Looking for moderation from this bunch? Dream on.
Let us count the ways in which the Republican Party remains strongly, belligerently out of touch. Or at least let's
count the states.
According to a count by The Huffington Post, only seven states plus the District of Columbia have no mention of opposition to same-sex marriage or other rights for LGBT individuals in their party platforms. Fourteen states appear to go by the national platform, leaving 29 other states with their own platforms that oppose gay rights.
That means the party in 29 states had to work hard on their
own language opposing LGBT rights, so important it was to them that their platform mention how opposed they were. It's no
threatening to secede from the Union, but it's still impressive how much effort goes into being mean for the sake of mean. (For good or for bad, it's a generational thing, and the younger generation of Republicans continues to have No Damn Say in what their party does. Which you think would be irritating, but at this point it seems to be mostly a form of Stockholm Syndrome.) Then there's this:
"Republican voters are in a much different place from where the platform is," said [Freedom to Marry national campaign director Marc Solomon]. "The language in the platform is truly vicious and anti-gay. Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council claims to have written the language in the platform, and they're classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [...] I think that if Republican voters and even increasingly active Republican elected [officials] and others realize that this section of the platform is being written by really extreme, anti-gay forces, I think that they would be ... pretty appalled."
You'd think so, but ... no. No, they weren't appalled, and they still aren't appalled, and Tony Perkins continues to make good cash money being batshit insane for conservative audiences that like batshit insane very very much. It's not a question of the state party platforms being out of touch, it's a question of
the entire party apparatus being so addicted to conspiracy and bigotries that Tony Freaking Perkins fits right in.
I know it sounds like hearing from a broken record, but it continues to be rather important to note that this party is not right in the head. The distance between militia-speech and congressman-speech, and the margins between an actual hate group (e.g. Perkins) and official party policy, are razor thin. There's a reason that both Tony Perkins and the clearly not-right-in-the-head Cliven Bundy attract so many supporters from the party, and it isn't because the party just has a few bad apples. The House of Representatives shut down the United States government in an act of pouting, pointless opposition to American citizens getting marginally more effective health care. Conservative issue groups and media outlets continue to work proudly on misinformation efforts to get people killed. People hoping to see glimmers of rationality from the party are deluding themselves.