The Road to the GOP's Religious Extremism

As I have noted any number of times since I launched this blog, I left the Republican Party over a decade ago because the Party was rapidly forgetting the concepts of (i) the separation of church and state and (ii) freedom of religion is for everyone, and in the process heading toward becoming a de facto far right Christian party. In my resignation letter to the Virginia Beach Republican Party, I said that in good conscience I could not ever support the party as an activist until the party once again implemented the two concepts I just referenced. The GOP has changed a great deal since that day when I resigned, and the change has not been for the better. More or less my entire extended family has likewise exited the GOP and I suspect that we are just the tip of the iceberg.

In a post Andrew Sullivan (I'm pictured with him above) does an excellent job of summing up the across the board responsibility of party activists and elites for what the GOP has become. Indeed, the surge of Rick Santorum is but the logical outcome of these actions. Belatedly, some are upset with their own handiwork. Here are some post highlights:

George Will recently sighed: "Romney is not attracting people who want rationality leavened by romance. Santorum is repelling people who want politics unmediated by theology." That's about right. But for the past decade, the Republican elites and base have precisely insisted on a politics that is mediated by theology.

They are the ones who have insisted that religious argument has an integral role in public discourse; that there is a "war on Christmas" and now all religion; they are the ones who have campaigned against gay marriage as un-Biblical or in violation of a "natural law" barely updated from the 13th century; they are the ones raging against a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine because God bequeathed it all to the Jewish people; they are those who directed the federal government to involve itself in an end-of-life decision already resolved by state law; they are those who have made criminalization of abortion a litmus test for Republican candidates for a generation, and who want to give women an invasive ultrasound before allowing them to exercize what has now been a constitutional right for decades.

I despise what the GOP has become. But it is what it is. And Santorum is its logical leader. . . . With Santorum, we'd finally get to test whether that "real conservatism" is indeed the future of the GOP or what I think it is - a reactionary form of madness.

And, by the way, those Washington pundits now huffing and puffing about Santorum's extremism? They should have spoken up a long time ago.