Dear Wingnut,

You've managed to expertly dodge John V's question. You wrote that "family, hard work and honesty" are conservative values. To defend this you assert:

(1) Hard work is a conservative value because in 1996 a Republican Congress passed the Welfare to Work law. But many liberals, including Bill Clinton, supported the law. You never explain why liberal values fail to embrace "hard work". A lot of people in this country work hard everyday. Not all of them vote for the GOP. You're smart enough to know that.

(2) Because liberals promote marriage equality they don't value "family". You're using "Family" as a code word which means something other than in normal usage. There are same-sex families all over the country raising children right now. It's true California has rejected same-sex marriage. New Hampshire has embraced it (not exactly a bastion of liberalism). Families come in all shapes and sizes these days ... but that's not what you meant when you talked about "Family".

(3) You know better than to try and defend your assertion that "honesty" is a conservative value but not a liberal one. So instead you talk about numbers. You instead present polls to demonstrate the distribution of "conservative", "liberal", and "moderate" voters. But you ignore polls asking which party voters approve of. You ignore recent polls suggesting nearly 50% of Americans no longer think of the word "socialism" unfavorably. Hence the profusion of pundits crying "fascist" recently ... when the mud-slinging needs re-branding, your poll showing 60% of Americans don't identify as conservative looks more like a fig leaf than anything else.

You also ignore some of the negative values that conservatism brings with it. The Left has its fair share of whackos, but so does the Right. The Weather Underground (among others) may have been bad ... but how many KKK members voted for the Democrats in November? Racism and Intolerance have been conservative values too.

That has TOTALLY got to be an Editor's Choice letter.

Renegade Iconoclast cracked me up.

And really, this stuff about defending conservatives' gay-bashing really gets up my nose. Wingnut denied that bigotry was what drove the Proposition 8 movement against gay marriage in California, not long ago. Come on. That proposition should have been called The Spite Proposition. It was basically, "well what can we say? We don't like gays!" That's all. There was a religious component as well, I know, but there are a million religious strictures that no-one cares about or passes propositions about. Has anyone proposed prosecuting husbands and wives for sleeping together when the wife's on her period? No? Why not? That's punishable by death, according to the Bible. How about outlawing the sale of crab as food? There are religious laws against eating it, you know. It's pretty obvious, since none of these or the other religious laws that everyone ignores raise millions of dollars in proposition money, that no-one's really as worried as they pretend about what God thinks. God doesn't hate gays; they hate gays. ("They" meaning not religious people, but so many Pro-prop 8 people--sorry, guys.)

And invoking a formless, rootless "tradition", to sidestep the religious question, doesn't wash either. It used to be tradition to burn witches, or Catholics (under Protestant rulers), or Protestants (under Catholic rulers). My God! They don't do that anymore? Well who decided that, and let's make sure to express our outrage that they changed the customary definition of law, the social order, and piety, of centuries'-long standing!

The argument that either religion or tradition dictate gay-bashing or gay-ghettoization is without any reasonable grounds. Gay marriage isn't an "attack on marriage"--it's an embrace of marriage. And if liberals are "re-defining" "traditional" definitions of marriage, that's because we're not here to kowtow to every single "tradition." Some traditions, such as witch-burning, deserved to die out. Would you bring them back? The living among us, not the past generations that embraced such brutality, should be the ones to decide. We shouldn't do so by mindlessly hewing to past habits, but consciously. If a gay person gets married, how on earth does it keep me, a straight man, from marrying a woman? If it doesn't, then why on earth doesn't the conversation begin and end there?

That was just one sentence in Wingnut's column today, but really, you've gotta knock that "our definition of family is the right one" stuff off.

while i'm tempted to commend the wingnut for deigning to actually answer the question for once, i'm confounded by the utterly contradictory nature of the statistics.

fifty-five percent of Americans believe that the government controls too much of our daily lives but somehow, over 50% of Americans are perfectly happy to have the government controlling their daily lives if they are about to become a parent and don't wish to be, and almost 90% want the government to legislate hiring and firing practices in the event that your physician decides it is against his or her religion to give your fourteen year old daughter the morning after pill after her sexual assault or whatever.

oh and by the way, liberals don't want to redefine "family". the American "family" has been changing for a long time, whether you like it or not, to include single moms, single dads, grandparents, stepparents, same sex parents, and every combination of the above, with or with out liberal support.

so no, we don't want to redefine "families"; we just want to acknowledge that there are plenty of families across the country that love each other just as deeply as ours do, and afford them the legal rights and protections that they deserve, whether they look like our families or not.

Here's a question: how is vetoing S-CHIP legislation pro-family?

and oh--the Ledbetter v Goodyear decision. How is denying women, who last equal pay for their work good for families? especially when so many families depend on women's income?

and how is anti-union legislation pro-family, given that the pay for women in unions is 11% higher than the average pay for women who are not union members?

--and how is anti-union legislation pro-family, given that the pay for women in unions is 11% higher than the average pay for women who are not union members?

-- Kristinab

Heh--I can't resist:

Well, union members are anti-hard work, because they're liberal, right? So since they're liberal, they're somehow probably anti-family too.

And since Barack Obama and Sotomayor came from hard-scrabble, hardworking beginnings, they are not liberal, but center-right.

Honestly--sorry to keep roasting you, Wingnut, but you might simply have admitted to Joe that you wrote a really ill-considered passage when you tried to make honesty, hard work and family values out to be conservative-owned enterprises. That really is the biggest pile of bullshit that's ever piled out of a Washington mouth. Don't even you think so, deep down? I mean, if we were to discuss it all by ourselves, over a bottle of old single malt late at night?