were circulated by the Indiana Democratic Party. News releases claimed Pence supported an “off-the-cuff endorsement for ex-gay conversion therapy,” without explaining that the language came from a campaign website.

We can find no evidence that Pence ever expressed support for conversion therapy. But neither can we find evidence that he has rejected it in his own words, as opposed to a spokesman. He has spoken at the Value Voters Summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council, which still advocates SOCE techniques and argues the APA study actually supports use of such practices. Micah Clark, who serves as executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana and opposes efforts to ban SOCE, stood behind Pence when he signed the RFRA.

Pence could certainly settle this conundrum if he has rejected such therapies in his own words, rather than through a spokesman. Then there would no longer be any question.

Do not hold your breath waiting for Pence to condemn the practice and the harm it does to so many. He remains the political whore of all the hate groups that continue to advocate for the false therapy and who push the GOP to retain, if not ramp up, its anti-LGBT agenda. Meanwhile, the Trump/Pence regime is waging a relentless war on LGBT Americans, especially those who are transgender.

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Why is Pete Buttigieg so Popular?

While he may yet prove to be a flash in the pan or merely the flavor of the week, Pete Buttigieg's surprising success to date and ranking as in third place in two polls looking at 2020 Democrat presidential nominee contenders has some scratching their heads.  This has certainly got to be the case of some sitting U.S. senators, both male and female who find themselves struggling much harder to gain traction. There are various theories which only time will prove right or wrong, but running beneath Buttigieg's current success is a yearning for someone fresh and most importantly unflappable enough to go toe to toe with the vile and truth and veracity challenged Donald Trump.  Personally, I do not think Sanders or Warren can defeat Trump no matter how much I may like some of their ideas.  A similar concern applies to other announced contenders.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at some of the theories on Buttigieg to date.  Here re article highlights:

On paper, Pete Buttigieg doesn’t seem like a high-profile presidential candidate. But somehow, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has become a serious political force.

An April Monmouth University poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucus attendees found Buttigieg in third place behind some of the biggest names in Democratic politics: former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Even when you factor in the poll’s margin of error, he is at least running even with sitting senators.

An April St. Anselm poll of Democratic voters in another crucial early-voting state, New Hampshire, found Buttigieg in third place as well. And The Fix’s Aaron Blake pointed out that Buttigieg outraised four sitting senators in the first three months of this year, even as he spent less than his competitors to get his name out there.

Before we go any further, it’s worth noting it’s still very early in the campaign. “I can’t tell if he’s the latest flavor of the month or the week or he’s got staying power,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist. “I honestly think it remains to be seen whether he goes the distance or not.”

But even so, the passion for “Mayor Pete” — and the speed at which it developed — is notable. How is he doing it?

[H]ere are some theories, partly informed by dozens of emails from readers of The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, about why this mayor of a town most of his supporters have probably never been to is exciting so many people.

1. Buttigieg is a novelty for Democrats. There are four senators from the Northeast running for president. By contrast, Buttigieg is from the Midwest, he’s a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and he unapologetically talks about his Christian faith in a way that helps voters feel like the Republican Party is not the only one with a claim to talk about faith.

2. There are aspects of his profile that excite more liberal members of the party. Like the fact he’s 37 and openly gay. (He came out as gay while mayor.) If he were to win, he would be both the first openly gay president and the youngest president ever. “[A]s a millennial myself, this means a great deal to me,” Joe Perin, a 25-year-old Indianapolis resident, said of Buttigieg’s age in an email to The Fix. “We have, until this point, been completely subject to the actions and decisions of older generations.”

3. The Democratic Party has been without a clear leader since President Trump won. So why not look to someone outside Washington?

4. Buttigieg is a candidate some Democrats could see taking on Trump successfully. Talk to any Democratic voter, and they’ll tell you they want, above all else, a candidate to defeat Trump. Buttigieg seems to fit the ideal profile for some Democrats for a few reasons. His policies are still in broad outlines, but he appears to have a more centrist economic worldview than Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who some Democrats worry might turn off swing voters.

“He seems pretty unflappable,” Pamela from California said in an email to The Fix. “He seems to be the type who can let it slide off and not engage.”

And Buttigieg is a white man. There is evidence that some Democratic voters are, fairly or not, skittish of electing another woman to run against Trump after Hillary Clinton lost to him.

5. Voters say he’s got the intangibles. Why does Buttigieg appear more popular right now than another young hotshot politician running for president, former congressman Beto O’Rourke? Voters who shared their thoughts with The Fix said Buttigieg has a calm personality, an ease on the biggest stage possible and a direct, eloquent way of speaking that has earned him comparisons to a young Barack Obama.

“Obama campaigned on hope, and Trump campaigned on fear. I think Mayor Pete may campaign on ‘care.’ ”

This is all a snapshot in time. There’s a long campaign ahead, and Buttigieg is untested at the highest level of politics. But how he handles those tests is worth watching given how well received the early days of his campaign have been.

Being free of Washington, DC, baggage may also be one of his attractions.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

Notre Dame: A Cathedral for a Fragile Age

Like many across the globe I was shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific fire at Notre Dame de Paris which has sat on the  Île de la Cité  - the historic heart of Paris in the middle of the River Seine - for 850 years.  Paris is perhaps my favorite city in the world. Part of my attachment to Paris and France may stem from the part of me that descends from French immigrants who ultimately settled in New Orleans.  Part may stem from my frequent visits to Paris years ago on business trips and more recently on pleasure trips, the last taking place last September.  Another part my come from the realization that without France, Yorktown might have been lost.  Visit the Yorktown Revolutionary War Museum and you are reminded that it was a joint American-French army that defeated the British after the French fleet had driven away British reinforcements.

Whatever the allure, on every trip to Paris, I'd visit Notre Dame or walk by it.  It seemed immortal and a forever constant. With luck, the French will restore Notre Dame and also restore that nation's national unity which has been frayed by far right forces and Russian meddling akin to what America suffered.  A piece in the New York Times also suggests that the cathedral and French culture and French Enlightenment - a strong source for the Founding Fathers - may remind Americans of what has been lost but is capable of being restored in its own society.   Here are column excerpts:

Kilometer Zero: Notre-Dame de Paris, the place from which distance in France is measured, the reference of a people, the starting point and endpoint, the “epicenter,” as President Emmanuel Macron put it. That is why so many people, religious or not, were in tears as the great cathedral burned. A part of themselves, their bearings, was aflame.

Ransacked during the revolution in an anticlerical frenzy, restored and rebuilt during the 19th century after tempers cooled, site of imperial coronation, national liberation and presidential funerals, Notre-Dame became the nation’s soul, the place where France could reconcile its turbulent history, the monarchical and the republican, the religious and the secular.

What is Paris after all? Beauty. The horror of it lay in watching beauty burn, the delicate spire toppling into an inferno of 800-year-old beams. Here was the best of humankind, as powerful an expression as exists of the sacred, going up in black smoke.

In a time of anxiety, of ugliness and hatred and lies, the blaze felt ominous. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” John Keats wrote, and that is “all ye need to know.”

A friend in Paris, Sarah Cleveland, wrote to me: “It was strangely quiet and still, as if people were in a trance, watching the fire boil inside the shell of the cathedral walls, like a caldron. The scene was solemn, reverent. Hopeless. It seemed impossible that something so monumental could be so fragile.”

Civilization is fragile. Democracy is fragile, like that spire. It is impossible today, it is dangerous, to ignore that. When a universal reference goes up in smoke, an abyss opens up.

Notre-Dame is a sanctuary, in a time when the American president spits on sanctuaries and has considered, as punishment, dumping poor migrants in those cities that dare to call themselves by that name.

Our Lady of Paris is still there after the blaze, with her towers, roofless now. President Macron vowed to rebuild the cathedral. Money is pouring in. The French president was dignified, a reminder of the unifying power of dignity at a time when it has vanished from the White House.

Notre-Dame, Macron said, is “our history” and “our imaginary”: a means, in other words, to remember and an inspiration to all who aspire for something transcendent, beyond self. The contribution of President Trump, for whom self is all, was to suggest sending “flying water tankers” to douse the cathedral. His advice was ignored.

Perhaps, for an American, the closest thing to Notre-Dame, in its power to represent the nation, is the Statue of Liberty, work of a French sculptor. A mist hung over the water the other day, with the magical result that the torch of liberty hovered in the air, apparently detached. Seeing it, I imagined Emma Lazarus’s poem rewritten for the age of Trump:

Give me your despots, your rich,Your vulgar tax evaders yearning to flee,The depraved and debauched that itchTo steal, I will make them free.Send these, the dishonorable, to watchHow easy it is to corrupt like me.

I don’t recall French civilization feeling so important in my lifetime. It’s what we have. There will be ugly polemics over the coming weeks, once the first shock passes, over who was responsible, how this disaster happened, what negligence was involved.

But in those silent, reverent, hymn-singing crowds on the streets of Paris, I also saw the possibility of a French coming-together in the determination to rebuild — not only the cathedral, but also a nation shaken by the violence of the Yellow Vest movement and the social divisions it reflects. The story of Notre-Dame is a story of endurance and rebirth.

It is also a story of European civilization. Notre-Dame survived Hitler, just. Its fragility, now demonstrated, demands Europe’s unity, too.

Here at home, Trump and many in the GOP have been destroying America's institutions just as thoroughly as yesterday's fire destroyed the roof of Notre Dame cathedral.  All of us must vow to rebuild those endangered institutions and protect them from Trump and those who would destroy them.  Just as the French will set about restoring Notre Dame.

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Will the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020?

There have been many post mortems of the 2016 presidential election, some of which have been, in my view wrong - especially those who down played racism as a motivating factor for Trump voters - and some that looked at the irresponsible coverage cranked out by far too many in the media, many driven by laziness or idiotic false equivalency.  When one candidate lies repeatedly while the opponent  has science and fact based positions, a responsible journalist doesn't treat them the same and should not allow the lies to go unchallenged and unexposed. Yet we saw that again and again in 2016 - and again in 2018 during the midterms - where Trump and GOP lies were treated as if they were true and were reported as if they had equal merit with legitimate policies and positions. The other failing was the constant reporting on Trump's efforts to draw attention and cause media circuses to distract when negative stories were surfacing.  Something Trump is doing at the moment as the release of the Mueller report nears.  Sadly, many in the media seemingly have learned nothing.  A piece in the New York Times I bookmarked in January lays out how critical it is for the responsible media (which excludes Fox News) not to repeat the same mistakes.  Here are highlights:

“Pocahontas” won’t be lonely for long. As other Democrats join Elizabeth Warren in the contest for the party’s presidential nomination, President Trump will assign them their own nicknames, different from hers but just as derisive. There’s no doubt.

But how much heed will we in the media pay to this stupidity? Will we sprint to Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker or Mike Bloomberg for a reaction to what Trump just called one of them and then rush back to him for his response to that response? Or will we note Trump’s latest nonsense only briefly and pivot to matters more consequential?

That’s a specific question but also an overarching one — about the degree to which we’ll let him set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics versus substance, and about whether we’ll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of his presidency. There were plenty.

With the dawn of 2019 and the acceleration of potential Democratic candidates’ preparations for presidential bids, we have a chance to do things differently than we did the last time around — to redeem ourselves.

Our success or failure will affect our stature at a time of rickety public trust in us. It will raise or lower the temperature of civic discourse, which is perilously hot. Above all, it will have an impact on who takes the oath of office in January 2021. Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.

“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.

And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As the writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”

[R]eaders’ news appetite isn’t infinite, so they’re starved of information about the fraudulence of his supposed populism and the toll of his incompetence. And he wins. He doesn’t hate the media, not at all. He uses us.

Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has been analyzing that coverage since Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Patterson found that for much of that year, the number of stories about Trump in the country’s most influential newspapers and on its principal newscasts significantly exceeded what his support in polls at the time justified.

And those stories were predominantly positive. . . . In stark contrast, stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015 were mostly negative.

Through the first half of 2016, as Trump racked up victories in the Republican primaries, he commanded much more coverage than any other candidate from either party, and it was evenly balanced between positive and negative appraisals — unlike the coverage of Clinton, which remained mostly negative.

Only during their general-election face-off in the latter half of 2016 did Trump and Clinton confront equivalent tides of naysaying. “On topics relating to the candidates’ fitness for office, Clinton and Trump’s coverage was virtually identical in terms of its negative tone,” Patterson wrote.

Regarding their fitness for office, they were treated identically? In retrospect, that’s madness. It should have been in real time, too.

[W]e fell prey to a habit that can’t be repeated when we compare the new crop of Democratic challengers to Trump and to one another. We interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories about each contender, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were from another’s. If we were going to pile on Trump, we had to pile on Clinton — or, rather, keep piling on her.

“It was wall-to-wall emails,” said Jill Abramson, . . . . “When you compare that to the wrongdoing that has been exposed so far by Robert Mueller,” Abramson told me, “it seems like a small thing.” The considerable muck in Clinton’s background never did, and never could, match the mountain of muck in Trump’s.

Trump also benefited from the media’s excessive faith in polls and its insufficient grasp of what was happening among Americans between the coasts. “The basic flaw of the press coverage, and I count myself in it, was the total assumption that Hillary would win,” she said. “The firepower of the investigative spotlight turned on Trump was a little bit less, because no one thought he would be the president, and that was a grave mistake.”

Regardless, he won’t get any pass along those lines in 2020. There are formal investigations galore into his behavior. The media needs only to track them — and is doing so, raptly.

We need to do something else, too, which is to recognize that Trump now has an actual record in office and to discuss that with as much energy as we do his damned Twitter feed.

We’ll have evidence aplenty to demonstrate that he’s ineffective and incompetent, an approach more likely to have traction than telling voters that he’s outrageous. They already know that.  We just have to wean ourselves from his Twitter expectorations, which are such easy, entertaining fuel for talking — or, rather, exploding — heads.

“It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time,” he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.

So does anything, really, that tugs us from issues of policy and governance into the realms of theater and sport. That puts a greater premium than ever on avoiding what Joel Benenson called “the horse-race obsession” with who’s ahead, who’s behind, who seems to be breaking into a gallop, who’s showing signs of a limp.

[I]t’s on us to try to interest them [readers and/or viewers] in more and to leaven that concentration of attention with full, vivid introductions to Trump’s alternatives. Dozens of Democrats are poised to volunteer for that role, and when we in the media observe — as I myself have done — that they must possess the requisite vividness to steal some of his spotlight, we’re talking as much about our own prejudices and shortcomings as anything else. We can direct that spotlight where we want. It needn’t always fall on the politician juggling swords or doing back flips.

It’s on us to quit staging “likability” sweepstakes . . . Every four years we say we’ll devote more energy and space to policy and every four years we don’t. But in an environment this polarized and shrill, and at a crossroads this consequential, following through on that vow is more important than ever.

It’s on us not to surrender to tired taxonomies that worsen the country’s divisions and echo Trump’s divisiveness. Black voters, white voters, urban voters and rural voters aren’t driven solely by those designations, and the soul of the country doesn’t belong exclusively to former factory workers in the Rust Belt.

It’s critically important that we find ways to get at what it is people imagine government should be doing and that we really look at what kind of leadership we need.”  Nicknames have nothing to do with it. So let’s not have much to do with them.

Today's Republicans Are the Real Extremists

As long time readers know, I grew up in a Republican household and had both parents and grandparents who were Republicans for the majority of their lives.  I followed in their foot steps and became a party activist, served on the Virginia Beach City Committee and even incorporated that body (as Virginia SCC documents available online confirm).  Yet before the end of my parents' life times they and the rest of my family fled the GOP.  It's not that we had change.  Rather, it was the Republican Party that had changed drastically as a result, in retrospect of the Party's embrace of Christofascists and white supremacists. The end result has been a GOP that is extreme and bears no resemblance to the GOP of the 1950, 1960's or even the 1980's under Reagan.  Yet, many Republican "friends" continue to close their eyes to the reality that the GOP they remember is no more and that the party for which they continue to vote has become both extreme and something ugly, especially under Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that the real extremists today are Republicans, not the Democrats they target for abuse and perhaps even violence.  Here are excerpts:

All of Donald Trump’s major policies have failed substantively, politically, or both. His one big legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, remains unpopular. His attacks on Obamacare have only enhanced public approval of the program. His fearmongering has cemented majority opposition to his proposed border wall.

But while today’s G.O.P. can’t do policy, it commands a powerful propaganda machine. And this machine is now dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists. It might work — but it shouldn’t, because Democrats aren’t extremists, but Republicans are.

The attack on Democrats has largely involved demonizing two new members of Congress, Representative Ilhan Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar is Muslim, and the usual suspects have gone all-out in using an out-of-context quotation to portray her, completely falsely, as sympathetic to terrorists.

It’s surely not an accident that these two principal targets are both women of color; there’s a sense in which supposed concerns about extremism are just a cover for sexism and white nationalism. But it’s still worth pointing out that while both Omar and AOC are on the left of the Democratic Party, neither is staking out policy positions that are extreme compared with either expert views or public opinion.

Take AOC’s famous advocacy of a 70 percent tax rate on very high incomes. Economists who knew anything about public finance immediately recognized that number as coming from a widely cited paper by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, two of the field’s leading figures. You don’t have to agree with their analysis to recognize that AOC, far from showing her ignorance, was actually drawing on solid research.

Nor does the public find the idea outrageous. An overwhelming majority believe that people with high incomes pay too little in taxes, and polls show wide support for AOC’s proposal.

Republicans, on the other hand, really are extremists. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in 2012 — long before the rise of Trump — the modern G.O.P. is “ideologically extreme” and uninterested in “facts, evidence, and science.” For example, major figures in the party routinely dismiss global warming as a hoax perpetrated by a vast global conspiracy.

Or consider the views of Stephen Moore, who Trump is trying to put on the board of the Federal Reserve.

He’s a former editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a fixture at conferences like FreedomFest. Given this background, it may not be surprising that he’s a firm believer in failed economic doctrines, especially the insistence that tax cuts for the wealthy have magical effects.

What’s coming out only now, however, is the extent of Moore’s political extremism. Many of his past statements — like his assertion that “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy” — sound like a liberal caricature of conservatism. But it’s not a caricature; Moore shows us what the right actually thinks.

I mentioned that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the rich pay too little in taxes. Moore, on the other hand, wants to eliminate income taxes and replace them with sales taxes, which would dramatically shift the tax burden away from the rich and onto the middle class.

He also wants to privatize Social Security, a program that is both hugely popular and the bedrock of retirement security for American workers. Moore would convert it into a 401(k)-type system. He is also fiercely hostile to Medicaid, which covers 65 million Americans.

Finally, Moore has proposed, in advance, a purge of the institution Trump wants him to join, calling for firing “hundreds” of Federal Reserve economists “who are worthless.” These would, presumably, be the economists who considered low interest rates and monetary expansion valuable tools in fighting the Great Recession, at the same time Moore was predicting that these policies would send inflation soaring. Guess who was right.

So even if you cherry-pick left-leaning Democrats, a look at their actual positions shows them to be not at all extreme. At the same time, pillars of the right-wing establishment hold views that are utterly at odds with both evidence and public opinion. Republicans are the real extremists.

Again, this is why I ceased to be a Republican two decades ago.

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