At a Republican Rally

There is an old  saying that in this country people  have a choice between the evil party, the Democrats, and the stupid party, the Republicans.  Some people may prefer “bad” or “misguided” over “evil” to label  the Democrats, but it often is hard to argue with “stupid” to describe the Republicans.  A couple of days ago  Debby and I and a friend attended a rally for Senator Cruz at a local restaurant.  It was a lousy place for such an event. The small dining area  was filled  with a large number of people standing  in the spaces around the tables, blocking the waiters and waitresses and probably annoying people trying to eat. That, however, wasn’t stupid but  only excusable poor planning.

The stupidity came later. This was a purely political  rally open to all to fire up support for the Senator’s campaign against a particularly repugnant  Democrat.  Nevertheless the show began with a local politician giving a long and very sectarian evangelical Christian invocation, which clearly implied that Christianity and his kind of Republicanism were inseparable if not more or less the same.  One can assume  that our local Republican politicians know there are Jews, Hindus, Muslims, secular people, Buddhists, Unitarians, and other non-Christians around   whose votes count the same as any believer’s and whose support would help  Republicans win elections. Yet they purposely behaved in a way that such people  could reasonably have understood as signaling that this was a place where they were  not wanted and did not belong.  (Senator Cruz, to his credit, stayed mainly on topics of policy and  political ideology in his speech and when answering questions after it.)

The leftists have some very unpleasant things planned for this country.  In resisting them all Americans who value a free society need to hang  together.  It would be good if more Republicans were smart enough to realize that and act accordingly.