Samhain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Rush Limbaugh was quoted, “The liberals will find a way to blame this on conservatives or Republicans.” Yep. And I already did. But, let me narrow and focus that a bit. There was, once, a breed of Republican and a breed of conservatives who focused on economics while exhibiting a libertarian stance toward social issues. It is the devil’s bargain begun under Nixon with the creation of the southern strategy that yanked this venerable political position off its market based approach and onto what will soon become, I believe, their own third rail, social issue politics.
The Republican and conservative insistence on visiting women during their most intimate decisions surrounding birth and pregnancy and intercourse, their repeated and cynical claims about homosexuals, their insistence on the 2nd amendment as some holy writ demanding every America keep a gun in case of government tyranny–not its original purpose at all–peculiar for folks with an originalist view of the constitution, has twisted what was a reasonable party of opposition into a caricature of politics, politics turned a sour moralist sideshow.
Perhaps now, with the bankruptcy of three of their most dearly held ideas evident: no new taxes, no gun control, and no global warming these folks will retreat back into the caves where they hid before the latter part of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Let them mutter around their fires and create self-righteous havoc in their own families and congregations if they wish. But, for the rest of us, conservative and liberal and radical alike, lets not let these folks have any more of the public debate than their numbers deserve.
