This is going to be an interesting week politically, and also socially. I would say it’ll be the most unusual week since August 1974, when Republicans pressured Nixon to quit rather than to face an impeachment, which was imminent.
Nixon during his debate with Kennedy, 1960.
In our time, the tipping point is that the presidential candidate for the Morality and Purity Party has admitted proudly to committing serial sexual assault.
This is twisting Republicans and the party into knots as they deal with a candidate who does not actually represent any of their purported values (on ordinary issues like trade).
Recent polling is reported to have about 75% of his partisans still in favor of him.
I think that this look into the background is revealing. It’s an actual revelation of the values and boundaries of a large and powerful segment of the population. This population is what’s called the Republican base, which includes its core of fundamentalist Christians, and many people who have secularized that agenda and put it into schools.
Are these the same people we expect to teach their sons to treat women appropriately, and to honor the integrity of their bodies and intentions?
It would seem that the ruse of religion and its garb of moral purity as a function of politics are now being exposed for the fraud that they are. The politics part is important: I have known many truly upstanding people whose faith is Christian; they don’t seem to be the same people who first politicize sexual morality and then condone the most repugnant conduct.
If we pry a little deeper under the anti-choice arguments and look for the real conduct of that particular politicized Christian base, we might find the same exact moral configuration. The message here is that politics and religion don’t mix. They are a toxic combination. The founders of our nation knew this, including several distinct prohibitions in the Constitution against mixing government and religion.