The problem isn't that the GOP is sociopathic to the core, or that it's willing to amplify and exploit every sociocultural rupture for merely another diseased vote, or that it can so easily cast to the Devil any potential concerns about political integrity or monumental constitutionalities or even common decency.
The problem, rather, is that the GOP has minor reason, as the NY Times framed it this morning, to be "worried about the risk of being seen as intolerant or not supportive of the right to freedom of religion." Because, to put it another way, the problem is that nearly 70 percent of the American public is, in practice, intolerant of religious freedom, as a CNN poll recently found about the proposed NYC mosque.
But let's go a bit farther. The even deeper problem isn't so much that the majority public is ignorant today, but rather that Americans in general have learned so little from all their ignorant yesterdays.
One would think that after a couple of centuries of flash phobias, baseless terrors and hysterical anti-isms -- anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, anti-civil-rights-ism, anti-gayism and all other manner of anti-Otherness, Anglophobia, Francophobia, Hun-phobia, anti-immigration, McCarthy-style anti-communism and its earlier manifestations of anti-Redism, anti-intellectualism, anti-rum and anti-rebellionism, anti- ... fluoridation? -- that we would have spiritually mellowed. By now.
Yet all that's required to revalidate our ignorance and reanimate our intolerance is the shortest match and grossest distortion, both of which, these days, the GOP is always happy to supply. When one ponders the party's deepest and most stirring roots -- its ideological ancestries of post-revolutionary republicanism and civic virtue and Burkean modesty -- one vividly sees just how far, for want of a better word, it has traveled.
Ironically, however, the GOP's lingering presence is now grounded almost exclusively in American sloth.