Stands on Social Issues Causing Civil War in GOP

As a former Republican, in my view it is far past time when the business community base of the Republican Party needed to stand up to the knuckle dragging elements of the party base best embodied by Christofascists - many of whom are also white supremacists - who want to drag the nation back to the worse aspects of the 1950's and in the process make right wing Christianity the de facto national religion.  With the ongoing fights over deceptively named "religious liberty" bills at the state level, the business faction of the GOP has finally realized that pandering to the prejudices of the Christofascists is bad for business - just ask the High Point Furniture Market which is seeing massive cancellations thanks to the North Carolina GOP.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing civil war between the business wing of the GOP and the religious extremists of the Christofascist elements of the party base.  Here are excerpts:

The ideological rifts breaking apart the Republican Party have moved into the states, where business leaders and evangelicals who have long coexisted in the GOP are suddenly at war over social issues such as gay rights and religious freedom.

The escalating feud has been evident in recent days in Georgia and North Carolina, where Republican governors have taken opposite approaches to dealing with these two vocal constituencies.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, facing pressure from corporate heavyweights such as Delta Air Lines and Disney, vetoed a bill that would have allowed pastors and faith-based groups to deny services to same-sex couples. The decision by Deal, who is not running for reelection, has drawn fire from leading evangelical activists, who have accused him of being a traitor to their cause.

The legislative battles, which have played out in state capitals across the country, underscore the unusual level of disarray in a party that traditionally strives for order. Rather than unifying around a message and strategy to win back the White House and retain congressional majorities, the GOP is largely collapsing amid factional warfare. There is seemingly no issue where Republicans agree — with bitter disputes raging over trade, foreign policy, entitlements and social issues.

Trump’s rise has muddied the ideological waters for the camps that have long made up the bulk of the GOP coalition — the three-legged stool built by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s consisting of fiscal conservatives, national security hawks and social conservatives. He has railed against free-trade deals backed by big business and blasted an interventionist foreign policy embraced by GOP hawks.

But the state-level battles between businesses and evangelicals demonstrate that the Republican Party’s troubles go beyond the concerns over Trump — pointing to a potentially irreconcilable divide between core elements of the GOP base.

Each side remains influential. Evangelical leaders can mobilize large numbers of activists and voters in key states and congressional districts. Corporations, meanwhile, operating in a post-Citizens United world of unlimited political spending, have the ability to put enormous pressure on policymakers.

“You are talking about two portions of the Republican Party who don’t fundamentally understand one another. . . . . The anger among evangelicals was especially raw this week after Deal’s veto.  “The devil has gone down to Georgia again, but this time it was in the form of big business and cowardly politicians,” said Tony Perkins, president of the evangelical Family Research Council.

Evangelical activists began pushing measures they describe as promoting “religious liberty” — aimed at protecting people such as wedding cake bakers or photographers who object to same-sex marriage from being legally compelled to participate in ceremonies. But these protections are often written broadly, with critics arguing they allow discrimination against the LGBT community in other ways, such as in employment and providing charitable services.

The focus on gay marriage ran counter to recommendations in a post-2012 election autopsy report published by the Republican National Committee. The report urged the party to move away from social issues as a way to expand the GOP’s reach beyond core conservatives.

Many Republican elites, including executives at big companies, feel like gay marriage is settled law and do not think special measures are needed to protect religious conservatives.

“Generally, in the past, big business wanted to keep out of social issues,” said David Boaz, a longtime leader at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The corporate world has moved more to the cultural left. The religious right is feeling more and more embattled, isolated, and that makes them even angrier about things like this veto in Georgia.”

The [2016 gubernatorial] campaign in North Carolina could hinge on how evangelicals and business leaders respond.  The state’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, a Democrat vying to unseat McCrory, on Tuesday called the law a “national embarrassment” and said he would not defend it in court.

The feuding will likely unfold in additional states over the coming weeks and months. . . . Gregg Keller, the Missouri-based GOP operative who was tasked with outreach to conservative activists on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential campaign last year, said the business wing should recognize that religious conservatives will not go away.

“One of the largest cultural imperatives that helped lead to the rise of Christianity was the view of the sexually licentious nature of the Roman Empire,” he said. “This is not a bug of evangelical Christianity; this is a feature. This is a hill on which evangelical Christians are going to be willing to die.”  He added: “The business community has caught the bull by the horns on this one.”

What is laughable about the Christofascists complaints about "sexual licentiousness" is that it is they themselves (especially in the Bible Belt) who have the highest divorce rates, the highest Internet porn usage, the most teen pregnancies and a seemingly endless string of sex scandals.  They want to police everyone else's sex life, yet their own are lives are veritable soap operas with white trash characters.

Big Bang Theory Advance Bad News for Bible Literalists

Science, not gays and sexuality, continues to prove itself the main threat to knuckle dragging Biblical literalists who are already reeling from evidence from the human genome project that Adam and Eve never existed as historical persons.  Now, new findings give the "Big Bang" theory a major boost and make the supposed seven days of creation laid out in the Bible look about as moribund as the belief in Adam and Eve.  All of this will be terrifying, of course, for the Bible beaters who find thinking for one's self and having uncertainty in their lives the most frightening prospects of all.  It also underscores the idiocy of having government and public policy guided by Old Testament literalism.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the latest scientific findings:

In the beginning, the universe got very big very fast, transforming itself in a fraction of an instant from something almost infinitesimally small to something imponderably vast, a cosmos so huge that no one will ever be able to see it all.

This is the premise of an idea called cosmic inflation — a powerful twist on the big-bang theory — and Monday it received a major boost from an experiment at the South Pole called BICEP2. A team of astronomers led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that it had detected ripples from gravitational waves created in a violent inflationary event at the dawn of time.

“We’re very excited to present our results because they seem to match the prediction of the theory so closely,” Kovac said in an interview. “But it’s the case that science can never actually prove a theory to be true. There could always be an alternative explanation that we haven’t been clever enough to think of.”

The reaction in the scientific community was cautiously exultant. The new result was hailed as potentially one of the biggest discoveries of the past two decades.

Cosmology, the study of the universe on the largest scales, has already been roiled by the 1998 discovery that the cosmos is not merely expanding but doing so at an accelerating rate, because of what has been called “dark energy.” Just as that discovery has implications for the ultimate fate of the universe, this new one provides a stunning look back at the moment the universe was born.

“It gives us a new window on the universe that takes us back to almost the very beginning of time, allowing us to turn previously metaphysical questions about our origins into scientific ones.”

The measurement, however, is a difficult one. The astronomers chose the South Pole for BICEP2 and earlier experiments because the air is exceedingly dry, almost devoid of water vapor and ideal for observing subtle quirks in the ancient light pouring in from the night sky. They spent four years building the telescope, and then three years observing and analyzing the data. Kovac, 43, who has been to the South Pole 23 times, said of the conditions there, “It’s almost like being in space.”

The fact that the universe is dynamic at the grandest scale, and not static as it appears to be when we gaze at the “fixed stars” in the night sky, has been known since the late 1920s, when astronomer Edwin Hubble revealed that the light from galaxies showed that they were moving away from one another.

This led to the theory that the universe, once compact, is expanding. Scientists in recent years have been able to narrow down the age of the universe to about 13.8 billion years. Multiple lines of evidence, including the detection of the CMB exactly 50 years ago, have bolstered the consensus model of modern cosmology, which shows that the universe was initially infinitely hot and dense, literally dimensionless. There was no space, no time.

Then something happened. The universe began to expand and cool. This was the big bang.

The inflationary model implies that our universe is exceedingly larger than what we currently observe, which is humbling already in its scale. Moreover, the vacuum energy that drove the inflationary process would presumably imply the existence of a larger cosmos, or “multiverse,” of which our universe is but a granular element.

“These ideas about the multiverse become interesting to me only when theories come up with testable predictions based on them,” Kovac said Monday. “The powerful thing about the basic inflationary paradigm is that it did offer us this clear, testable prediction: the existence of gravitational waves which are directly linked to the exponential expansion that’s intrinsic to the theory.”

Obviously, there is much more to yet be discovered.  Nonetheless, it is pretty clear that the Genesis story written by ignorant and uneducated nomads to explain the unknown is anything but the truth.

Kentucky Legislature Overrides Veto of Bill Protecting Right to Discriminate Against Gays

Illustrating the problems facing the GOP is the state of Kentucky where the GOP controlled legislature passed a bill that would allow Christofascists to discriminate against gays and largely ignore any law they did not like based on professed religious belief.  Kentucky governor Steve Beshear vetoed House Bill 279. Now,the knuckle draggers and Bible beaters in the legislature have overridden Beshear's veto.  The selfishness and belief that they can ride rough shod over the rights of others are among the most notable aspects of today's conservative Christians.  Put simply, they are NOT nice people.  USA Today has details:

The Kentucky legislature voted Tuesday night to override the governor's veto of a controversial "religious freedom" bill.  The House's 79-15 vote sent House Bill 279 to the Senate, which voted 32-6 to override the measure.

During the House debate Tuesday, Democratic state Rep. Darryl Owens said the U.S. and Kentucky constitutions already protect religious freedom -- a freedom he said he does not see under threat.

"This is a piece of legislation looking for a reason," Owens said.

But Republican Rep. Stan Lee said, "It wasn't so long ago we had prayer in the schools, but they made us take it out."  

Gay-rights and human-rights groups have warned that the bill could be used to challenge local laws in Louisville, Lexington, Covington and Vicco designed to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination.

Gov. Steve Beshear added additional concerns in his veto message Friday, saying the bill's unintentional consequences also could harm economic development efforts and enforcement of drug laws.

Kentucky has sent a clear message to the world: if you're not a far right religious nutcase, you probably do not want to locate to Kentucky.   Hopefully, businesses will get that message and locate in states that embrace modernity and equality for all citizens.