House on Red Corner

Sad state of affairs

It is with great shame that I have been watching the GOP, the party which has had social conservatism and family values as core principles, burn out like a supernova recently. Today, I came across this flow chart at Talking Points Memo to help keep score. It made me chuckle a bit and yet there is a glare of sad hypocrisy which is hard to miss, that is unless the social conservatives are too blinded by their own version of the truth to see that. It seems that The Washington Times has also been watching this death spiral provinding us with this lovely summary of the recent chain of events,

In politics, hypocrisy has become a heavy cross to bear for those who once sought to own the moral high ground.

Not that Democrats are models of purity what with the shining examples provided by Bill Clinton last decade and John Edwards in the recent couple of years, it does appear that while the Republicans are down and out, they are going the full monty and really getting deeply embroiled in the mud. Perhaps, there will be a realization that using moral absolutism is an extremely tactless strategy as it is an impossible ground to hold in this world. These people who claim that marriage between two loving people will destroy their own marriage just because those people are of the same sex are miserably wrong.

The Social Conservative stance has been consistently hypocritical. Whenever they have a problem, unwanted teenage pregnancy, gay sex affair in the bathroom of an airport, sex with underage boys/girls or prostitutes AND THEY GET CAUGHT; they all hold a big press conference and ask the press to respect their privacy and their own personal decision. That is to say, that when the Social Conservatives get caught, they want to have a choice to make but when they have not been caught they are advocating that other people’s rights; the very same rights they plead for when they are caught; be taken away from them or denied.

Gay marriage and abortion are, in a manner of speaking, choices that individuals have available to them in life. In this world, in this country, they may not hold the same legality(actually abortion is quite legal and it is the interfering with the operation of clinics, as some protesters are want to do, that is illegal) as the choices which are advocated by Social Conservatives however, that will not stop these choices from being made.

We are beyond the point where it makes sense to continue to drive this culture war wedge between members of the population. What we need is a refreshing shake down of the issues so that we can come together and unify around the ways that all American citizens can pursue happiness with life and liberty.