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?