The Republican religious base is crawling out of its primordial slime to promote its main priorities for the mid-term elections: banning some people from using a particular word to describe their relationship when it is closer to their own ideal of a monogamous family unit and making it illegal to destroy graven idols representing a line on a map.
These are important issues after all, when the alternatives are global unrest dues to energy crises and the death of the planet due to environmental catastrophe.
The fascinating thing about the social conservative disease is that it requires a view of the world which is not based upon traditional morals or any concept of progress. To demonstrate this, let’s use the example for gay rights.
Most social conservatives, who aren’t criminals, probably agree that someone like Elton John should not be dragged into the street and pelted to a bloody death with rocks, (despite the release of ‘I’m Still Standing’). Most of these people also agree that he shouldn’t be put in jail because of his sexual preference. Yet most of these people would argue that Sir Elton shouldn’t have been able to marry his partner. The argument is ‘things have just gone too far’. This is not a political belief so much as an uncourageous disposition – cowardice in the face of progress.
The problem of social conservatism is the ‘reverse induction’ argument. I.E. the same group of people 50 years ago would have thought that outright murder of gays was probably wrong and that marriage was so inconceivable as to be not worth bothering about, but a good idea was making sure that being openly gay could get you locked up in the one place where you would definitely get laid by another guy.
In short, social conservatives are not defending traditional values (if they are they are breaking the law) or looking to a brighter future, but are an insignificant artifact representing the fleeting transience of the here and now.