"The Religious Right’s Slow-Motion Suicide"

[applegrove]

The Religious Right’s Slow-Motion Suicide

By Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/29/social-conservatives-face-the-precipice.html

"SNIP.........................



If you think of the famous three legs of the Republican stool (the money conservatives, the foreign-policy conservatives, and the cultural conservatives) and think about which of those legs have had the biggest policy impact during periods of Republican governance in recent history, you have to conclude that the money and foreign-policy conservatives have made out like bandits (in some cases all too literally). The money crowd got all the deregulation it could realistically hope for. The neocons got two wars. The social conservatives haven’t done nearly as well. They’ve gotten some judicial appointments, but Roe v. Wade is still law, and that turncoat Kennedy is probably going to let the gays marry.

Now we’re getting to why on one level I feel a pang of sympathy for them. The disasters the Republican Party has brought us in the last decade—the economic meltdown and the wars—were the fault of the other two legs of the stool. Yet we know that these two groups are going to have permanent power in GOP. The money people own the party, and the neocons still dominate in Washington and—Rand Paul notwithstanding—will always have a considerable degree of influence in the party. The social conservatives are the only faction within the triad that hasn’t heaped wreckage upon the nation (not for lack of trying), and yet they have far less power in the upper echelons of party than the other two groups. And when they complain, as they occasionally do, that they’ve largely been paid back for all their work in the vineyards with lip service and symbolic little executive order-type things, they have a point. It’s a little like labor in the Democratic Party.

And now, 2016 is going to be a pivotal election for them. Many of them want Ted Cruz, who won the Values Voter straw poll. But of course this is ridiculous. Cruz isn’t going to be the nominee. In fact Cruz’s win, and the fact that Jeb Bush and Chris Christie weren’t even invited to the meeting, is a sign of their retreat from serious politics toward something entirely gestural. Bush, from these people’s perspective, is too squishy on immigration, and Christie last October decided to stop fighting the tide of history on same-sex marriage when a decision by the state’s Supreme Court led Christie to withdraw an appeal his administration had lodged against a pro-same-sex marriage lawsuit.

That’s a childish way to do politics. If somehow they were to get their way with Cruz, then Hillary Clinton will easily be elected president, and she’ll almost certainly have the time and opportunity to flip the Supreme Court back to a liberal majority, and they’ll be finished for the good, the cultural right, and they will have contributed mightily to their own well-deserved demise.



...........................SNIP"

[Peacetrain]

1. I am so so glad I came back on line and read your op

"That’s a childish way to do politics. If somehow they were to get their way with Cruz, then Hillary Clinton will easily be elected president, and she’ll almost certainly have the time and opportunity to flip the Supreme Court back to a liberal majority, and they’ll be finished for the good, the cultural right, and they will have contributed mightily to their own well-deserved demise."

It was just the tonic I needed

[PearliePoo2]

2. excellent article!

I liked this.

[Thinkingabout]

3. If Cruz won the straw vote in their values meeting, it proves I will never be a member.

They set up a meeting with their friends and peddle their crap. If this group has tax exempt then we need to change the rules.

[Xipe Totec]

4. The three legs are...

A dick, a wooden post, and an AK-47.

[Warpy]

5. I'm not the only one who wishes they'd speed it up a bit

by trying to ride roughshod over the money boys. The neocons think they can manipulate anyone who gets into office and aren't strictly GOP. Sadly, they've been right for too many years.

Their demise is coming now because they have alienated so many of their young, believers who won't self identify as even generic Christian because their elders have given it such a bad name.

Millennials have realized that mixing religion and politics produces a toxic brew that destroys both.