Quote of the Day: The GOP Is a Religious Organization, Not a Political One.

As regular readers know, I come from a family of former Republicans and served myself some years ago on the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  I remember when what began as an  infiltration of the GOP by Christofascists commenced and, as the GOP moved away from honoring the concept of the separation of church and state I resigned from the GOP.  Things have only gotten far, far worse over the years since I walked away in from the GOP in a combination of disgust and fear.  At this point, all of my immediate family members have walked away from the GOP as well - as did my late parents before their passing.  The fusion of religion and politics was the number one reason we all walked away.  Andrew Sullivan has a spot on description of what today's GOP has become.  Here's the pertinent language:

The GOP, at its core, is a religious organization, not a political one. It is digging in deeper on immigration reform, and marriage equality, and abortion. It is not acting as a rational actor in political competition but as a fundamentalist movement, gerrymandering its way to total resistance to modernity’s increasing diversity of views and beliefs. It is emphatically not a socially conservative force: it is a radical, fundamentalist movement, incapable of accepting any political settlement that does not comport with unchanging, eternal dicta.

It is the great tragedy of the era that Republicans targeted one of the few grass-roots, genuinely conservative movements [gay marriage proponents] as their implacable enemy in the last quarter century. They went after the one group truly trying to shore up and support marriage – and they even wanted to amend the Constitution to do so. They did so, I believe, for one reason alone: fundamentalism. And that is not conservatism. In so many ways, it is conservatism’s eternal nemesis: the refusal to adjust to the times in favor of an ideology that never changes.

Candidly, I do not see how the Christofascist take over can be easily reversed.  Particularly here in Virginia where the Virginia GOP is an arm of The Family Foundation, a virulently anti-gay and anti-minority organization of extremists.