Crazy ...

As a newly minted Republican and longstanding complainer about political correctness, should I take it personally when Atlantic blogger James Fallows asks: "When will they take a stand against their own crazies?" His post is on booing from the crowd at the Republican presidential debates, highlighting that reaction to a gay soldier's question about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

While some of the booing at debates (e.g. in support of executions) made me queasy, let's not get too prissy about this. A political platform is not a church service, and a certain amount of raucous heckling is par for the course unless there are specific rules against it. If the gay soldier didn't want to get booed, maybe he shouldn't have waded in to this controversy (which I guess was a reason for Don't Ask Don't Tell in the first place). And I didn't see anything wrong with Sen. Rick Santorum's response.

'Twas amusing to see the booers in the same debate come after Gov. Rick Perry because of his support for granting in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants. His resistance was one of his few good moments on stage. Today I got an email from an aged relative, a lifelong conservative and the Catholic child of parents who emigrated to New York, who has become a bit of an obsessive about illegal immigration. It was a diatribe from one Frosty Wooldridge, who appears to blame the problems of Detroit largely on illegal immigration and says (although it's all-cap boldface in the version I got): "If you think Mexicans and Muslims and other foreigners will eventually fit right in then you are as big a part of the problem as they are." I looked up said Wooldridge, and discovered he's an anti-Catholic supporter of Planned Parenthood. I don't think my relative knew that, but Wooldridge is a crazy I am happy to disown.

Comments

[Matthew]

"While some of the booing at debates (e.g. in support of executions) made me queasy, let's not get too prissy about this. A political platform is not a church service, and a certain amount of raucous heckling is par for the course unless there are specific rules against it."

I agree that a political platform isn't a church service. Yet as a father of a service member why are you apologizing for these candidates who don't have the moral courage & simply stand up for the guy that we all can RESPECTFULLY disagree w/ his position yet respect his extraordinary commitment in service of his country?

Like Southerners during Jim Crow, their silence implies they agree w/ it & ultimately reinforces the current policy. In relation to these debates, it reinforces disrespect & bigotry.

[Brian]

That's exactly the point. Religious conservatives HAVE melded religion and politics together very tightly.

There's also the hypocrisy that conservatives have spent years sanctified soldiers for their own militaristic ideology and to silence opposition. So to boo a "hero" (tm) violates their own b.s. of many years.