Kathleen Parker Has Romnesia

Often columnist Kathleen Parker is a voice of reason in a Republican Party that has become a de facto sectarian party that seeks to force its religious beliefs on all Americans and gut the First Amendment promise of freedom of religion for all citizens.  Indeed, I have noted and commented when Parker has written columns decrying the GOP's "death wish" and describing with horror the ultra-reactionary GOP party platform adopted in Tampa earlier in August.  She has even described Mitt Romney as a cyborg.  She's even complained about the GOP's "god problem" and attacks against her by Christofascists who label her as a fascist (search her name on this blog for more examples). Despite all of this, Parker must have either (i) developed a severe case of "Romnesia," (ii) suffered serious head trauma, (iii) guzzled down gallons of Christianist Kool-Aid, or (iv) bene kidnapped and subjected to a Stepford Wives like transformation.  How else can one explain her column in today's Washington Post in which she accuses Barack Obama of relaunching the so-called culture wars and claims that no one in the GOP will take away the right to abortion.  Here are samples from her severe, debilitating Romnesia induced delusion column:

We shouldn’t be talking about this silliness — Big Bird, “bull­s----er” or a girl’s “first time.”  We should be talking about The Issues, we keep telling ourselves. But in the waning days of the presidential campaign, these are the issues — binders full of cultural issues that continue to divide us and by which Barack Obama hopes to win reelection.

It is no accident that the war of competing economic theories has devolved into the same old culture war, beginning with the debate about the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Ever since, the Obama campaign has strategically tried to push the Republican Party and Mitt Romney into a corner by advancing the war-on-women narrative.

That Obama has had ample help from certain outspoken players (Missouri and Indiana Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, respectively, to name the most notorious) has only made Romney’s challenges greater. But the war against women has always been a red herring.

The contraception issue never would have come up but for Obama’s decision to force the hand of the Catholic Church. By placing religious institutions in the position of having to provide health insurance to pay for contraception as well as sterilization, which, agree or not, are against church teaching, Obama created the conversation.

The same ol’ culture wars. But, of course, women have had access to birth control for decades, and no one is trying to take it away. Anyone who suggests otherwise may have been spending too much time with Big Bird. 

One can only hope that Parker seeks immediate medical treatment for this shocking disconnect from reality and her many past columns that underscore the source of the culture wars within today's insane GOP and the party's own platform.