Random Questions: The "Tea Party" Edition

In this installment of my Random Questions segment on B&D, I examine this weeks tea-bagging convention in Nashville, Tennessee. So sit back and feel free to respond to said questions.

- Can we please call the tea party group for what they really are: a bunch of hypocritical, paranoid, reactionary, bigoted white folks who are being told, through Fox News and conservative talk radio, that President Obama is the second coming of Joseph Stalin? These people are protesting over the out-of-control spending that has taken place in Washington D.C., but have only began to raise their voices four months after Former President George W. Bush left office. So where were these group of patriots when he and Vice-President Cheney handed out billions dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, lied the country into an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, and handed huge sums of bailout money to the financial powerhouses who, thanks to years of unregulated activity on Wall Street and the private sector, almost scattered the country's economic infrastructure to the wind? Oh, its a Republican president, so he gets off the hook for fucking up the country for eight years. More importantly, these angry rednecks are beginning to see the writing on the wall: that our country is rapidly changing, and my generation has little or no need for the old prejudices or backwards-thinking social norms or customs the teabaggers are trying hard to cling to like a high school girl hangs onto her crush at the junior prom.

- Exactly what is it about gay people that scares some the tea-bagging community? This afternoon, Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court, had this to say about the president and his strides for equal right for gays and lesbians.

"[Obama] has ignored our history and our heritage, arrogantly declaring to the world that we are no longer a Christian nation. He has elevated immorality to a new level, setting aside the entire month of June to celebrate gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pride. He now threatens to change our law to allow homosexuality in our military ...

First, we are not a Christian nation! Just because the vast majority of Americans identify themselves with the Christian faith, it does not mean that the country, on a national level, adopts your religion! Plus, Congress would have made an amendment into Constitution recognizing the nation has adopted said religion decades ago. More to the point, why do rednecks fear the gay man, the lesbian woman? Do these people believe that they're carrying some disease that will spread to the rest of the population? Or is their fear based on the fact they do not fit the mold of what their world view should be for both genders?

- To my Republican friends: is this really the way you want to attempt come back into power? Off of the politics of spreading hate, fear and bigotry? When Tom Tancredo, the former Congressman from Colorado gave the opening keynote speech yesterday, stated that Obama wouldn't have become president if there was a literacy test in order to vote, do you endorse his words? Can you honestly look me in the face and claim that you support Tancredo's desire to bring back the Jim Crow-era racism that robbed millions of African-American men and women the right to participate in our democratic process? When I hear of stories of neighbors hanging Obama in effigy, or when I see right-wing supporters carrying signs that link the sitting president to Hitler, Stalin, etc. and misspelled racial epithets about the president, do you actually support this kind of extreme hate speech? Or do you turn a blind eye to such dangerous and reckless speech, that in your minds, the ends justify the means, as long as you reclaim power on Capital Hill? These people represent your party as a whole, whether you care to accept that reality or not.