GOP Base Lunacy and the Measles Vaccine Debate

More and more the base of the Republican Party displays fear of modernity and scientific truths and in the name of "parental rights" refuse to expose their children to public schools and more dangerously, modern vaccines to avoid preventable diseases.  One of the results of this backwardness is the current measles outbreak which is being fueled by those who  refuse to have their children vaccinated.  To me, it is symptomatic of the lunacy that has become synonymous with today's Republican Party.  It is also typical of far right Christians who are among the most self-centered and selfish people one will encounter despite all the claims of piety and adherence to the Gospel message.  They truly, in my view, do not give a damn about how they endanger others.  Now, would be GOP presidential candidates are being pushed to take positions as to whether the public welfare outweighs pandering to those who live in a fantasy world.  The New York Times looks at the issue.  Here are highlights:

WASHINGTON — The politics of medicine, morality and free will have collided in an emotional debate over vaccines and the government’s place in requiring them, posing a challenge for Republicans who find themselves in the familiar but uncomfortable position of reconciling modern science with the skepticism of their core conservative voters.

As the latest measles outbreak raises alarm, and parents who have decided not to vaccinate their children face growing pressure to do so, the national debate is forcing the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential hopefuls to confront questions about whether it is in the public’s interest to allow parents to decide for themselves.

Gov. Chris Christie’s trade mission to London was suddenly overshadowed on Monday after he was quoted as saying that parents “need to have some measure of choice” about vaccinating their children against measles.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a physician, was less equivocal, telling the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday that parents should absolutely have a say in whether to vaccinate their children for measles.

The vaccination controversy is a twist on an old problem for the Republican Party: how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives.

It is a dance Republican candidates often do when they hedge their answers about whether evolution should be taught in schools. It is what makes the fight over global warming such a liability for their party, and what led last year to a widely criticized response to the Ebola scare.

There is evidence that vaccinations have become more of a political issue in recent years. Pew Research Center polls show that in 2009, 71 percent of both Republicans and Democrats favored requiring the vaccination of children. Five years later, Democratic support had grown to 76 percent, but Republican support had fallen to 65 percent.

[A]sked about immunization over the weekend in an interview on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” Mr. Obama urged parents to “get your kids vaccinated.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton also weighed in with a jab at vaccine naysayers, writing Monday night on Twitter, “The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork.”

The issue has more political potency among conservative voters who are highly skeptical of anything required by the government.

The vaccine question surfaced in the 2012 Republican primary when rivals of Rick Perry, then the Texas governor, pounced on him for issuing an executive order requiring sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus . . .

[T]he debate is not one-sided for Republicans. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, also a possible 2016 candidate, was asked on Sunday about vaccinations on the ABC News program “This Week,” and insisted that the science was clear and convincing. “Study after study has shown that there are no negative long-term consequences,” he said. “And the more kids who are not vaccinated, the more they’re at risk and the more they put their neighbors’ kids at risk as well.”

Asked about immunizations again later on Monday, Mr. Paul was even more insistent, saying it was a question of “freedom.” He grew irritated with a CNBC host who pressed him and snapped: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.”

Rand Paul's comment is very distressing. NO ONE owns children.  They have every right to be protected from the ignorance of their parents and from their parent's poisonous religious beliefs.  Yet the far right sees children as chattel property to be mistreated and abused, physically and psychologically as deranged parents see fit.  This mindset needs to be eradicated.

Justice Alito: 'The Idea That Romantic Love Is a Prerequisite to Marriage' is the Problem

If there's any doubt about the backward thinking of supposed "thinkers" and "intellectuals on the far right, one need look no further than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's (Alito is pictured at left) recent dissent in United States v. Windsor in which this Neanderthal bemoans that the idea of romantic love should be a part of marriage began all the problems surrounding marriage and gay marriage in particular.  Alito seemingly longs for the days when women were bartered by their male relatives for livestock and other financial or political benefits with out a care as to whether the woman involved could even tolerate her often much older husband.  Alito's creepy views are certainly in keeping with the Christofascist agenda of subservient wives and sex being only for procreation (and male pleasure).  Huffington Post looks at Alito's batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

There's been lots of discussion about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's off-the-rails DOMA dissent, but if you really want a peek into the mind of someone living a couple of centuries in the past -- and using pseudo-academic rationales rather than pure emotion, like Scalia -- you've got to read Justice Samuel Alito's concurring dissent on DOMA.  In it we learn that the problem with the decline of marriage really began with "the ascendence of the idea that romantic love is a prerequisite to marriage."

This makes me think that a) Justice Alito purchased his wife at an auction, or from her parents in exchange for a plot of land and a couple of mules, or b) she kicked him out of the house the moment he walked in the door after she read his dissent.

Is this what conservatives really think, that the real problem is that we're marrying for love?

The family is an ancient and universal human institution. Family structure reflects the characteristics of a civilization, and changes in family structure and in the popular understanding of marriage and the family can have profound effects. Past changes in the understanding of marriage -- for example, the gradual ascendance of the idea that romantic love is a prerequisite to marriage -- have had far-reaching consequences.... We can expect something similar to take place if same-sex marriage becomes widely accepted. The long-term consequences of this change are not now known and are unlikely to be ascertainable for some time to come.

I can't imagine that Alito really believes we should go back to arranged marriages. But the man who stated during oral arguments on DOMA that gay unions are "newer than cellphones and the Internet" does appear to believe that the shift to "romantic love" was a dramatic change that caused such a jolt to the institution of marriage

"At present, no one -- including social scientists, philosophers, and historians -- can predict with any certainty what the long-term ramifications of widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage will be," Alito warns. And for that reason Alito believes the court should have upheld DOMA. The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that if the government could have enforced arranged marriage with a federal law, it should have, since no one could predict the outcome of these newfangled romantic-love marriages, which altered the institution of marriage forever.

The descent of the far right into utter insanity continues and it is frightening that someone as out of touch with normal reality is on the Supreme Court.

The GOP’s Ted Cruz Problem

I've written about Ted Cruz, a supposed "rising star" in the Republican Party, several times of late.  Why?  Because he and Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli here in Virginia represent the delusional and hate filled element of the GOP that needs to be defeated and driven from the mainstream of the party if it is going to be saved from possible extinction at some point in the future.  These nasty individuals play well with the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging  GOP base, but they are driving voters and would be future Republicans from the party.   A piece in Salon explores why Cruz's rise in the GOP "could damage his party more than Joe McCarthy and Jesse Helms ever did."  Here are some highlights:

We’ve seen senators like Ted Cruz before. The historical comparison most commonly invoked involves Joe McCarthy, whose scurrilous red-baiting crusade in the early 1950s shattered the careers of innocent public servants and alienated McCarthy from his fellow senators, but also made him a folk hero on the right. Jesse Helms comes to mind too. The far-right North Carolinian was generally seen as more trouble than he was worth by his party’s establishment  .  .  .  .  

So it goes for Cruz, the freshman Texas senator who in his first two months on the job has baselessly asserted that Chuck Hagel might have received money from the North Korean government, reiterated his belief that there were 12 Communists on Harvard Law School’s faculty when he was a student there, and delighted in playing the role of ideological purist, even – or especially – if it puts him at odds with fellow Republicans..

The Hagel attacks have drawn cries of McCarthyism from the left, a torrent of negative media coverage, and earned Cruz a public rebuke from John McCain. But none of this has bothered Cruz, and for good reason: His standing within the conservative movement is only growing. 

What makes Cruz and Cruz-ism a particular problem for his party is the demographic conundrum Republicans now face. Obama’s reelection (and Democrats’ unexpected gains in the Senate) was testament to the rising clout of the “coalition of the ascendant” – African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women (particularly single women), Millennials. As Joan Walsh pointed out last week, Cruz’s Cuban-American background by itself won’t improve his or his party’s standing with Hispanics or other minorities. Instead, he’s appealing to the aging, overwhelmingly white core of the Republican base  .  .  .  . 

Cruz is now positioned as a major obstacle to the ideological modernization that the Republican Party is desperately in need of. If his brand of conservatism is treated as the gold standard of purity by the conservative media and conservative activists, Republican leaders will have a hard time moving the party away from its Obama-era orthodoxy. .  .  .  .  In some states, like Cruz’s Texas, it really doesn’t matter whom the GOP nominates; the party will win anyway. But in other states, the nomination of a Cruz-like candidate can be an act of electoral suicide.

When firebrands like McCarthy and Helms were on the scene, the Republican Party was more geographically and ideologically diverse.  .  .  .  But the GOP’s appeal has narrowed in the last decade or two. That doesn’t mean the party is doomed, but it does need a reboot – a reboot that’s difficult to envision as long as the party’s base continues to celebrate behavior like Cruz’s.

The choices for the GOP are to change and attract new voters and younger voters or to focus on the dwindling number of aging angry whites and religious extremists.  The changing demographics should be obvious.  Unless, of course, one is living in the alternate universe of the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd. 

In One Way That America Is Sadly Exceptional

We hear the far right in particular always bloviating about "American exceptionalism."  They are right in one sick aspect of American society.  We slaughter one another with hand guns more than any other developed country.  Don't tell me insane number of guns isn't a prime motivating factor.  How many front pages like this one do we need to see before something changes?

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