GOP got into bed with religious right
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ONCE STORIES like those of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Nevada Senator John Ensign cheating on their wives might have stunned the nation. But today, the sex scandals themselves don’t even shock Republicans. Such incidents are now so commonplace that websites are devoted to cataloguing them.
The root of this entanglement is the love affair between the Republican Party and the religious right. This gave rise to the moral hypocrisy that is as much a symbol of the GOP today as is the elephant.
The result of that mating, a Republican Party hopped up on the narcotic of self-righteousness, has sickened politics for decades by weakening it with the belief that the private life of a public official is an indispensable yardstick for measuring his or her performance in office. Faithful husband Richard Nixon and philandering Bill Clinton come to mind.
Today we demand politicians unfettered by human weakness. Perhaps if we did not sanctify political office, Americans could accept public servants as humans like us, rather than expecting them to be saints.
Barry Goldwater, whose contempt for the religious right’s political intrusion was unbounded, told U.S. News & World Report in 1994, “If [the religious right] succeed in establishing religion as a basic Republican Party tenet, they could do us in.’’
His party ignored the warning, and American politics is worse off for it.
Mark Ira Kaufman
Silver Lake, Ohio 
