Andrew Sullivan- Leaving the Right

I've made no secret that I once was a Republican - an active Republican in fact, holding a seat on the Virginia Beach City Committee for the GOP just short of eight (8) years, served as a precinct captain and worked on many campaigns. In those days, most of my extended family were also Republicans or at least voted Republican. Something that extended back to the days growing up in Central New York when Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York. But the Party and conservatism have changed. The result was that I and many family members left the GOP - or more accurately, the GOP left us as it increasing became a party of reaction controlled increasingly by religious fundamentalists. If you believe in the separation of church and state and that religion should not shape civil rights, it virtually became impossible to remain a Republican in good conscience. Many others have experienced the same thing. One is Andrew Sullivan who describes why he left the Right in a recent blog post. His post sums up many of my thoughts. Here are some highlights:

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[I]n so far as it [The Right] means the dominant mode of discourse among the institutions and blogs and magazines and newspapers and journals that support the GOP, Charles Johnson is absolutely right in my view to get off that wagon for the reasons has has stated. Read his testament. It is full of emotion, but also of honesty.

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[T]here has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so - against the conservative degeneracy in front of us.
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[M]y attachment to the Anglo-American conservative political tradition, as I understand it, is real and deep and the result of sincere reflection on the world as I see it. And I want that tradition to survive because I believe it is a vital complement to liberalism in sustaining the genius and wonder of the modern West. For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America.
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My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul"). Here goes:
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I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.
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I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
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I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
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I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.
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I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.
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I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.
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I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
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I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
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I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.
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I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
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Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right. To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me. And increasingly, I'm not alone.