GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party

Salon ^ | 8-5-2012 | Mike Lofgren

[Sir Napsalot]

A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts

Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

.... All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

[Sir Napsalot]

I don’t know if he considered himself one of those elites, but one has to wonder why he stuck as staff on GOP side for such a long time.

And why after leaving his long tenure, he’s opting for the Left’s current darling role.

[Ron H.]

Quickly seeking the source for this piece I also quickly deduced that it wouldn’t be worth my time to read it. Rarely does Salon have anything good to say about Cons or SoCons. Next.

[danielmryan]

I don’t know if he considered himself one of those elites, but one has to wonder why he stuck as staff on GOP side for such a long time.

One might also wonder how John Boehner turned into what he is, if one gets my drift :)

And why after leaving his long tenure, he’s opting for the Left’s current darling role.

At the risk of sounding flip, because the Left has modeled themselves on the typical staffer?