In modern GOP, the old South returns

[freshwest]

In modern GOP, the old South returns

By Harold Meyerson, Published: August 28

The Republican ticket may hail from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan head the most Southernized major U.S. political party since Jefferson Davis’s day. In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.

No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180. Founded as the party of the anti-slavery North and committed to deep governmental involvement in spurring the economy (land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railway), today’s GOP is the negation of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. It is almost entirely white — 92?percent, compared with just 58?percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49?percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39?percent of Democrats...

The ghosts of Dixie — of the Scopes Trial and the underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming? Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans — adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-in-modern-gop-the-old-south-returns/2012/08/28/4d673034-f144-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_print.html

I thought all of this article was important, but had to cut it to three paragraphs. What the GOP is doing now, does not even reflect the current demographs of the 'South' but something that has not existed for a generation, except in tightly GOP-controlled areas.

Most people in the USA have different ethnic and racial members within their family circles, just like the Obama family does. Enjoy that beautiful cross section of humanity as described by Barack's sister:

This is what is normal and right about America and the world. IMO, this is the default position of humanity, not this 'other' obsession that the GOP has been tossing out.