Is Corporate America About to Kick Social Conservatives to the Curb?

The twin pillars of the Republican Party over the last 30 years or more have been big business on the one hand and so-called social conservatives - those I call the Christofascists.  As a piece in Salon traces out, the union of big business and the Christofascists within the Republican tent was a marriage of convenience with big business and Republican candidates using social issues to turn out voters to vote ultimately against their own best interests.   The marriage of convenience first arose out of the use of racism and reaction to desegregation and later trended toward issues such as abortion and gays, not that racism and anti-immigrant bias ever disappeared from the mix.  Now, however, with the ranks of the Christofascists dwindling and social disapproval of the stridency and general hatefulness of the Christofascists growing, the marriage of convenience may be headed for divorce.  Here are excerpts from the article that focus on the hopefully coming divorce:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s op-ed in the New York Times marks the whimpering end of an unholy alliance. The letter itself was a ham-handed attempt to capture the 2016 evangelical vote before Sen. Ted Cruz does. But the very crudity of his piece revealed that the union at the heart of Movement Conservatism is ripping apart.

In his op-ed, Jindal undertook to explain to business leaders how Movement Conservatism works. Its political strategy, he lectured, “requires populist social conservatives to ally with the business community on economic matters and corporate titans to side with social conservatives on cultural matters.” The governor is right: Since the 1980s big business interests have managed to secure policies that have concentrated wealth at the very top of the economic ladder, and they have managed their coup only with the help of the votes of social conservatives.
 
But Jindal’s hyperbolic posturing as he warns “any corporation” “bullying” social conservatives into accepting same-sex marriage to “Save your breath,” reveals a touchstone moment: This grand alliance is over.

[I]ts stability depended on convincing evangelicals and social conservatives that slashing taxes and destroying business regulation served their social ends. Since 1980, those economic policies have concentrated wealth upward and left values voters with less and less. Rumblings of discontent have disturbed the coalition as real wages have stagnated and tax burdens have shifted down the ladder. Movement Conservatives continued to be able to rally support from evangelicals as they limited women’s reproductive choices and attacked minorities and immigrants as lazy criminals, but their power has slipped as the programs they slash increasingly harm values voters. Same-sex marriage marks the beginning of the divorce. Big business Movement Conservatives were happy to pay lip service to right-wing populism so long as it kept Republicans in power. But supporting it now will do the opposite, as most Americans swing behind non-discrimination.

Jindal’s op-ed offers Republicans a great opportunity. It employs the same rhetorical techniques Buckley did in 1951 — turning the popular majority in favor of equal rights into “the radical left,” for example — but now those techniques seem transparently, almost laughably, disingenuous. Seeing such a caricature of the bargain that made Movement Conservatism succeed could create the magical moment in which the party finally rejects the devil’s bargain it struck in the 1950s.

The Struggle to Turn North Carolina Blue

Living in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, one cannot escape North Carolina news because (i) some of the newer "bedroom communities" for the area are located just across the Virginia/North Carolina border and (ii) local news coverage includes northeast North Carolina.  As a result, it is easy to watch a struggle going on in North Carolina that mirrors Virginia: modern, progressive, urban parts of the state are trying to out vote the rural areas that embrace religious extremism, the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda and which view outsiders and modernity with a mindset not so far removed from that on display in the old movie "Deliverance."  For progressives, it's hard dealing with the batshitery that such backward areas support.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing struggle.  Here are excerpts (note the elderly voter who bemoans what has become of the GOP):

Charlotte, the largest city, the “research triangle” cities (and college towns) of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and cities like Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Asheville are turning more blue than red, partly from an infusion of new workers in finance, health care, technology and education. But the state as a whole is more of a tossup.

Last year, Republicans took control of the governor’s mansion and increased their majorities in both chambers of the Legislature, giving them total control of state government in Raleigh for the first time in over a century. The new governor, Pat McCrory, thought to be a moderate when he was Charlotte’s mayor, helped lead a sharp turn to the right. He signed laws that slashed unemployment benefits; opted out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion; toughened voting requirements; made it harder for abortion clinics to operate; and repealed a law that allowed death row inmates to have their sentences converted to life in prison without parole if they could prove racial bias in their cases.

The resulting backlash — a series of weekly sit-in protests known as “Moral Mondays” — has given pause even to Republicans such as Sally Dalton Robinson, whose family has been central to the life of Charlotte and the state. Her husband, Russell, was a founder of one of the state’s largest law firms; his grandfather was the principal author of the state’s 1868 Constitution.

“Russ and I see so much the same way,” said Mrs. Robinson, who is 80. “Our whole voting lives, we’ve been registered Republicans, and we don’t intend to change.” Her husband’s great-grandfather came over to Goldsboro, N.C., from Ireland before the Civil War and was a Republican when that meant opposing secession and slavery, supporting President Abraham Lincoln, and being at dangerous odds with their neighbors, who were overwhelmingly white Democrats.

“What we feel is that the Republican Party we have voted for and supported most of our married life has really gone off and left us — that’s sad to us,” Mrs. Robinson said. “A lot of that — not all — is social issues. I’m very opposed to what Republicans in this state have done in terms of abortion, making it harder. I’m opposed to putting into the Constitution that marriage is between a man and a woman. I think it’s very detrimental that we’ve cut back on the days that we have for early voting.

She added: “I grew up in a city that was very segregated, and I did not question that as a child. When I would get on the bus as an 8-year-old to go to town, the African-Americans were seated at the back and I was seated at the front. I didn’t question it. It’s hard for me to take that in about myself, but it’s true.”

North Carolina, like Sally Dalton Robinson, has changed. Still, in 2014, it’s a state that is still weighing what it wants to be now and will be in the future. This midterm election could give us, and the rest of the nation, a clue.

"Social Conservatives" Could Doom the Republican Party

Speaking of religious extremism in follow up to the last post, we can see the evils of fundamentalist religious belief in the circumstances facing the Republican Party.  Years back the GOP, in a short sighted, cynical ploy to win elections, welcomed Christofascists into the party.  Not only that, they allowed them to infiltrate and largely take over the party grassroots.  These extremists were actually knowingly voted onto city and county committees and a Frankenstein monster was created.  As Christofascists became ever more numerous, sane, rational Republicans fled - I and my entire family left the GOP - the insanity which intertwines a toxic form of Christianity with the nations civil laws took a tighter hold over the GOP.  As a piece in Salon explores, the GOP may be getting closer to paying a much deserved price for getting in bed with evil (and not just the evil of the Koch brothers).  Here are excerpts from the piece:

I wrote a piece earlier about the GOP’s “three-legged stool” that stands for “family values, small government and strong national defense” in light of the recent resurgence of jingoistic fear-mongering in the 2014 campaign ads. The commentary on the right has been shifting perceptibly day by day as the threat of ISIS and our renewed military involvement in the Middle East tickled the martial lizard brain into action. But what of the other legs on the stool? The Christian Right is very likely to be on board with whatever military adventures the Republicans push (they usually are) but they are also likely to be agitated at the loss of prestige within the party and what they see as a defeatist attitude toward such issues a gay marriage and contraception.

The right wing firebrands’ reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision not to make a decision on marriage equality this week is instructive.

Christian Right leader and possible presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said:

“It is shocking that many elected officials, attorneys and judges think that a court ruling is the ‘final word,’” Huckabee said. “It most certainly is not. . . . It is NOT the ‘law of the land’ as is often heralded.”

[H]e probably spoke for many members of the religious right in his anger that the Court didn’t take the opportunity to strike down the abomination of marriage equality, especially since they’d been led to believe that they finally achieved their goal of a conservative majority that would give them everything they want when they want it.

[T]he last few years have left the social conservatives feeling a bit bereft. Their candidates have been marginalized for believing odd myths like the one which says a woman’s body “shuts down” and won’t allow pregnancy as a result of rape or making impolitic statements about the sexual habits of the 97% of women who use birth control. 

Ed Kilgore sees a new wrinkle in all this that’s bound to tie the GOP up in knots if it comes to pass:

[A]s the “religious liberty” movement continues to develop, you could see it morph into the theoretical foundation for a parallel society in which the painful diversity of contemporary life, and its disturbing clatter of demands for “equality” and “non-discrimination” and “rights” (other than religious rights and the Right To Life, of course) is simply excluded, along with “government schools” and secular news and entertainment.

But there’s danger in too much reliance on liberating conservatives from “judicial activism” via an ever-expanding zone of “religious liberty:” opponents of same-sex marriage and abortion/contraception could become complacent and lose the spiritual muscle-tone provided by fighting to restore godly norms for all Americans. There’s a long history of conservative evangelicals retreating into apolitical and interior lives; that’s where they largely existed for many decades prior to the 1970s.

Wouldn’t it be something if the Republican Party ended up kicking out one of the legs of its famous stool through the “judicial activism” of the most conservative Supreme Court in memory? It’s a distinct possibility. Stay tuned.

With the country's demographics changing rapidly and societal acceptance of gays and contraception surging,  if the GOP continues to embrace the Christofascists and allows these extremists to dictate the GOP's platform, the party runs the risk of becoming a permanent minority party - especially after the 2020 census and redrawing of what for now are safe gerrymandered GOP districts.  If the GOP doesn't do something soon, it will be akin to the passengers and crew of the Titanic as they sped toward disaster. 

Virginia Is At A Crossroad

Last week's same sex marriage ruling ignited a furious number of spittle flecked rants from the usual suspects - e.g., hate merchants Victoria Cobb, Tony Perkins, Matt Staver, et al - but it also underscores the reality that Virginia is at a crossroads where the Virginia GOP's embrace of the past, including open racism and religious extremism, is about to be swept away as non-rural areas seek to embrace the 21st century and the future.  Lest there be any doubt, before their fantasy world is swept away for good, the Christofascists and white supremacists of today's Virginia GOP will become even more shrill, but the tide of change will not be stop in the long run.  A piece in Bacon's Rebellion looks at the crossroads that Virginia has reached.  Here are excerpts:

Standing before a trim, white, clapboard house off Lafayette Boulevard in Norfolk last week, friends and supporters of gay rights cheered loudly as two same sex couples approached a front-yard podium to celebrate their legal victory in having Virginia’s gay marriage ban overturned.

The night before, U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen, citing Abraham Lincoln and the unfairness of the state’s previous ban on interracial marriage, had declared Virginia’s ban unconstitutional.

It had been supported by the state’s conservatives and also by 57 percent of voters who approved a constitutional amendment in 2006 declaring marriage as only for men and women. Popular opinion, however, appears to have shifted.

It was an historic moment on a par with federal courts overturning racial segregation and other blunt violations of human rights. Seventeen states now allow gay marriage and a host of lawsuits tend to push overturning bans. Virginia is the first Southern state to do so.

Immediately, hard-right politicians such as Prince William County’s Bob Marshall called for the judge’s impeachment just as some demanded the ouster of the new state Attorney General, Mark Herring, for, correctly, refusing to defend the marriage ban.

The situation represents a huge shift in philosophy for the state. For years, Virginia has been dominated by conservative thinking that is enormously contradictory.  . . . promoting limited government and individual freedom in some areas (little regulation of business and politicians) and badly suppressing individual rights in cases such as marriage and abortion.

This comes after the state’s reputation was badly stained by the first-ever indictment of a former governor (Robert F. McDonnell) on federal corruption charges. So much for “the Virginia way” that touts Thomas Jefferson and the entire cadre for freedom.

I have always been frustrated by the state’s bi-polar attitudes about individual rights. Not a Virginian by birth, I was glad to leave the state in 1983 after reporting from it for about eight years. I was sick and tired of its genuflecting before big business on environment and labor issues. Little-regulated Big Business, after all, had given Virginians such presents the Kepone ecological disaster.

The philosophical contradictions are finally catching up. Even though proponents of gay rights at the Norfolk press conference made a big deal about Virginia being the first “southern” state to confront ending the gay marriage ban, I am not so sure the state is really “Southern” any more.

Social right conservatives have taken drubbings. Kenneth Cuccinelli lost his bid for governor. Mark Obenshain, who once wanted to require any woman who miscarried a child to have to report it to police, narrowly lost his race for attorney general. (What’s his name) Jackson, a true crazy, lost his race for lieutenant governor.

Conservatives, meanwhile, are trying to reinvent themselves. True, some are screaming death to anyone who disagrees with them, sort of like the queen in “Alice in Wonderland.” Others are trying to find new issues to distance themselves from what is now a sure political loser – hard-right social issues.

Others are scrambling to discover new issues, such as recruiting business, reforming education, whatever. At the same time, they are straining to protect the status quo, such as ensuring that Virginia keeps its weak ethics laws.

They will lose because the handwriting is on the wall. Judge Wright Allen has helped script it.

The GOP’s Civil War Has Just Begun

Recently, the daughter of a Republican candidate contacted me in reaction to a post I wrote about her father.  We ultimately spoke by telephone and surprisingly agreed on many issues, particularly the toxic problem of the GOP base's stranglehold on the nomination process which either (i) forces sane candidates to have to stake out insane positions to get nominated or (ii) allows true lunatics to beat sane and rational candidates.  As noted in an earlier post today, Mark Obenshain's concession to Mark Herring has already reignited the war over whether or not the Virginia GOP will continue to use state conventions which lead to more extremist candidates or revert back to primaries.  The same civil war is being waged all across the nation.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the growing civil war.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican civil war, like all civil wars, is even messier than it looks. It’s a battle between two different conservative establishments, complicated by philosophical struggles across many other fronts. Its resolution will determine whether we are a governable country.

Because the GOP fight is so important, it’s a mistake to dismiss the passage of a real, honest-to-goodness budget through both houses of Congress as a minor event. The deal negotiated by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) may be small, but it represents a major recalibration of forces inside the Republican Party.

The tea party certainly still wields power in GOP primaries, one reason why only one of the seven Republican senators facing tea-party challengers, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, supported allowing a vote on the deal. But Ryan and House Speaker John Boehner calculated, correctly, that the wreckage from October’s shutdown strategy allowed them to breach the tea party’s barrier against deal-making. 

Let’s be clear about what this GOP brawl is not. It is not a clash between “conservatives” and “moderates.” Most genuine Republican moderates either lost primaries or were defeated by Democrats. Liberal Republicans, once a hearty breed, disappeared long ago. The Republican Party is unequivocally in conservative hands.

Nor is this a fight in which “the Republican establishment” is being challenged by its “grass-roots” enemies. Boehner denounced conservative fundraising behemoths (they include FreedomWorks, Heritage Action and Americans for Prosperity) because he understands that they now constitute an alternative Republican establishment. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was even more explicit, arguing that “many of the outside groups do what they do solely to raise money.” 

The showdown involving the two conservative power centers is not the only dispute that matters. There are crisscrossing divisions between foreign policy hawks and non-interventionists; between those who care passionately about social issues such as abortion and gay marriage and those who would play them down; between purist libertarians and pro-business pragmatists; and between supporters and opponents of a more open policy on immigration.

The governing wing won this round. But Ryan’s comments on the debt ceiling, coupled with similar remarks from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, suggest that Republicans will face another internal struggle over how much to demand in exchange for expanding the government’s borrowing authority. 

If Boehner cedes that decision to the party’s confrontational wing, the gains of this week will evaporate. And given the hostility among conservatives to Obama, the habit of seeing compromise as a form of capitulation could prove very hard to break.

Social Conservatives to GOP Establishment: We Told You So

We all knew this was coming even before even before the defeat of the Romney/Ryan ticket on November 6th: the conservative Kool-Aid drinking element in the GOP would blame the loss on the party's failure to be conservative enough.  In the alternate universe of these folks, they refuse to understand that a majority of Americans do not want what they are selling and that, if anything, Romney's pandering to them helped set the stage for the loss of both the White House and Senate seats the GOP had hoped to gain.  Thus the GOP establishment is faced with the prospect of a civil war with people who are at best out of touch or, more likely half insane (OK, perhaps totally, insane).  An article in the Washington Post  looks at the recriminations now flying fast and furiously.  Here are excerpts:

Evangelical leaders and conservative activists have a simple message for establishment Republicans about Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid: We told you so.

After nearly two weeks of listening to GOP officials pledge to assert greater control over the party and its most strident voices in the wake of Romney’s loss, grass-roots activists have begun to fight back, saying that they are not to blame for the party’s losses in November.

The conservative backlash sets up an internal fight for the direction of the Republican Party, as many top leaders in Washington have proposed moderating their views on citizenship for illegal immigrants, to appeal to Latino voters. In addition, many top GOP officials have called for softening the party’s rhetoric on social issues, following the embarrassing showing by Senate candidates who were routed after publicly musing about denying abortion services to women who had been raped.

The dispute began to take shape soon after Obama was declared the winner and Republicans, who had hoped to claim the Senate majority, lost two seats. Two days after the election, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told ABC News that the Republicans’ mission was to appeal to nonwhite voters: “How do we speak to all Americans? You know, not just to people who look like us and act like us, but how do we speak to all Americans?”

More problematic for Republicans is the drift of Hispanic voters into the Democratic fold. Obama won among Hispanic voters by 44 percentage points this year, up eight points from 2008.

Korn warned that two reliably Republican states worth 49 electoral votes combined could become swing states if demographic trendlines continue. In 2004, George W. Bush tied in the Hispanic vote in Texas and lost in Arizona by 13 percentage points. Romney lost the Hispanic vote by more than 40 points in both states.

[M]any senior party officials have reversed course and suggested that they should at least support the DREAM Act, which would allow the children of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation. Such a move would spark a huge internal fight with some conservatives. 

The 2014 Senate races will serve as a test for establishment control of the political process. For the third consecutive cycle, Republicans will begin as heavy favorites to gain a large bloc of seats, and some party leaders want a bigger role in choosing those nominees. In 2010 and 2012, Republicans say, bad nominees in Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada cost them what should have been easy victories. If those seats were in GOP hands today, the Senate would be deadlocked at 50-50.

Some outside groups, however, stand ready to fight for the most conservative nominee, pointing to Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) as examples of rising stars who won Senate races without establishment support.

The Democrats can only pray that the evangelicals and conservative win the civil war and help speed the GOP to a permanent minority party status where it belongs until the Christofascists are somehow driven back into the political wilderness.

The Looming GOP Civil War -- Whether Romney Wins or Not

I have repeatedly argued that in my view - especially as a former GOP activist and City Committee member - that the Republican Party is committing a slow form of political suicide.  I continue to believe that my prediction will prove accurate.  My only disappointment is that the suicide isn't happening more quickly because I truly view today's GOP as a form of toxic cancer on the nation.  It is a political party that panders to the worse bigots, racists and extremists who in order to enhance their own power and/or financial well being.  Getting back to my premise that the GOP is committing a form of suicide, a piece in Politico looks at the civil war that is fast approaching in the GOP regardless whether or not Romney/Ryan win tomorrow.  Even the Palmetto Queen, Senator Lindsey Graham seems to share my analysis.  Here are some excerpts:

The scene in this Cincinnati suburb also set the stage for the party’s coming inner struggle to define itself no matter this cycle’s outcome.  A cadre of young and diverse Republican officials took the stage to speak before Romney. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte each made the case for their nominee and offered a reminder of the strength of the GOP’s bench.  But they did so before a crowd that was nearly all-white and their appearances were sandwiched in between slashing speeches from a familiar roster of older white males . . .

Regardless of whether Romney wins or loses, Republicans must move to confront its demographic crisis. The GOP coalition is undergirded by a shrinking population of older white conservative men from the countryside, while the Democrats rely on an ascendant bloc of minorities, moderate women and culturally tolerant young voters in cities and suburbs. This is why, in every election, since 1992, Democrats have either won the White House or fallen a single state short of the presidency.

“If we lose this election there is only one explanation — demographics,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).  , , , But Republicans are divided on the way forward. Its base is growing more conservative, nominating and at times electing purists while the country is becoming more center than center-right.

This split will loom over the GOP for the next few years whether Romney is in the White House or on the beaches of La Jolla. If he becomes the 45th president in January, Romney will have to tread carefully as he grapples with a conservative-dominated Republican House, a Senate GOP increasingly divided between old bulls and younger true believers and thousands of party activists who opposed him in two presidential primaries.   .  .  .  .  A Romney loss would mean the same internal issues would come to the fore more quickly and explosively but with no clear leader at the top of the party.

“If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn’t conservative enough I’m going to go nuts,” said Graham. “We’re not losing 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.”  Of the party’s reliance on a shrinking pool of white men, one former top George W. Bush official said: “We’re in a demographic boa constrictor and it gets tighter every single election.”

There is much more to the piece, but you get the drift.  At some point the GOP needs to jettison the Christofascists and the Tea Party extremists or else the party will cease to exist as a national party.  And, if that happens, it will have been all self-inflicted.

Obama "Fear" Driving Social Conservatives

The immediately prior post looked at the fear of modernity and sense of being threatened by the modern world which ultimately underlies much of the unrest in the Arab world.  The post also drew parallels between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists.  A piece in Politico looks at the fear that is driving social conservatives to Mitt Romney.  Why? Because in their minds Obama represents a changing world and changing knowledge that ranges from the human genome project that proves that Adam and Eve never existed (hence no Fall and no need for a Messiah) to understanding that homosexuality is a natural and normal condition.  All of this scares the living Hell out of these knuckle dragging Neanderthals who are terrified to think for themselves and accept that their pastors and priest have been selling them a false bill of goods.  In contrast, Romney promises to try to roll back time and allow them to continue to exist in a fantasy world even at the expense of their own economic well being.  Oh, and let's not forget the sad reality that the GOP has become the party of white supremacists who cannot tolerate that Obama is not white.  Here are article highlights:

 

Fear of President Barack Obama — not enthusiasm for Mitt Romney — is driving religious conservatives to pull the lever for the GOP nominee this November.

Romney — a former Massachusetts governor who came late to the anti-abortion rights cause — was never a favorite of evangelical voters during the Republican primaries, and their love for him hasn’t grown much now that he has officially become their party’s standard bearer, as judged by interviews with two dozen conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington this weekend.

But religious conservatives will support Romney because Obama — who endorsed same-sex marriage earlier this year — is anathema to them.

“It’s not excitement, it is fear — fear of the other guy,” said Dolores Taylor, 69, of West Harrison, N.Y., explaining why she will vote for Romney over Obama in November. “Excited doesn’t seem to be the right word — I’d say energized, because I’m so angry about what’s going on.”

Jackie Lewis, a woman from Ashburn, Va., echoed those sentiments, calling the motivating factor behind her decision to back Romney “total fear”of the incumbent.  “We can’t take four more years of this,” she said.

Conservatives attending the conference said they worried about a range of things during a possible Obama II, from implementation of the president’s health care law, and a move to what they saw as more “socialist” policies to the end of the very values — including the protection of life and traditional marriage — that they came to the summit to support.

Asked who they supported during the GOP primaries, the majority of those interviewed named someone other than Romney. Many were early supporters of Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann, both of whom spoke at the conference, though they all say they’re backing Romney now that he’s the nominee.

In a CNN poll released last week, 48 percent of Romney supporters said their vote was for Romney, while 47 percent said they were voting for him as a vote against Obama.

In many ways, these people are little different than the Muslims rioting against the USA around the Arab world.  The real enemy for these people is change and modernity and Romney has been only too happy to pander to their Neanderthal mindset.  These dim wits fail to grasp that the world WILL change and that they are fighting losing rear guard battle.

How the GOP Lost Its Way

As a former GOP activist - I was on a local city committee for 8 years - I remember a time when one did not need to be either a religious fanatic, a thinly veiled white supremacist, or driven by greed and obsessed with lower taxes to be a Republican.  Sadly, those days are long gone and I and many others - including a number of LGBT bloggers I know - fled the GOP where after the Christofascist take over, we are deemed not even fully human and certainly not entitled to any civil rights.  As I've noted before, my entire extended family more or less has fled the insane asylum that has become today's GOP.   I blame most of the change in the GOP on the emergence Christian Right as the real puppet masters of the party.  In Virginia, the Republican Party of Virginia has become a de facto branch of The Family Foundation, a virulently anti-modernity affiliate of Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.  What I find especially chilling about the Christianist take over is that it has coincided with a level of selfishness and greed and intolerance that never used to be the principal hallmarks of the GOP.  A lengthy column in the Washington Post looks at this slide away form caring about the common good and the embracing of far right extremism.  Here are some excerpts: 

To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts — because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.

Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important of all, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator” — with little concern for the rest.

Today’s conservatism is about low taxes, fewer regulations, less government — and little else. Anyone who dares to define it differently faces political extinction. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana was considered a solid conservative, until conservatives decided that anyone who seeks bipartisan consensus on anything is a sellout. Even Orrin Hatch of Utah, one of the longest-serving Republican senators, is facing a primary challenge. His flaw? He occasionally collaborated with the late Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy on providing health insurance coverage for children and encouraging young Americans to join national service programs.

Conservatism today places individualism on a pedestal, but it originally arose in revolt against that idea.

The great American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. certainly understood this. In his book “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country,” he quotes approvingly John Stuart Mill’s insistence that “everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.” With liberty comes responsibility to the community.

Before the Civil War, conservatives such as Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay believed in an active federal government that served the common good. This included a commitment to internal improvements (what we now, less elegantly, call infrastructure), public schooling, and the encouragement of manufacturing and science. Clay, an unapologetic supporter of national economic planning, called his program “the American System,” explicitly distinguishing his idea from the British laissez-faire system. (The Club for Growth would not have been pleased.)

Civil War pensions — the first great social insurance program and a central Republican cause — were supporting about 28 percent of men 65 and over by 1910. In 1894, the program’s most expensive year, the pensions accounted for 37 percent of federal spending. Sounds like a massive entitlement program, doesn’t it?

And the first American version of socialized medicine was signed into law in 1798 by that great conservative president, John Adams. The Marine Hospital Servicefunded hospitals across the country to treat sailors who were sick or got injured on the job. There is no record of a mass campaign to repeal AdamsCare.

Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system and established the federal student loan program in the 1950s.   More recently, Ronald Reagan never tried to dismantle the New Deal and acknowledged, sometimes with wry humor, the need for tax increases. He was acutely alive to the communal side of conservatism.

In other words, until recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.

Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.

Bush’s unpopularity at the end of his term encouraged conservatives, including the fledgling tea party movement, to distance themselves from his legacy. They declared that Bush’s shortcomings stemmed from his embrace of “big government” and “big spending” — even if much of the spending was in Iraq and Afghanistan. They recoiled from his “compassionate conservatism,” deciding, as right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin put it, that “ ‘compassionate conservatism’ and fiscal conservatism were never compatible.”

 Obama, in the meantime, pitched communal themes from the moment he took office .  .  .   .   The more he emphasized a better balance between the individual and the community, the less interested conservatives became in anything that smacked of such equilibrium.

It’s why they cannot accept (as Romney and the Heritage Foundation once did) energetic efforts by the government to expand access to health insurance. It’s why, even after a catastrophic financial crisis, they continue to resist new rules aimed not at overturning capitalism but at making it more stable.

[W]hen we balance our individualism with a sense of communal obligation that we are most ourselves as Americans. The 20th century was built on this balance, and we will once again prove the prophets of U.S. decline wrong if we can refresh and build upon that tradition. But doing so will require conservatives to abandon untempered individualism, which betrays what conservatism has been and should be.

Why the Right and GOP Can’t Win the Gay Marriage Fight

Just as the changing demographics of the nation spell long term problems for the Republican Party in its current far right/Christianist dominated incarnation, these changes in the nation's population spell long term defeat for the far right and the GOP in the same sex marriage war.  The Christianists have won a number of battles - and may even win on May 8th in North Carolina - but the results of the war against gays in the longer view will be defeat for the far right and those who practice politics of division and hate.  Many on the far right refuse to see that they are on the losing side of history and will likely be viewed no better than rabid segregationists by future generations.  Some, however, seem to be beginning to face reality.  An article in The American Conservative looks at the chronology of LGBT acceptance by society and makes the case as to why the Christianists and their GOP puppets cannot win in the longer term war.  here ares some highlights:

Rod Dreher has made the case that advocates of same-sex marriage are the aggressors on this front of the culture war. But they have presented their argument as a defensive one—a matter of equal rights being unfairly violated—and this has been a masterstroke of propaganda, winning much sympathy for their cause. The thing against which supporters of same-sex marriage have committed their aggression is tradition, specifically the West’s traditional understanding of marriage dating back a thousand years and more.

“Same-sex marriage has only been on the national radar since 1993, when a Hawaii court ruled that the state had to demonstrate just cause for why marriage ought to be denied to same-sex couples,” Dreher wrote on his blog at The American Conservative’s website. “That was fewer than 20 years ago, and in that time, support for same-sex marriage has increased at a pace that is nothing short of revolutionary. According to the trajectory of polling, at some point in the next few years, what had been the settled view of the nature of marriage for millennia will have been rejected by a majority of the American people.”

How has this happened? .   .   .   .   it is a consequence of a shift in the foundations of Western civilization that has been taking place over centuries—a shift from Christian to liberal foundations. So profound is this transformation that even the opponents of same-sex marriage are not exactly fighting to recover the old way of life.

Homosexual activity may be as old as civilization, but the idea of a category of person whose sexual identity is primarily defined by same-sex attraction, yet who is otherwise quite like the mainstream of society, is of recent vintage. That people in this group are not negligible in numbers—amounting to perhaps 5 percent of the general population—has also been a slowly dawning realization.

Once society was widely conscious of this population, and had an inkling of its extent, there was no question of reverting to the status quo ante. The knowledge itself had changed the political question. Not only were homosexuals not going back into the closet, but the rest of society could not forget that they exist. And there had been little in the way of a “traditional” approach to something that was beyond the margin of public consciousness. So now the question arose of how to think about—and act toward—this alarming new population. Should it be included in or excluded from the body politic, and on what terms?

[T]wo things steadily eroded the cultural and legal taboos against homosexuality. The first was that it had come to be seen as an innate desire about which individuals have little choice. The second was that as these strange new beings emerged from their hiding places they didn’t look so frightening—indeed, they looked a lot like everybody else. The great public-relations victory won by the gay-rights movement that hastened the advent of gay marriage was the shift in the 1990s away from a radical, anti-bourgeois image toward one more in keeping with societal norms, from the militancy of ACT-UP to the banality of “Will and Grace.” The gay-marriage effort has been a cause as well as an effect in this change: while same-sex marriage is disturbing to many Americans, it is reassuring to others, suggesting as it does loyalty to a middle-class ideal.

[I]f homosexuals were not going to be under legal or therapeutic penalty, what would become of them? This is the question to which few conservatives can supply a satisfactory answer because the principles that conservatives affirm point toward policies that conflict with their wishes.

The second consistent position that conservatives can embrace, however reluctantly, would be that of providing full legal equality. This could be seen as a capitulation to liberalism; it could also be seen as an acknowledgement of reality. The trouble with this position is that it doesn’t stop where most conservatives would like it to stop: the logic of legal equality certainly demands that homosexuals be allowed to serve in government, including in the military, and prima facie it demands that they be afforded equal access to the institution of marriage. Conservatives can try to draw the line before that point, but doing so requires making an exception to the principle of legal equality, and exceptions are, by their very nature, more difficult to establish than arguments that go along with general rules.

In an age when the Church no longer supplies the institutional framework for family life, the definition of marriage has become radically uncertain. Into this fluid environment—in which individualism or atomism is once again rising to the fore, as in the Roman Empire—the new fact of homosexuality was gradually introduced. The result, same-sex marriage, has shocked conservatives. But this innovation has moved so far so quickly only because it is not at all out of step with the institutions and ideas of our time.

Santorum and the Future of the GOP

Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum managed to pull off wins in yesterday's "Super Tuesday" primary contest in the states of yesterday Tennessee, North Dakota, and Oklahoma came close to tying Mitt Romney in Ohio. Except for Ohio, none are states that Barack Obama has any likelihood of winning come November. The results say as much about Romney's lack of appeal to far right Christian conservatives as they do about what has become of the Republican Party given the fact that in most circles Santorum is viewed as an extremist who wants to police the nation's bedrooms. While most voters see the economy as the number one issue in the campaign, large sections of the GOP seem to prefer to wage a culture war and elect someone to be the bedroom police man. A column in the New York Times looks at the Santorum base in the GOP and speculates where things may evolve in the future. Here are highlights:

Rick Santorum’s victories in Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota on Super Tuesday, and his very strong showing in Ohio, will give hope to journalists who love the horse race, without changing the underlying dynamics of the Republican contest. Bloodied, balked and widely mistrusted, Mitt Romney is still going to slog his way to the nomination.

The easy explanation for Santorum’s unlikely rise is that he lucked into it. Almost all of the Republican candidates got their surge in at some point, their week or two as a pseudo-frontrunner, and unlike Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry before him, Santorum’s moment in the sun just happened to coincide with the actual voting.

Santorum’s coalition is roughly the same one that Mike Huckabee tried to assemble in 2008. With a demographic mix of evangelicals and blue-collar Republicans, and a message that’s conservative on social issues but more populist than the party’s Wall Street wing on economics, it’s proven capable of delivering states from Minnesota to Mississippi, the Rockies to the Rust Belt.

Of course, like Huckabee, he’s on his way to falling short. But given his weaknesses, structural and personal — including the absence of Huckabee’s trademark wit — it’s remarkable how far he’s come, and how durable this coalition has proven itself from one cycle to another.

[T]he main domestic argument that he’s tried to make – about the link between family breakdown and economic disarray — has more relevance to the challenges facing Americans in the early 21st century than the Reagan nostalgia that too often passes for policy thinking from the party’s tax cutting and foreign policy hawks. Ours is increasingly a country where sky-high economic expectations coexist with middle class wage stagnation, and where the idealization of married life coexists with steadily rising out-of-wedlock births. In this atmosphere, the fusion of a (moderate) social conservatism and a right-leaning economic populism could end up having a broader appeal than many alternative right-of-center visions.

Whether that actually happens depends on whether future Republican presidential hopefuls decide to learn from, adapt and improve upon the Huckabee-Santorum template. If they do, it’s possible that what Santorum has accomplished in the last few months will be remembered, not as the last glimpse of the Republican past, but as a plausible sketch of the Republican future.

The one flaw in the author's view is believing that moderate social conservatism can grow in a party that is increasingly controlled by extremists who even challenge the very concept of the separation of church and state and the idea that freedom of religion extends to others than themselves. I for one believe the social conservatives - who are also anti-immigrant, anti-minorities and, of course, anti-gay - will yet be the death of the Republican Party.

Where are the GOP Moderates?

I often disagree with much of what columnist Nicholas Kristof has to say. But in a column in the New York Times, he provides a good history of the Republican Party and makes the case that it is today's far right extremists in the GOP who are the aberration and "Republicans in Name Only" a/k/a RINO's. The far right and hate-filled "family values" crowd have perverted the GOP into something ugly and Kristof wonders if there's any chance that the party will be able to return to its moderate past. The GOP of today is certainly NOT the party that I and most of my family once belonged to. Today, its hallmarks are the embrace of ignorance, a hatred of anyone who's not a white conservative Christian, and constant attacks on the religious freedom of all but the most extreme Christianists. Here are some column highlights:

The most embarrassing moments to watch this political season have occurred as Mitt Romney has pretended to be an angry, fire-breathing true conservative. The evidence suggests that in his soul he’s a moderate pragmatist . .

Newt Gingrich, Romney’s main rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is denouncing Romney with one of the ugliest slurs in the Republican lexicon: a Massachusetts moderate. Other moderate Republicans are savaged as RINOs — Republicans in name only — as if they emerged from an ugly mutant strain.

Yet, in fact, as a new history book underscores, it is the Gingriches and Santorums who are the mutants. For most of its history, the Republican Party was dominated by those closer to Romney than to social conservatives like Rick Santorum, and it is only in the last generation that the party has lurched to the hard right.

“Much of the current conservative movement is characterized by this sort of historical amnesia and symbolic parricide, which seeks to undo key aspects of the Republican legacy such as Reagan’s elimination of corporate tax loopholes, Nixon’s environmental and labor safety programs, and a variety of G.O.P. achievements in civil rights, civil liberties, and good government reforms,” Kabaservice writes. “In the long view of history, it is really today’s conservatives who are ‘Republicans in name only.’ ”

[T]he original Massachusetts moderates were legendary figures in Republican history, like Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge. Theodore Roosevelt embraced progressivism as “the highest and wisest form of conservatism.” Few did more to promote racial integration, civil rights and individual freedoms than a Republican, Earl Warren, in his years as chief justice.

Dwight Eisenhower cautioned against excess military spending as “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.” Richard Nixon proposed health care reform. Ronald Reagan endorsed the same tax rate for capital gains as for earned income. Each of these titans of Republican Party history would today risk mockery for these views.

What happened? That’s a long and gradual story beginning with Senator Joe McCarthy’s success in galvanizing working-class suspicions of government elites and continues with an angry backlash at changing mores and liberalized abortion laws. Conservative Southern whites moved into the Republican Party. Newer media voices like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck made extremism seem congenial — while making bipartisanship feel treacherous.

[S]ocial conservatives staged a grass-roots overthrow of the moderate Republican apparatus in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and focused on abortion and gay rights. “Moderates simply gave up participating after being ostracized,” Bladine remembers. “It became almost impossible to nominate a Republican for statewide office who had any chance of winning in a statewide vote.”

The question becomes one of when and how - if it's even possible at this point - the GOP can be wrenched back from the haters and ignorance worshipers of the so-called "social conservatives" and Tea Party morons who are now the core of the GOP base. The recapture of the GOP needs to happen for the best interest of the country and a positive future. The current GOP only seeks to drag the nation backward in time.

Tea Party Nation Condemns Navy Kiss As "Sexual Aberration"

Last week many across the blogosphere hailed the "first kiss" Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta and her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, when the USS Oak Hill returned to the Little Creek Navy Base after deployment. I was one of the bloggers cheering. Others, however, were outraged and the spittle has been flying. Among the groups condemning the Navy for sanctioning "sexual aberration" was Tea Party Nation. The action helps to underscore the fact that a huge majority of the so-called Tea Party movement are knuckle dragging Christianists who believe only they themselves merit religious freedom. The rest of us are supposed to shut up and accept their fear and hate based religious beliefs. Right Wing Watch reported on the Tea Party Nation statement. Here are some highlights:

In a message sent to Tea Party Nation members, the group’s resident bigot Alan Caruba wrote that the kiss proves the military is being “used by gay and lesbian advocacy groups as a petri dish to force social change” to help people who have an orientation that is a “sexual aberration”:


For generations of Americans, the most famous kiss between a Navy sailor and a nurse occurred during the celebration of V-J Day in New York’s Times Square on August 14, 1945.

The photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt was published in Life magazine a week later. It said everything you needed to know about the joy with which the nation responded to the end of World War Two and everything about the shared values of the nation.

So, when a photo of a homecoming kiss between Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta kissing her “partner”, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell went public on December 22, it set gay and lesbian hearts atwitter. What the predominantly heterosexual population thought of it was unreported.

But why? The answer is the way the U.S. military has been used by gay and lesbian advocacy groups as a petri dish to force social change. The other location for influencing such change is in our nation’s schools and manifests itself in charges of massive bullying and questionable sex education curriculums, many of which evoke outrage among today’s parents.

Gays and lesbians play on the inherent sense of fairness and tolerance that is a hallmark of American society. The result is that homosexuality is now widely represented in popular culture to the point of being accepted as “normal.” It is not “normal.” It is a sexual aberration involving a very small portion of the overall population, perhaps no more than four percent. Always was, always will be.

The photo of two Navy lesbians kissing represents the “progress” that a vocal minority has made, given the support of liberal politicians on both sides of the aisle working against the tide of resistance of majority Americans who are fighting the social implications of “gay rights”, the demands for “gay marriage”, and the influence over young minds passing through government school systems.,

The best description of today's far right and conservative "Christians" is "all hate all the time." Every policy ultimately traces back to selfishness and contempt for someone else in society. And if one challenges this sick social/religious mindset, you'd best expect to be denigrated and slandered.

The Continued Price of Bigotry

I have often argued - and studies have confirmed - that states and regions that embrace bigotry and intolerance suffer economically and find themselves on the bottom of the heap in the quest to attract businesses and investment. Alabama is finding out just how true this is in the wake of its new anti-foreigner immigration law which, as noted last week, lead to the arrest of a Mercedes-Benz executive. That debacle may be a belated wake up call to folks in Alabama who truly need to get their heads out of their asses and come into the 21st century. Yes, the Bible thumping Christianists and white supremacists (increasingly these two toxic elements are one and the same) who hate blacks, gays, immigrants of all stripes and Hispanics in particular will shriek and howl, but it's time that their pernicious influence be kicked to the curb if the state seeks to prosper. An editorial in the New York Times looks at the price Alabama has inflicted on itself. Here are highlights:

It’s early yet for a full accounting of the economic damage Alabama has done to itself with its radical new immigration law. Farmers can tally the cost of crops left to rot as workers flee. Governments can calculate the loss of revenues when taxpayers flee. It’s harder to measure the price of a ruined business reputation or the value of investments lost or productivity lost as Alabamians stand in line for hours to prove their citizenship in any transaction with the government.

A growing number of Alabamians say the price will be too high, and there is compelling evidence that they are right. Alabama is already at the low end of states in employment and economic vitality. It has long struggled to lure good jobs and shed a history of racial intolerance.

That was turning around and many foreign manufacturers, including Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Honda, have set up there. Its business-friendly reputation took a serious blow with the arrest in Tuscaloosa of a visiting Mercedes manager who was caught driving without his license and taken to jail as a potential illegal immigrant.

Sheldon Day, the mayor of Thomasville, has aggressively recruited foreign companies to his town, including a Chinese company — Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group. . . . Mayor Day is now worried about that project and future prospects. He was quoted by The Press-Register in Mobile as saying business inquiries had dried up since the law was passed. “I know the immigration issue is being used against us.”

For all of the talk about clearing the way for unemployed Americans, there is no evidence that Alabamians in any significant numbers are rushing to fill the gap left by missing farm laborers and other low-wage immigrant workers.

The law’s damage is particularly heartbreaking in poor towns across the state, where small businesses are the economic lifeblood. We’ve spoken with Latino shopkeepers and restaurant owners in places like Albertville who say business is catastrophically down, with customers in hiding or flight. The situation isn’t much better in Huntsville and Birmingham.

There should be no doubt about the moral repugnance of Alabama’s law, which seeks to deny hardworking families the means to live. But even some of the law’s most enthusiastic supporters are beginning to acknowledge the law’s high economic cost. There is growing talk of revising or repealing the legislation. The sooner Alabama does so — and other states learn — the better.

Will Virginia learn from Alabama's debacle? Probably not given the near mentally ill members of the GOP here in Virginia that will likely sign on to the lunacy of Ken Kookinelli Cuccinelli and Christofascist Bob Marshall. Only a severe negative economic impact might wake folks up. Meanwhile, backwater areas of the state will become even less attractive to would be investors and new businesses.

Vatican Calls for Global Economic Authority and Condemns " Idolatry of the Market"

I will be the first to admit that I rarely agree with anything emanating from the bitter old queens in dresses at the Vatican who all too often turn Christ's Gospel message upside down in their quest for power, control, and most importantly money. But I guess once in a while even such people get something right. Hence the Vatican's condemnation of the cult of free market controls which often morphs into a struggle of the survival of the fittest (or most greedy) with the vast majority suffering in poverty and varying levels of neglect as the amoral and greedy waltz away with most of the profits and resources. The interesting thing to watch will be to see how this new Vatican announcement plays with the Christian Right adherents of the prosperity Gospel and the Tea Party crowd who would throw most citizens to the wolves as they hoard money and possessions for themselves. Candidly, nothing would please me more than to see a rift develop between conservative Catholics and the greedy hate merchants of the Christian Right and GOP. Reuters looks at this in some ways surprising development. Here are some highlights:

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.

“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid,” it said.

It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

Asked at a news conference if the document could become a manifesto for the movement of the “indignant ones”, who have criticised global economic policies, Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department, said: “The people on Wall Street need to sit down and go through a process of discernment and see whether their role managing the finances of the world is actually serving the interests of humanity and the common good. “We are calling for all these bodies and organisations to sit down and do a little bit of re-thinking.”

Will Social Conservatives Make Iowa Irrelevant?

From my waning days in the GOP as the extremists of the Christian Right slowly increased their vice grip on the party, I know how skewed the nomination process has become. In Virginia, organizations like The Family Foundation utilize a network of far right churches to mobilize voters for primary contests. These zombie like voters - who would gladly take the country back in time as they push for a defacto theocracy - then go to the polls and shift the outcome in favor of extremist candidates. The same cancer infects the primary process on other states with Iowa being one of them. The result is that now, some in the GOP think Iowa should be largely ignored since its primary structure is so dominated by the Christian Taliban that a nominee popular with that segment of the electorate may well prove unelectable elsewhere. As I've noted before, the GOP in its quest for short term expediency has created a Frankenstein monster. The Washington Post looks at the move by some to relegate Iowa to irrelevance because the extremists in that state hold too much sway. Here are some highlights:
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Iowa — Politically speaking, this state is in something of an existential crisis. For the past nine presidential elections, Iowa has reveled in the attention it gets with its position at the front of the presidential nominating contest. This time around, the question is not just who will win the Iowa caucuses but also whether it will matter.
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When the rest of the country is focusing on the economy, will Republicans in other states take their lead from the outcome of an eccentric process that has been dominated by social conservatives?
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Some of the leading presidential contenders, who have invested little in the state so far, appear to be hoping that the answer is not all that much — increasing the anxiety that Iowa Republicans feel about their place in the political firmament.
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The uncomfortable fact for Iowa Republicans is that their cherished caucuses have rarely been much of a launching pad. Since the party held its first one to pick a president in 1976, there have been only two instances in which a winner who was not an incumbent has gone on to take the GOP nomination. And only one of those, George W. Bush in 2000, won the White House.
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In a recent column for the New Hampshire Union Leader that was reprinted in the Des Moines Register, former New Hampshire GOP chairman Fergus Cullen wrote that important issues don’t get debated in Iowa, because “three quarters of the audience wears tinfoil hats.”
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“Iowa Republicans didn’t set out to marginalize themselves, but it’s happened — to New Hampshire’s benefit,” Cullen added. “With several major candidates likely to bypass Iowa, and the odds rising that Iowa’s skewed caucus electorate could support candidates with limited general election appeal, the likelihood of New Hampshire being called upon to make a correction” increases.
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Some Romney supporters in Iowa say they would understand if he turns elsewhere. . . . I think he’s got a good chance of beating Obama,” he added, “but the problem here is to win in Iowa you’ve got to go too far to the right, and it will hurt him in the national election.” The overall direction of Republican politics in Iowa has swung rightward on social issues, even since the last presidential election.
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Obviously, it would be great fun to see Iowa's role in the nomination process marginalized because of the growing toxicity of the Christian Right's influence. It could help the saner members of the GOP to make a more concerted effort to reclaim the party from the crazies and extremists.

Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?

I looked at recent debate held in Canada that looked at this issue under a slightly different title where the result was that Christopher Hitchings won the argument that religion was NOT a force for good. In many ways it's not a new debate even though today's Christianists who market hate and divisiveness sometimes may make it seem so. Yes, some good things are done in the name of religion and some denominations in their present incarnations seem to have put aside some aspects of their more violent and unsavory pasts. But in the overall scheme of things, in my view, the scales tip against religion and some of religions more disingenuous current leaders - e.g., Pope Benedict XVI, who I will get to later in this post. Blogger friend Bob Felton of Civil Commotion always takes an intellect/logic approach to religion and in the process spotlights its atrocities and hypocrisy. In a recent post he quoted Bertrand Russell's analysis of the answer to the title of this post written 80 years ago. Some things do not change. Here are some brief highlights:
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My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
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To take the case that is of most interest to members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects.
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It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one may say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole, for human misery that religion is a force for evil, since it permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.
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There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.
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The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude toward sex — an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the civilized world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. . . . . The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. . . . Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life.
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The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment.
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In my view, the Roman Catholic Church and Christian fundamentalists (I include Mormons in this later category for convenience) continue all of the evils that Russell outlines. During his recent trip to Spain, Benedict XVI, the Nazi Pope, whined about the progressive reforms in that country which include - of the horror - gay marriage and more liberalized abortion policies. In the process, Benedict said "in Spain, a strong aggressive lay mentality, an anti-clericalism and secularization has been born as we experienced in the 1930s." What God's Rottweiler omitted, of course, was any description of why much of the Spanish populace was anti-clerical: the Church was an active enforcer of an unjust and brutal ruling class. People's World has a good description of what the 1930's Spanish Church did - and it wasn't anything in keeping with Christ's Gospel message - in piece entitled "Spring Time for Franco and Pope Benedict." Here are highlights:
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He [Benedict] went on to say that Spain was a major center for a return to faith because Spain had played such a central role in "reviving" Christianity in past centuries. He didn't say what he meant specifically. Was it the Spanish Inquisition, Spanish colonialism's destruction of tens of millions of native peoples in the Western Hemisphere, the maintenance of a feudal social order that made Spain by the 19th century a weak backward nation, an example of what no one wanted to be?
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In the 1920s and '30s Spain was at its core a feudal society without effective civil rights and liberties, a society in which the higher orders of the Catholic Church controlled vast amounts of land and other resources, making the Church a key component rather than a mere servant of the Spanish ruling class.
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After five years of political struggle, in which the church supported reactionary forces and parties in Spain, a people's front coalition of liberals, socialists and communists defeated conservative and reactionary forces in a national election.
In its 1931 constitution the Spanish Republic established religious freedom, which had never existed in Spain, as well as the separation of church and state and an end to the Catholic Church's control of education, and most importantly, placed restrictions upon church property. It also sought to institute land reforms which would have returned poor church-controlled lands to the poor.
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The most reactionary sectors of Spanish capital then supported General Francisco Franco's coup against the government. When the coup faltered in the face of worker and peasant resistance, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy entered the conflict to provide troops, weapons, planes and funds to Franco's forces.
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The global Catholic Church supported Franco's armies . . . often countering the accounts of the atrocities committed by Franco's forces against workers and peasants with stories of attacks on monasteries and church-controlled feudal estates and the killing of clergy by the poor and other supporters of the Republic.
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Following Franco's victory in 1939, a single party fascist state was established, property was returned to the upper classes and the church, and civil liberties and religious freedom were abolished (the latter for all non- Catholics, including Protestant Christians). Hundreds of thousands of anti-fascist supporters of the Republic were murdered in the years which immediately followed Franco's victory, when Pope Benedict as a German teenager was a member of the Hitler Youth and then a draftee in the German Army.
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The Pope's statements in Spain should be seen as an insult not only to the Spanish people but to secular and religious people everywhere who seek knowledge which will help them fight social injustice rather than use ideology to preserve and protect wealth and power.