I am not shocked, surprised, or even outraged all that much any more. I have gone through all the stages of grief and finally reached acceptance. David is right. Evil is incarnate, right here and now, and those who refuse to see it—or examine their role in relation to it—are dupes.

“Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities.” —Voltaire

The narrative is wrong, parties do govern from their platforms. People wouldn’t have fights over their platforms and put a lot of effort into influencing them if they were just ignored.

“Gerald M. Pomper, a professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University, studied meaningful platform pledges from 1944 to 1976 — and later updated his work by looking at the 1990s — and found that winning political parties try to redeem roughly 70 percent of their concrete platform pledges.”.

http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2012/08/28832/

Robert, the writer seemed to be focusing on the clearest connections to LGBT rights a freedoms. I think we can each go back and find a dozen more ways these things can be used to hurt LGBT people. But the most important point remains: this isn’t good for LGBT people. This also isn’t good for women, immigrants and non-Christians, none of which are the topic of the post.

As an outsider I’ve viewed the Tea Party as a revolt against pragmatists who try to govern away from the platform. Am I mistaken in this interpretation? Isn’t that what makes a RINO a RINO? Aren’t RINOs, above and beyond Democrats, the targets of Tea Party supporters? They’d rather have a purist that loses the general election win the primary than a pragmatist who can win the election.

I suppose that party leadership sees the platform as a way to placate the base, but the base is pissed off and has demanded, in primaries at least, that the folks running toe the party line; ie the platform.

I think what we’re witnessing is the collapse of the two party system under the weight of technological advance, voter apathy & gerrymandering. The internet doesn’t allow politicians to placate with impunity, most eligible Americans don’t participate in the primaries & the gerrymandering lessens the importance of the general election by shifting the true election to the primary.

This platform is disturbing not only because of the extremist nature of the language therein but also because it will be the measuring stick against which congressional Republicans running in primaries will be measured in the future.

I didn’t realize you were so extreme, and seemingly supportive of some of these odious issues.

I’m not so sure that they hate us more than anyone else — I suspect it’s just that we’re the easiest target. The blow-back from openly racist or misogynist statements is pretty severe; from anti-gay statements, not so much. If Peter Sprigg or Scott Lively said anything against racial minorities as extreme as what they’ve said against gays, they’d be finished. (Even Rush Limbaugh took a bad hit on that score.)

And it’s Tony Perkins, Brian, Brown, Mat Staver, Matt Barber who are pounding that drum, because they’ve figured out that naked racism doesn’t really pay very well. (I’m waiting and hoping that someone will ask Tony Perkins on national TV how that Klan mailing list worked out for him.)

If you can’t stomach Obama (and I can’t), the only thing to do is to vote for Gary Johnson.

Yesterday you suggested this document would, if adopted, embarrass ordinary, decent-minded voters, and I challenged you to show it to 10 conservative friends to see if you were correct. Please consider that a standing challenge. Until you are willing to assure us that you actually ran it by those 10 and they were actually ashamed of it, your personal outrage only serves to inform the rest of us that you are clueless about what shames your fellow conservatives.

But must it be 10 out of 10? No. Assure us of 6 and I’ll publicly acknowlege your wisdom versus my bigoted folly on this. I will absolutely trust your honor to report truthfully, but until you report about ordinary voters I conclude that the only person they’ve both shocked and outraged is you.

The rest of us who are outraged aren’t either shocked or surprised. We haven’t been living under a rock or in a Martian cave or with our heads buried in sand. These people are evil, and their mephitic spiritual odor has pinched the nostrils of the whole world. They aren’t merely guilty of ignorantly following evil mens’ orders; they themselves are evil.

They are sociopaths who don’t believe that all social animals (including humans) are hardwired for justice; the golden rule is used by them strictly as a con on others, and they are proud of their biological apostasy. That is the essential definition of true evil.

People like you and the LCR enable their inherent evil by refusing to admit its existence. Keep it up and you’ll hate yourselves by the time you’re my age, if shame doesn’t kill you short of there. In about 10 years it will start to come home to you: Every time you excused this cesspool of a movement you became complicit in the suicides of broken children, and in the murders of GLBT community members by their movement-sanctioned haters.