The Santorum question: Is he too extreme for the middle? On abortion, same-sex marriage and other social issues, he's the most conservative of the GOP candidates. But he'll need the swing vote to win. By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times February 21, 2012, 6:31 p.m. Reporting from Phoenix— Rick Santorum is winning the hearts of conservative voters with uncompromising social views that, he says, are drawn from the same well as his fiscal and environmental policies: a reading of America's founding documents that stresses their Judeo-Christian underpinnings. ... Santorum has been a national leader in the fight against abortion, which he passionately opposes even in cases of rape or incest. He opposes government funding not only for abortion but for some forms of prenatal testing, such as amniocentesis, which he believes is used to decide whether to abort a child with birth defects. (He and his wife, Karen, have a daughter, Bella, born with a defect known as Trisomy 18, and he speaks emotionally about children who are aborted because they aren't "perfect.") He has spoken out against contraception, calling it "a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." (He says he has no desire to ban it.) He has attacked President Obama relentlessly over requiring faith-based institutions to provide insurance coverage for contraception to their workers, calling it a serious challenge to religious liberty, even in its amended form. He has been quoted as supporting laws against sodomy. He fiercely opposes same-sex marriage and the Obama administration's policy to allow gays to serve openly in the military, and has compared gay sex to "man on dog" sex. He takes a hard line on immigration. On some of these views, Santorum is clearly outside the mainstream of American public opinion — in some cases, far outside. ... Onward Christian Soldier
you could ask our own resident nutjobs, but they won't be able to explain as they are deeply under the spell.
The cartoon is hilarious, since Reagan was too moderate for today's Republican Party, and would probably throw up on Rick Insanetorum out of disgust.
But that's been there long before now. I'm baffled how much influence an extremely ignorant minority has in determining the GOP candidate for president. Same question, but I can't help repeating it. How did they get this much power? Another possibility I'm thinking of is maybe it did start with the moral majority movement and has grown from there. What a horrible state of affairs.
A growing "independent" sector and general voter apathy come to mind. Religion gives them the motive and the zany perspective. Keep in mind too that these are the primaries, where most voters are fairly hardcore. Personally, I think that is a bad thing for both parties. For democrats, it weeds out the progressives in favor of the centrist. For the republicans, it weeds out the centrists in favor of the radical loonies. EDIT: You should read this book. EDIT the 2ND: And here is an excellent rebuttal to that book's thesis. In summary, this is a hard problem. But I still think I'm generally right - the USA is more religious than virtually any other major western power. And consequently we get into these dumb arguments about nonsensical dogma-based policies with little relevance to scientific or logical reality, or actual tangible problems that the government should be involved with.
That book looks really cool, and like it might be exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks for the recommendation.
hightop is making less sense than usual. It was the conservatives mandating restrictions on women and their rights in VA. Liberals are the ones in favor of women's rights both in this case and historically. Yet hightop is railing about "liberal mandators". hightop, would you like to explain your logic here?
so there are a couple of mandates here. There are mandates that would be beneficial to a citizen's health and you are against it. There are mandates that restrict a women's rights, and you have absolutely nothing to say about that. It appears that your anger is selective, and that your anger isn't really about mandates but perhaps about who is making the mandate.
