John Tierney is fairly on-target today. The Christian Taliban wing of the Rethuglicans are gambling that for all of the Nixonian Republican grumbling, being a moral scold will win elections more than being fiscally prudent. Quite a gamble, and one I hope loses, like Ralph Reed lost. Especially since most of the piety is phony money sanctimony anyway.
The Church Lady Party - John Tierney : ... Republicans are looking like moral Grinches — or, more precisely, the Church Lady, the scold who makes even fellow congregants roll their eyes. ... They’re the party whose leader defends the sanctity of embryonic stem cells against scientists trying to cure diseases. They’re the killjoy who stands up to object when a gay couple wants to marry. They’re so shocked by gambling — imagine, Americans betting money! — that the House has just passed a bill outlawing most online wagering, and federal agents have arrested a visiting British executive of a sports-betting operation that is perfectly legal in his country.Even before there were lottery tickets at gas stations and casinos on reservations, savvy politicians realized that gambling was a vice to be denounced but mostly ignored. They generally didn’t raid bingo nights. They didn’t try to stop people from playing poker in the privacy of their homes, but that’s the hopeless mission undertaken by the righteous right.
So far, Republicans have staved off gay marriage, but over the long term it’s another losing cause. Younger voters already are turned off by what they perceive as the party’s homophobia. As the public gets used to seeing happy couples exchanging vows, the taboo against gay marriage will ease — and Republicans will be remembered as priggish wedding crashers.
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But protecting a cluster of cells the size of a grain of sand is not what most voters think of as a traditional family value. Embryonic stem-cell research is so popular that even some conservative Republicans voted for the bill allowing it to be federally financed. Bush’s veto this week kept in place the ban on federal funds, pleasing religious conservatives, but they’ll never be able to stop this research....
So even though I have no moral qualms about the research, I think Bush’s veto was good public policy. But it wasn’t good politics. He tried to present it as a defense of life — he even used that old campaign ploy, posing with babies — but he couldn’t compete with the images of paralyzed adults asking for help.As the baby boomers age, it’s not smart to be known as the party that won’t pay for medical research. It’s not smart to have Michael J. Fox and Nancy Reagan blaming you for blocking cures for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, or to be remembered as the party that ignored Christopher Reeve’s pleas before he died. No matter how moral the Church Lady tries to sound, she’ll never win an argument with Superman in a wheelchair.
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