Tea Party Worldview
by digby
Here’s just another little tid-bit to add to the ample existing evidence that the Tea Party is as socially conservative as it gets and that they care about the culture war as much as they care about cutting taxes and destroying government. From Right Wing Watch:
There are few “mainstream” anti-gay activists operating today that can match Matt Barber for shear anti–gay vitriol. In fact, it was his attacks on gays that turned Barber into a Religious Right celebrity in the first place, eventually landing him a job with Concerned Women for America before Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel lured him away and gave him a position as Associate Dean at Liberty University and Director of Cultural Affairs with Liberty Counsel. And Staver snapped up Barber because he shares his anti-gay views and because of their endless anti-gay attacks, Liberty Counsel found itself on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-gay groups. So, of course, Rep. Michele Bachmann has tapped Staver to come and teach her Tea Party class to members of Congress …
I’m wondering when people are going to recognize that not only is the Tea Party socially conservative and uhm … racially uncomfortable, their antipathy to taxes and government actually stems from those attitudes. It’s not a coincidence or even a sympathetic constellation of various positions on the issues. They don’t like government because they believe that government should not protect and support people they don’t like.
It’s not even a matter of not liking the constitutional principle of “majority rule, but protect the minority” because they think it’s undemocratic. When they are in the majority, they resent the protection of the minority, to be sure. But when they are in the minority they equally resent majority rule. The “principle” is simply that they believe they are superior and more deserving and that people they don’t like, whether they are in the majority or the minority, do not deserve to have any say in how the world is organized. They just do not believe their opposition is legitimate in any way. It’s not really any more complicated than that.
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