Frank Schaeffer is a New York Times best selling author. He is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, and also an acclaimed writer. Among his writings is "Crazy For God" which is a portrait of religious fundamentalism in this country. As Schaeffer's column in the Huffington Post reveals, he is also a former Republican who like so many others has left the Party - or perhaps more accurately, found that the party had left him as it was taken over by religious extremists who have contempt for the Constitution. Shaeffer's column leaves no prisoners and is a good read that Obama and others who would seek to placate the far right ought to read because trying to deal with that element is like selling your soul to the Devil. The best approach Obama and those who want the nation to succeed can undertake is to marginalize the current GOP and its Christianist masters to the fullest extent possible. Nothing less than a total repudiation of them and what they stand for will suffice. As a former Republican myself, I identified with much of what Shaeffer has to say. Here are some highlights:*
Dear Republican Leaders: The Republican Party has become the party dedicated to sabotaging the American future. . . . You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.
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I used to be one of you. . . . my parents (evangelical leaders Francis and Edith Schaeffer) and I were about as tight with -- and useful to -- the Republican Party as anyone. We played a big part creating the Religious Right. In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America's "moral decline." Soon after McCain lost in 2000 I re-registered as an independent in disgust with W. Bush. But I still respected many Republicans. Not today.
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How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? . . . Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson's and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!
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President Obama has been in office barely 45 days and the Republican Party has the nerve to blame him for the economic and military cataclysm he inherited. I say economic and military cataclysm because without the needless war in Iraq you all backed we would not be in the economic mess we're in today. If that money had been spent here at home on renovating our infrastructure, taking us toward a green economy, putting our health-care system in order we'd be a very different situation.
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When your new leader Rush Limbaugh calls for President Obama to fail he's calling for more flag-draped coffins. Limbaugh is the new "Hanoi Jane." For the party that created our crises of misbegotten war, mismanaged economy, the lack of regulation of our banking industry, handing our country to rich crooks... to obstruct the one person who is trying to repair the damage is obscene.
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The worsening economic situation is your fault and your fault alone. The Republicans created this mess through 8 years of backing the worst president in our history and now, because you put partisan ideology ahead of the good of our country, you have blown your last chance to redeem yourselves. You deserve the banishment to the political wilderness that awaits all traitors.
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