The only hope for the pandas of politics is a dirty word: evolution
After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, there has been much speculation about the future of the Republican Party. The question “Can the GOP evolve and thrive again?” is being asked by many – but, notably, seldom by Republicans. Judging by their choices in recent years, they appear to have taken a different approach to their party’s survival.
Even faced with massive changes to their environment, Republicans have, quite characteristically, chosen to avoid the subject of evolution. After all, it’s a topic many of them want given only cursory attention even in the school curriculum.
This is hardly pragmatic, given that for some years now their party has survived and sometimes prospered primarily by subsisting on a steady diet of angry, middle-aged, Christian, white men. When Ronald Reagan won his seat, 89 per cent of the voters in America were white; their numbers now are at 72 per cent and declining.
Once, great herds of angry, middle-aged, Christian, white men roamed the electoral plains of America. Now, these plains are thick with Latino voters – 50,000 new Hispanic Americans reach voting age every month.
As well, godless – or at least differently godded – voters gallop majestically there, alongside prancing herds of men who finally said, “Actually, I’m not so much angry as I am gay. I’m thinking about getting married.”
Today, single women roam free on the political Serengeti, making up a quarter of the voting-age population. Flocks of young people without health insurance fly overhead.
Read more in the Globe and Mail ….
Thank you for the link to the Globe article. Tabatha Southey seems to be having fun with words while discussing a serious subject. However, the title is not great, and Southey’s definition of evolution “– a process that involves natural selection, change compatible with reality, and letting go” fits the tone of the article but is of course incorrect. What the republicans need to do is evolve/change.
But can they? We live in a market democracy so the ‘leaders’ don’t so much lead as take poll after poll to find out where the crowd is going and then rush to the head of it.
Rupert Murdoch’s genius was in seeing the news as just another product like a mouse trap or a laundry detergent so while everyone else was trying to inform he invented Fox News to sell what the customer wanted to buy. He knew there was an unfulfilled market where you can catch more flies with shit than with sugar.
Kevin, that may have been Murdoch’s genius, but the election surely shows, if it shows anything, that people are not buying it, and the Republicans are going to have to get back to their roots, which is not in fundamentalist Christianity. You may attract more flies with shit than sugar, but people are not flies, and can see through fakery like Romney’s.
The vast majority of Muslims in America voted for Obama. The majority of America’s muslim community hails from countries where homosexuals are oppressed, harassed and even executed.
As a gay man, that really makes me want to prance…
And of course, when reasonable people point out Islam’s murderous homophobia, there’s always a good athiest who’ll butt in and portray those reasonable people as racist…
Mik-Mik
May I respectfully point out that it is precisely in those countries with caucasian majorities and with a judeo-christian religious background that gays enjoy the highest levels of freedom and respect? Ditto for women. If you disagree with that opinion, then please provide proof to the contary.
And as for being angry and gay and thinking of getting married? Well California’s gay marriage proposal was defeated largely thanks to the state’s Black voters, almost all of whom, at least those who went to the polls, voted for Obama a few weeks back.
Gays who cannot see this contradiction, and so who voted for Obama in the mistaken belief he was their best chance for gay marraige, are just so many turkeys cheering on the arrival of Thanksgiving
That gays can be attacked in Europe by non-white, non-christian individuals without anyone noticing and the fact Britian’s universities, and those in other european countires, now regularly host homophobic muslim hate-preachers invited by on-campus muslim students socieites should be pause for thought.
But it isn’t. And why should it?
Openly calling for the death of gays and Jews, and doing so consequence free, is now becoming the New Normal.
I’m not altogether clear, Nolongerlivinginthe70s, what point it is, precisely, that you want to make. Are you really saying, what you seem to be saying, that Mitt Romney and the Republicans would have been a better bet for gay people? If so, you seem to forget that Romney and the Republicans, Caucasian and Christian (well, almost, perhaps, maybe), are not noted supporters either of gay marriage or even, if it comes to that, of gay liberation. So what point is it that you did want to make?
Eric, Obama can come out and state his support of gay marriage but if, at one and the same time, his administration appeals to, and seeks support from, individuals, organisations and outfits that explicitly condemn homosexuality and which may even support, although slyly, the execution of gays, then of what value is Obama’s “explicit assertion” of support for gay marraige and rights?
That claim is but shallow, superficial nonsense, a cynical ploy to obtain the votes of some fairly clueless gays.
And, of course, it worked.
With Romney, gays would obviously never obtain the right to marry, but at the speed at which gay rights once taken for granted are being eroded by the rapid growth of new religions, I’m not sure that gay marraige is even a pressing priority anymore. A one term Romney, with all his faults, would have been the lesser of two evils by far.
Gays, whether they admit it or not, are now at the point where the most they can hope for is to maintian the status quo.
Gay rights are under assault by the tenors of ‘religious sensitivity’. If under the guise of freedom of conscience a ‘faith’ community, and one actively supported by the White House, becomes free to disseminate hateful propaganda against gays, creating the atmospherics that can facilitate the oppression and even murder of queers, then who cares about Obama’s pronoucements?
If criticising the virulent, murderous homophobia of a religion’s theology becomes a crime ( blasphemy), then the whole question of gay marriage recedes in importance. In fact,it becomes rather trivial.
The article below by Sam Harris explains things better than I ever could.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/on-the-freedom-to-offend-an-imaginary-god
Obama’s first term has been a foreign policy disaster. In only 4 years secular dictatorships all across the Mena region have been overthrown, only to see the progressive establishment of fascisitic theocratic dictatorships. in countries, that though poor, still had some hope. More of the same in Syria, and now Jordan, appears to be on the way.
By the time his second term is over the entire globe will be fitted with blasphemy blinkers rendering nearly all criticsm of the most homophobic, misogynistic and anti-semitic theocratic fascism known to man a though crime.
This WILL come to pass, In fact, it HAS come to pass, de-facto, already.