Good Bye to the GOP - Part II

Yesterday I noted an article that quoted Michael Stafford, a former Republican Party officer, who has left the Republican Party because of the GOP's down right inanity, meanness and religious extremism.  These are the same attributes of the GOP that caused me to leave the Party over a decade ago (although the party was still quasi-sane when I left compared to its current state).  Now, I've found a column written by Stafford that goes into to even more detail and confirms many of my own views of what has happened to the GOP.  Here are some highlights from The Cagle Post:

I’m a life-long Republican. My political affiliation has been woven intrinsically into the very fabric of my being.

As an adult, I continued to be a rock-solid Republican- I helped run my law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society and its Republican club. And after the election of President Obama in 2008, I served as an officer in my state Republican Party. For the next two years, I devoted substantial amounts of my time, my talent, and my treasure to supporting local candidates running for office and to building the Party organization.  Today, however, I am a registered Republican no longer.

I came to the decision to leave the GOP not with a heavy heart, but with a broken one.  I reached this point through a long series of awakenings and realizations - a path marked by literally years of wrestling with, and finally accepting, the political implications of a number of difficult truths. It involved ever-increasing levels of cognitive dissonance, as I tried to square my experiences, concerns, and knowledge, with my continued loyalty to the GOP.

As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies.  In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change- a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world- is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans- the notorious birthers- believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them.

Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in “class warfare,” but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose- one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget to see that.

Its [the GOP's] reckless behavior helps drive the political dysfunction crippling our nation.  In the end, it offers a dystopian vision of our future- a harsher, crueler and more merciless America starkly divided between the riders, and the ridden.

Ultimately, leaving the GOP was necessary in order to maintain my own integrity. Leaving is also a public act of personal protest. I am under no illusions about its broader significance- it will have no impact on the trajectory of the political narrative in this nation. But that does not make it futile. On the contrary, as the shadows lengthen, such minor individual acts of defiance and dissent are more critical now than ever before.

Perhaps, one day, a reformed and responsible Republican Party will reemerge.

But until then, the GOP and I have reached a parting of the ways. In the poignant words of “Kathleen Mavourneen,” an old Irish ballad: “It may be for years, and it may be forever”

If it's any consolation to Stafford, he is but one of countless life long Republicans who have left the GOP in order to maintain their own integrity and moral decency.  Of course what I find most ironic is that the GOP continues to pretend that it is the party of Christian values even as its policies reflect little but greed, cruelty to the less fortunate and a total lack of compassion or caring for others. Oh, and then there's the rejection of objective reality that I find most troublesome.