The biggest problem about our two party situation is any political position will be claimed by one party and opposed by the other.
It's how we get a situation where an LGBT person cannot profess to owning a gun because gun rights and LGBT rights are on different sides of the aisle from each other.
Being Godless Atheist myself, I've occasionally been confronted for my conservatism because that's somehow a Right-Wing-Christian exclusive thing.
Atheists are supposed to be liberals, I guess.
Being a conservative and pro-gun also means I'm not supposed to support LGBT rights.
Who decided this?
It's especially galling that admitting you're a Republican in this day and age somehow makes you racist.
Perhaps to the history deprived this could be true.
They don't seem to know who the first Republican president was.
The Civil Rights Act is often touted as a Democrat victory, but it barely got 60% of Democrats in Congress to vote for it while 80% of Republicans did.
Even so, it would have failed without the martyrdom of Kennedy that was exploited by LBJ. The jury remains out if the act actually helped minorities or if it's been the tool used to reduce them to a marginalized status, only useful for their en-bloc voting habits.
I run up against this all the time. When I was more active with the GOP, I got awfully sick and tired of party events where people would be chattering in their speeches about their close and personal relationship to Jesus Christ. I've commented that "there are few things lonelier than a right-wing atheist," and when I was in American Atheists, I got tired of the endless ranting against anybody to the right of Hubert Humphrey.
ReplyDeleteBoth "sides" have a lot of non-necessary positions that one is expected to take. Leslie Fish gets grief from her fellow left-wingers over her fervent Second Amendment support. (I've thought that an ad featuring her, saying "I'm a folk singer. And a Vietnam War protester. And an IWW member. I'm the NRA!" would blow a lot of minds.)