The Culture Wars Are Turning Against Conservatives

White and light in the head: Running your pizza parlor the biblical way. Huh?

No offense to Christians everywhere -- other than to remind you that you're running your lives based on beliefs of desert nomads from the early Iron Age -- but your time may have come and gone. Sure, America will remain a largely Christian nation, but your advantage in the culture wars is slipping away.

That's what has caught social conservatives off-guard with the Indiana religious liberty law this past few days. The gay wars have been fought and the gays won. Maybe you don't know it yet, but it's over. It was over the day Joe Biden said gay marriage was okay. Not that he led the battle, but when he spoke in the midst of the 2012 campaign -- signaling Barack Obama to speak of his own "evolution' days later -- Joe was telling America what we hadn't completely figured out: Opinion had shifted on the gay, and he knew it.

Now we all know it, except Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and a pack of GOP hopefuls who didn't notice the ground was shifting beneath their feet. Their backing of the Neanderthals in the Indiana legislature just made a bunch of Democratic campaign ad consultants drool like it was 2016. As Dr. Seuss might say, Oh, The Ads You'll Run!

Anatomy of an oops from WaPo:

The agreement [with Pence and the Indiana law] among the likely GOP candidates illustrates the enduring power of social conservatives in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina, which will help determine who emerges as the party’s nominee next year.

But the position puts the Republican field out of step with a growing national consensus on gay rights, handing Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats a way to portray Republicans as intolerant and insensitive. Some Republicans also fear that Indiana is only the first in a series of brush fires that could engulf the party as it struggles to adapt to the nation’s rapidly changing demographics and social mores.

Ya think?!? Mitt Romney and his famous Etch-A-Sketch moment doesn't begin to describe the horror that will await the GOP nominee after he tries to scrape himself off the battlefield that was the Republican primaries, bloody and covered in commitments to the wacky-wacky base. Good luck.

Thing is, it's not just me or liberal pundits that are homing in on this. It's the GOP pollsters themselves:

And of course we’re not just talking about racial demographics either. Pressed about the ongoing controversy in Indiana, [Republican pollster Whit] Ayres pointed to Gallup data showing the breathtakingly fast shift in public opinion about gays and marriage equality. As he notes in his book, as recently as 2006, a majority of Americans said that they thought that gay relations were “morally wrong,” according to Gallup, with just 44 percent taking the view that they are “morally acceptable.” As of last May, the last time Gallup polled this, it was 58-38 in favor of gays being morally acceptable. (Umm, hurray? Only 58 percent?) And of course gay marriage has followed, gaining majority favorability in 2013.

“There are surprisingly few issues where the age of the respondent is one of the strongest predictors of political views,” Ayres writes in his book. “One of the exceptions is gay rights. Young Americans inhabit a different world than their elders when it comes to tolerance and acceptance of gay relationships. On gay marriage, the breakpoint is at age 50, with majorities younger than 50 supporting gay marriage and majorities over 50 opposed.” Ultimately, Ayres said at the breakfast, “We’re headed to he point where a political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay at the presidential level will never connect with people who are under 30 years old.”

So that's it. 50 and above you're out of touch. Pretty young to be out of it. But there you are.

A final thought: This may be only the beginning. Law and Order used to be safe territory for the GOP. Not necessarily anymore. And it's the same with defense. A strong defense and a mammoth defense budget used to be a safe harbor for GOPers. Again, not anymore. George W. may have screwed that one up. Americans are increasingly tired of war. Don't tell Lindsey Graham. It'll ruin his day, or maybe even his year.

 "Forget it Lindsey, the gay thing's already done. It's the forever war I'm worried
about. Americans are tired of it. They might not want us on Meet the Press anymore!"

Update. America is tired of war and our involvement in the Middle East. But that doesn't mean we're tired of spending scads of money on defense. Go figure.

Indiana's Problem: Acting on Religious Beliefs Can Be Discriminatory

Lesbians eating cake. What an affront to religion!

The problem with Indiana's new religious freedom law is that is is quite different from the other laws that it claims it's not different from. But it is quite different:

Every other Religious Freedom Restoration Act applies to disputes between a person or entity and a government. Indiana’s is the only law that explicitly applies to disputes between private citizens.* This means it could be used as a cudgel by corporations to justify discrimination against individuals that might otherwise be protected under law. Indiana trial lawyer Matt Anderson, discussing this difference, writes that the Indiana law is “more broadly written than its federal and state predecessors” and opens up “the path of least resistance among its species to have a court adjudicate it in a manner that could ultimately be used to discriminate…”

Unfortunately, most media get this wrong. And this difference between Indiana's law and others is huge. When government inhibits the free expression of religion, it's violating the First Amendment. Government rightly has a public interest in assuring that it doesn't do that.

By applying the First Amendment guarantees to acts between private citizens makes it legal to discriminate based on religious beliefs. That's an invitation to violate laws against discrimination. That's exactly what the Indiana law does, and it's the reason for the uproar.

Indiana is in a pickle, made all the more precarious because public opinion on GLBT rights have changed so much so fast. Republicans -- Indiana's new law and other religious freedom laws in other states are Republican actions -- are so far behind the eight ball here precisely because of how unexpectedly they've fallen behind the times.

The GOP contenders for the presidency in 2016 are also very much in trouble here. They're falling in step behind Governor Mike Pence on this matter, believing they must do so because they're the "party of religion." Fine, but that's an increasingly marginalized place to come from. It's worked for years, but now it's increasingly a liability.

Republicans are out of step here, and Indiana is taking the heat for it. Since the GOP is also "the party of business," that's a big problem.

Clown Car Rundown, Person the Fifth: Has Indiana's Mike Pence Just Blown It?

Indiana Governor Mike Pence: Everybody else got to be a dick, why can't I?

Sorry, Mike Pence, but your timing sucked. It no longer matters that you were considered a potential presidential candidate -- I mean, shit, so was Bobby Jindal, you know Bobby Jindal!? -- for ten minutes. That part of your life is over. It ended yesterday on This Week when George Stephanopoulos asked you if you would "fix" your law by inserting language against any kind of discrimination. Your answer was, essentially, "No, we here in Indiana reserve the right to discriminate." Let's look at the video:

Governor Pence, you want to reserve the right for your precious Hoosiers to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Essentially, you're admitting your law allows that, and you won't stop it. Does it stop there? Can you discriminate against Muslims? Jews? Blacks? Where does it stop?

What stops are your ambitions moving forward. Sorry, Mike. You're a relic of the past.

But wait. Leading candidates for the GOP presidential nomination are supporting you, mostly because, as the party of religion, Republicans are, frankly, afraid to be seen as supporting gay rights over "religious practices." Weird, Mike Pence, but you've trapped the GOP chances in 2016 in a cage of discrimination. How will this play out? We'll all stay tuned.

False Political Dualities: Rethuglicans Aren't the Opposite of Libtards.

How we see each other, in the comment threads, at least.

Actually, this is a serious post. I just included the ridiculous names each side calls the other in the title as click-bait. (Also because they're super funny in their own perverse way.)

I discovered an article in The Nation that summarizes beliefs I've had for a while now. Conservatives and liberals, as they've evolved over the years, don't represent polar opposites. In fact, there's a false duality at play:

The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn’t. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that “freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.” Liberalism, however, as Lionel Trilling observed, “is a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine.” And while John Kenneth Galbraith helpfully pointed out that only those programs and policies that honor “the emancipation of belief” are worthy of the term, liberalism, at bottom, is pragmatism. Conservatives desire low taxes and small government because this is how they define freedom. They like to pretend that liberals prefer the opposite in both cases, but the truth is that liberals are OK with whatever works.

Our political dysfunction has many sources, but one way to describe our problem is this: we have allowed conservatives to define the terms of debate at a time when conservatives have lost all sense of moral, intellectual and especially practical responsibility.

We see this all the time lately. Examples of conservative ideology:

• Higher taxes on the rich just punish the job creators.
• Consumer protection laws that prevent banks and businesses from fleecing consumers are just plain wrong because it's free enterprise, stupid, and, anyway, you know, job creators.
• There are makers and takers, with the makers presumably conservative and the takers liberal.
• Liberals hate a strong defense. They'd rather the Muslims take over than stand up to them the way conservatives do.
• Blacks and Latinos vote for liberals because liberals give them free stuff. Otherwise, presumably, blacks and Latinos would vote for conservatives.
• Low taxes are always good and government regulation is always bad. This does not apply to laws regulating abortions, birth control, marriage, net neutrality, police search and seizure, harsh levels of fine and fees imposed by courts on minorities for minor offenses, right-to-work laws that limit labor unions, or religious rights that trump local, state, and federal laws. If laws and regulations support social conservative values, they're fine. (See Terri Schiavo law.)
• Small government is always good except for defense, which has to be the biggest, by a factor of ten, than the rest of the world. Also, we should hate government except when disaster strikes, and then government had better be great, or we'll hate it.
• Stealing money from state pension funds is a good way to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, mostly because we can easily make up any shortfalls by severely cutting education funding.
• It's easier to be anti-science than it is to generate electricity because think of the coal miners, they're people, too. And think of the children. I'm mean the coal-miners' children, at least. Besides, global warming is fake. Everybody on Fox News knows this.
• Demanding that creationism be taught alongside evolution in our schools isn't regulating education. It's just common sense.
• Passing a law that bans AP History in your state because it occasionally portrays America in a bad light (you know, like when it's been bad) is good. It's probably patriotic!

Yes, it's possible to claim that liberals adhere to an ideology, but that claim is weakened by the reality that liberalism is liberal, which roughly translates to "being open to new ideas and knowledge," while conservative roughly translates to "adverse to change," as in the way we used to do things. Burn coal to make electricity? Been doing that a long time. Use solar panels to generate electricity? That hurts Kentucky and West Virginia! Solar is cleaner? Yeah, but coal is a job creator! (Solar power isn't?)

Yes, I agree with Eric Alterman here:

Today’s conservative intellectuals aren’t even bothering to offer “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Instead, they’re making calculated attempts to undermine our democracy, exploiting and manipulating a public that has decreasing resources for the kind of reliable information that would lead to a pragmatic “liberal” response. It’s time we woke up to that reality while we still have a country—and a planet—left to save.

Wake up, liberals, and stop treating conservatives like our political polar opposites. As George Lakoff says, repeatedly, it's the frame, and conservatives have control of it.

Non-compliant children and authoritarian father figure. Kids had it coming.

When Will the GOP Obamacare Talking Points Fail? Cathy McMorris Rodgers Can Tell You!

Ouch, Cathy. Didn't see that coming, did you?

Sometimes you reap what you sow. Cathy McMorris Rodgers just has, in spades. Hoping to show her anti-Obamacare cred on her Facebook page with her "Tell us your Obamacare horror stories" thread, she instead unleashed the hounds of trolling beyond measure. So many positive comments in favor of Obamacare resulted with so many likes upon likes of Obamacare approval comments that a sort of critical mass, a kind of I-can't-stop-reading-these-comments-they're-great!! mania ensued. Even I was still reading a half an hour later.

See for yourself. It's priceless. Look down her timeline for the Obamacare 5 Years Later post. Biggest LOL in history?

Welcome to Indiana and West Virginia: They Hate Us for Our Freedom!

Oops, no Barbie! Don't let them eat cake!

In Indiana, they don't want to discriminate unless it's for religious reasons. USA! USA! Indiana, fuck yeah! (Oh course, they deny it's discrimination.)

In West Virginia, howdy friends, welcome to McDowell County! Nice camera you got there!

In the weird way we seem to be moving in modern-day America, these stories are connected. They're about sexual panic. In Indiana, it's about same-sex marriage, pure and simple.

In the incident in West Virginia, some tourists were taking in the rural beauty and quaintness of the town of  Raysal, when its fine citizens decided the photographer and her husband were pedophiles. Not defending pedophilia, but West Virginia, WTF?

It's amazing what the liberals have done to destroy America.

"You're not from around here, are ya?"

Thanks, George W. Bush, You Blew Up the Middle East

Mission accomplished? W. didn't know the half of it.

It's broadly accepted that invading Iraq may be the single worst foreign-policy blunder, at least in recent memory, by an American president (for fun, look at it from a British perspective). As the growing Sunni-Shia conflict, with Saudi Arabia and Iran engaging in a growing proxy war in the Middle East, gets worse, we should remember that Bush blew the lid off Pandora's Box by destroying the firewall that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It's beyond irony that Ronald Reagan helped Hussein build and maintain that firewall. Equally mind-boggling is that Donald Rumsfeld and Bush's father were very much at the center of Reagan's support of Hussein.

Though Barack Obama may appear to be lurching from one ineffective military or diplomatic response to another -- all in the main an attempt to preserve the flow of oil while avoiding boots on the ground, by the way -- we shouldn't forget that this is essentially an ad hoc attempt to outmaneuver George W. Bush's legacy.

Bush's dumb-and-dumber pugilism is the gift that keeps on giving. Saudi Arabia, and now potentially Egypt, fighting Iranian interests is Yemen? Smart people saw this coming.

And now the GOP-controlled Congress demands reductions in any social spending to offset a large -- and largely unnecessary -- increase in defense spending. Great set of priorities you've got there.

Let's manage the Middle East with diplomacy and aid to the refugee problem we've helped cause and get our military out of there. Why? Tell me one thing we're accomplishing that won't vanish or degrade whether we stay there or not.

It takes a village idiot to explain the good we've done there. We should have never left!

These people also did the other thing: Building the rationale for torture, and then unleashing it.

Note. This is slightly off-topic, but this piece by Greg Mitchell on last year's anniversary of "Mission Accomplished Day" is both stunning and revolting.