Doc, Help, I'm Afraid I Got Santorum-ism

HT to the SF Chronicle (SFgate) for the cascade of Rick Santorum dreck onto my running observations of how the GOP has no sense of what America is, has been, and should be about. There may be enough time before the November election to broadcast the essentials. We need to try. The bifurcation is wide.

The catalyst was Little Ricky's same-sex marriage double blunder:

• If elected POTUS, he'd see that all existing SSMs were invalidated (10s of thousands of fellow Americans having their legal rights stripped)
• He'd also see that there was a single, national marriage law

He perfectly illustrated what's been going on with the right wing since Pres. Bush the Greater, through Bush the Lesser and well into the current crop of would-be POTUS clowns. From his stated positions, we can learn:

1. He is in the van of wingers who are anti-gay and anti-marriage equality
2. He is eager for a huge, intrusive central government to mandate states rights as well as individual liberties
3. He does not understand federalism or the pre-US-nation principles of the constitution that reserve all rights to the states not granted to the central government
4. He is willing to rework the US Constitution as well as case law to suit his particularlistic religious and social beliefs
5. He'd have plebiscites on civil rights of groups he dislikes
6. He is willing to put his beliefs into public policy instead of respecting freedom of religion

Overall, his and wingers of his mindset are nearly totally anti-American. They do not share the ideals and ideas of the Revolutionary War, those quasi-mythical Founding Fathers, the Bill of Rights, and more recently the Baby Boomer/post-WWII concepts of individual liberty. It's as though they missed civics classes in junior high, as well as every American history class offered.

I mean, hey, if you hate gay men and lesbians, there you are, in your tiny-minded room of hate. We lefties acknowledge you have may be like that, so long as you don't try to impose your emotional and intellectual problems on other. Catch that last part.

Most of the rest of us paid attention to the concepts of the original American nation, as well as our advances over the past few hundred years. We even grew up with novels, movies, TV and texts that enforce, discuss and develop the ideals and practicalities involved.

I think of a ditty in my mother's 1940s college yearbook that included a line about "when they gave out brains, I thought they said trains...I missed mine." There is Little Ricky, too ignorant and too stupid to belong in a discussion with the bulk of us.

Thank God, thank Jefferson, thank the Framers, thank so many that the rest of us know we have to live and let live. We know that states have to honor each other's laws, in comity. We know that freedom of speech and religion includes that no single religions zealot tells the rest of us what we can, cannot or must do.

Wingers have truly overreached. They are damned this election and maybe far beyond. It's likely too late for them to wake up this time. Santorum is only the worst of those still talking on the national stage.