Okay, don't shoot me. I'm a hard-core Democrat. An Illinois Democrat, for God's sake.
But Rick Santorum got my attention a while back, when he urged Democrats to vote for his evangelical self in the Michigan primary. I started to think about crossing the line in today's Illinois primary election.
My motives were as pure as a newborn baby clutching a bar of Ivory Soap while Girl Scouts sing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" in the new-fallen snow. As I explained in my weekly newspaper column, my intent wasn't to play dirty with the Republicans' chances of winning in November. Another vote for Obama in Illinois would be highly superflous, so I decided to vote for the Republican I could best tolerate in the White House if Obama were to lose the general election.
So I did. For the first time in my life, I purposely voted for a Republican. Ron Paul, not that the name matters. He seems honest, intelligent and unable to win anything larger than a scratch-off lottery ticket.
I knew it would be hard to vote for a Rebublican, even just in a primary election, but I didn't know the aftermath would be so disturbing. I thought I'd waltz out of the courthouse with a funny story to tell, and then go about my business.
But no. I feel like scum. A miasma of guilt has been following me around all day like a Satanic fart that refuses to dissapate. I feel as though I have done something so unforgivable that Mohandas Gandhi would slap me in the face, that Mother Teresa would step over me in the gutter, and God is turning his countenance away from me because I committed a sin so patently heinous that He didn't even think it needed to be listed in the Ten Commandments.
All afternoon I have been swearing to myself that I will never do this again. And yet, how can I trust myself, now that I've taken a ball peen hammer to my moral compass and flushed it down the crapper? It's a slippery slope that leads from voting for a Rebublican in a measly primary election to campaigning for Rick Santorum and going on the Sunday morning talk shows to admit that when I was a Democrat, I wanted to marry my mother and have oral sex with cocker spaniels on television.
Please, somebody--anybody--stop me before I do this again in November.