There's some really awful stuff begin said out there about the various social issues that the far-right and the bigots are trying to make big election issues.
Examples: The Texas Attorney General compared Planned Parenthood to a terrorist organization. Some anti-gay preacher said that gays were responsible for the Nazi's coming to power. Their warnings about the end of Western Civilization if we allow gay marriage doesn't carry a lot of weight if you look at Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticutt, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York. But then who looks at evidence and facts? All of those states have lower divorce rates than most of the Bible Belt Southern states.
One of those ignorant, rabble-rousing preachers made totally false claims about the medical results of gay sex. Another one advised parents to beat the gay out of their 5 year old sons if they start acting feminine.
The Catholic bishops are opposing Obama's entire health care plan because the compromise he made to accommodate their anti-contraception stance didn't go far enough. The bishops say one thing, but the majority of Catholic voters just ignore the Church about birth control -- and these same bishops just lost a big chunk of women voters when they reprimanded the organization of American nuns for putting more emphasis on helping the poor and caring for the sick than on opposing abortion and birth control.
What I'm trying to remember is that this a losing strategy for the Republican candidates in the races that are close. The ones where these "social values issues" are important to voters will be won by Republicans anyway, given the redistricting patterns.
For the majority of moderate voters and independents, these issues are not controversial any more. Pushing the conservative position will lose votes for Republicans in the key swing states.
So, yes, the lies must be countered. But we should try to just take some deep breaths and wait them out.
Ralph
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The Romney camp doesn't seem to get this. They seem terrified of the religious right -- and obviously are bending over backwards to avoid crossing them.
ReplyDeleteRomney's national security spokesman, Ric Grinnell, has just resigned after about a month in the job -- because they told him to shut up. And it was not just shut up about gay issues (Grinnell happens to be gay, which apparently was fine with Romney and the campaign but they're afraid the right-wing-nuts will make an issue of it, even though he had already agreed not to speak about gay issues.)
So they told Grinnell not to speak up at all in the conference he had arranged with reporters to discuss VP Biden's foreign policy speech. This is where Grinnell would have been a firebrand attack voice -- but the Romney campaign told him not to speak. Apparently they didn't want to remind the wing-nuts that he was part of the campaign lest they make a stink about his being gay.
So he resigned. Good for him. This is a bad sign for the campaign -- if they are that scared of the religious right that they couldn't even defend their valued national security spokesman for something totally irrelevant to his job -- except that it displeases the extremists in the party.
So -- bad for Romney; good for Obama.
PS: Thanks to Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic for the reporting on this matter.
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