"Get Out!"

» WaPo: Giving Up On God (Kathleen Parker)

If there's one thing I feel I can safely promise my readership, it's that I don't expect to delve too deeply in the "Republican Wilderness" series as today's GOP tries to dig itself out of the very well-dug hole they've created for themselves. But Kathleen Parker's latest is a notable exception for my interest ...

... the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

Ya know what's odd is that Kathleen Parker will, when it's all over and done with, probably have more hate mail from dissing Sarah Palin than suggesting the GOP shoo away politically conservative Christians from the party. In and of itself, that represents a symptom of the problem right there.

I mean, the Apostle Paul killed off actual Christians back in the day. Yet, who do you hear more ill spoken of ... him, or someone who once thought Walter Mondale (a former choirboy) would have been a good President?

Another part of the problem is on display with comments like this from the Brothers Judd blog:

After watching John McCain run the same sort of campaign that Bob Dole did, you can bank on the GOP returning to its winning formula of nominating an Evangelical governor. As it happens, we have three excellent choices for 2012: Jeb, Sarah, and Bobby Jindal.

Maybe their readership wasn't big enough for the GetReligion.org scorekeepers to excoriate Orrin for missing the fact that two of those named are Catholic. Not that there hasn't been a muddying of the waters in the historical distinctions of the two, but still.