a gentle kind of imbecility, or perhaps a very dim and slow sort of awareness

[rone]

This sadness came across my Twitter feed:

Hey #GOP, we lost a generation of voters due to the issue of gay marriage. Let's get some of them back by backing prison and drug reform

— Phu Mai (@PhuLMai) March 29, 2013

The blindered naïveté is breathtaking; to consider that an entire generation of voters was lost because of the GOP's steadfast aversion to same-sex marriage both manages to overstate the amount of voters lost, overestimates the importance of the issue in the GOP's platform, while also laboring in the delusion that the GOP would back prison reform (it might have a chance if painted as an anti-union thing, but against the specter of being considered soft on crime, forget it) and drug reform (and shit on the memory of the Reagans? are you mad?), and that even if it did, that these two things would somehow get some of the fictional lost voters back.

This poltroon calls himself a RINO, because the label one wears is more important than the principles one lives by, at least to him.  This is how he suddenly, in 2013, realized that opposition to gay marriage is an issue that's breaking the party apart, instead of, you know, being an intrusion by federal and state governments into the civil rights of citizens.  What are rights compared to the power that one's party wields, after all?

Comments

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Why is it that people are so averse to actually sitting back and analyzing a situation to find the real problems?
Oh right, entrenched power and fear of losing it.


Nevermind.

[eagle]

The Christian Republicans have sat back and analyzed the situation and found the real problem, which is why they're losing their shit about the decline of morality in the country and thrashing about for some way to shame or legislate their morality back in. They've recognized that the younger generations have wholeheartedly rejected their fucked-up morality and their beliefs about gay marriage are going to decisively lose in the court of public opinion. And there isn't anything they can do about it.

Sadly, they can console themselves by taking a long swim in their giant vaults full of cash, tended to by impoverished college graduates who are strip-searched after each shift.

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

What I love is, a large portion of the people who are DEATHLY afraid of the imposition of Sharia Law in the USA are these same people trying to legislate THEIR morality back in.

That's like the pot saying the kettle is a stupid asshole who should shut the fuck up.

[eagle]

It's sadly consistent if they don't believe in the separation of church and state as normally conceived and instead don't want the state to be able to tell the Christian church what to do, but believe that the Christian church should be the favored religion. (Not that this is a very well-thought-out position, since what would happen in practice is fights over the definition of Christian, but I think it's a lot more accurate than saying that the Christian right actually believes in the separation of church and state.)

Some of them, the dominionists, will come right out and say that they believe in Christian "sharia" law.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, there IS a decline in morality. There has been a huge upswing in the worship of money, of power for its own sake, of self-centered arrogance, of pitiless dehumanization of the poor.

In Biblical terms, we are somewhere to the wrong side of Sodom and Gomorrah, because, when examined without the stupid filter of sexual misinterpretation, the sin of Sodom was that they broke the laws of hospitality: they wanted to interrogate, possibly by torture, the guests of a man who was considered a citizen. They interrogated every foreigner because they were (apparently) deathly afraid of spies. Or maybe "terrorists".

Under the laws of hospitality, one does not interrogate one's guests. One offers them bread, water, salt, and safety for the time of their stay. One does not imprison one's guests. The only time this changes is when they themselves break the laws by attacking or stealing, and even then there were limits, although I never saw what they were supposed to be.

I can point to a few places where we've violated those laws.

And woe to those who oppress the poor, the widow and orphan.
The sacrifice that is pleasing to God is a humble and contrite heart.

Those two phrases are completely missing in the "Christian" vernacular of the dominionist heretics who have so thoroughly infiltrated the Republican party (and our military, and our Congress, and ... yeah.)

So yes. Fundamentalism. There is none that they worship but Moloch and Rand was his prophetess.

[eagle]

Amen. The problem really isn't with the Christian religion as presented by Jesus. Somehow large supposedly-Christian movements managed to drop all the anti-wealth bits and the focus on the poor out of the religion and replace it with carefully-chosen clobber verses. Sigh.

[prock.livejournal.com]

The rise of doctrinaire libertarianism is testament to the fact that the GOP's embrace of "social conservatism" has led to pronounced dissatisfaction with the GOP. Whether these people are lost for good, or just waiting to be found, remains to be seen, but I can't envision the GOP rising to prominence on the back of evangelicals again.