In Which I AGREE with a Tea Partier

Maybe we really are in the “End Times.” I entirely agree with what a Tea Party Senator has just said.

Utah Senator Mike Lee was arm-in-arm with crazy Ted Cruz during the recent shenanigans that shut down the government. But in the wake of that fiasco, he has made a speech that at the very least shows a self-awareness we are not accustomed to seeing from Tea Party folks, and in places sounds positively progressive!

“Especially in the wake of recent controversies, many conservatives are more frustrated with the establishment than ever before,” Lee said. “And we have every reason to be. But however justified, frustration is not a platform. Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative.”

Instead of “outrage, resentment, and intolerance,” the party should project a message—and more than a message, a principle—of “optimism,” he said.

“American conservatism, at its core, is about gratitude, and cooperation, and trust, and above all hope,” Lee said. “It is also about inclusion. Successful political movements are about identifying converts, not heretics.”

 But the paragraph that most struck me was one in which Lee actually seems to occupy reality, and to see what most Tea Party folks resolutely refuse to acknowledge:

“This opportunity crisis,” he continued, “presents itself in three principal ways: immobility among the poor, trapped in poverty; insecurity in the middle class, where families just can’t seem to get ahead; and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic elites unfairly profit at everyone else’s expense. The Republican Party should tackle these three crises head on.”

Actually, I’d settle for a GOP that wasn’t insistent on making them worse.

That said, if this speech actually represents Mike Lee’s current perspective, it is immensely welcome–if considerably overdue. Maybe we could get him to talk to several members of Indiana’s Congressional delegation.

I’m especially looking at you, Todd Rokita and  Marlin Stutzman.

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Sums It Up

One of my “virtual” friends recently posted the following to Facebook. It made me think–and it also made me sad.

I like universal health care not just for its moral reasons but because it encourages job mobility, entrepreneurship, takes the burden off our manufacturing industries, and leads to cheaper health care costs. I like to spend money on public education because it makes our workers competitive in the international market. I want cap and trade because reliable and knowledgeable humans who are super-awesome at economics tell me that the long-term costs of inevitable climate shift will be worse than doing nothing. I want solar power and other green alternatives in order to ease climate change and to make us energy independent so people in countries half a world away with thousand-year-old grudges will stop yanking us around. I favor separation of church and state because, like Thomas Jefferson, I don’t want people of faith to have other faiths shoved on them by the power of the government.

In other words, as “Lefty” as all of that makes me today, I’m pretty much a 1972 Republican.

How did we get to the point where these sensible positions made him–and so many others– unwelcome in the GOP?

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It’s Inherited, Evidently

While I was hanging around my favorite beauty parlor–Juanita Jean’s, the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.–I came across a description of a sermon delivered by Ted Cruz’s father, a pastor and a Dominionist.

It explains a lot.

In a sermon last year at an Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, Cruz’ father Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as “kings” to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the “Seven Mountains” mandate, and “bring the spoils of war to the priests”, thus helping to bring about a prophesied “great transfer of wealth”, from the “wicked” to righteous gentile believers. There is a link to the video of Rafael Cruz describing the “great transfer of wealth” and the role of anointed “kings” in various sectors of society, including government, who are to “bring the spoils of war to the priests”.

Dominionists get their name from their theology: they believe that conservative Christians should have dominion over all others. In other words, they’re theocrats.

Not being one of those “righteous gentile believers” over whom Cruz Junior is evidently anointed to rule, I find this worldview pretty alarming–not to mention inconsistent with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, modernity and sanity.

Apples evidently don’t fall far from the trees they grow on…..

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When Politics Becomes Religion

Back in the olden days of the Cold War, I was convinced that Communism was less about economic theory and political reality and more about quasi-religious fervor. By the 1980s, it had become abundantly clear that Adam Smith had been right, and that centrally-planned economies didn’t work, but evidence had long been irrelevant to the true believers. (Maybe the USSR version wasn’t working, but that was because they weren’t doing it right.)

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague made a similar observation about the Tea Party folks. “You can’t talk them out of their positions by pointing to facts, because it’s a religion, and religion is all about faith–not fact.”

Now, noted GOP pollster and consultant Mike Murphy has made much the same point.

“There seem to be two schools of thought in GOP. One group, the Mathematicians, look at the GOP’s losing streak and the changing demography of the country and say the party needs to make real changes to attract voters beyond the old Republican base of white guys. Not just mechanics, but also policy. They want to modernize conservatism and change some of the old dogma on big issues like same sex marriage. I’m one of them. The other group, the Priests, say the problem is we don’t have enough ideological purity. We must have faith, be pure and nominate “real conservatives” (whatever that means; the Priests are a bit slippery about their definitions) who will fight without compromise against liberalism. The Priests are mostly focused on the sins we are against; they say our problem is a lack of intensity; if we are passionate and loud enough, we will alert and win over the rest of the country. The Mathematicians hear all this and think the Priests are totally in a 55-year-old white guy echo chamber of their own creation and disconnected from the reality of today’s electorate. They worry more about what the party should be for, and how we grow our numbers. They think the Priests fail to understand it is not 1980 anymore and votes are not there for the Old Pitch. The Priests hear the Mathematicians and think they are all sell-outs.”

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research recently conducted a series of focus groups for a project they titled “Inside the GOP.”  The report included a number of trenchant observations–more on those in a forthcoming post–but the finding most relevant to Murphy’s lament is that the current divisions in the Republican party aren’t only between the Priests and the “Mathematicians” (aka the dwindling number of moderates). There are also two varieties of Priests: Evangelicals and the Tea Party. And while both are faith-based and fervent, their dogmas and doctrines differ.

Religious wars are always the ugliest…..

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The Times They are A’Changing

Last weekend, my husband and I attended the wedding of City-County Counselor Zach Adamson to his longtime partner Christian Mosberg.

The couple had been married legally the week before, in Washington, D.C., since Indiana does not recognize same-sex marriages, but a second celebration was conducted back home in Indiana. There was a religious ceremony, involving clergy from several faith traditions, and a reception at Talbott Street that doubled as a fundraiser for Freedom, Indiana–the organization formed to fight HJR6.

Indiana culture warriors Micah Clark and Eric Miller would have been in despair; indicators of social and cultural change were everywhere, and it went well beyond the enthusiastic participation of clergy.

The ceremony wasn’t just attended by friends and families, although there were lots of both. The sanctuary was crowded with local politicians from both political parties. The Republican Mayor was there, as were several Democratic and Republican members of the City-County Council. A number of them also came to the reception, where they mingled with the kind of large and diverse group of friends that is one of the great benefits of urban living.

I couldn’t help thinking about the first time I’d been to Talbott Street, back when it was a truly transgressive venue featuring female impersonators and frequented by patrons who were mostly still closeted. My husband and I were both in City Hall at the time, part of the Hudnut Administration, and we’d come to see a friend perform. We were enjoying the show, when I was approached by a young man I recognized as a city employee. He was absolutely ashen-faced. “Please, please,” he said, “don’t tell anyone you saw me here.”

That was approximately 35 years ago–a long time in my life (although the years certainly seem to have sped by) but a ridiculously brief period as social movements go.

It’s no wonder the pronouncements from the “Christian” Right have taken on a shrill and frantic quality. In what seems like the blink of an eye, GLBT folks have gone from a frightened, despised minority to a group of friends and neighbors with whom we are happy to celebrate life’s rites of passage.

Think I’m exaggerating the degree to which attitudes have changed? Yesterday, notoriously timid Indiana University announced it was joining Freedom Indiana.

Indiana’s legislators may be the last to get the memo, but homophobia is so last century!

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