I fully understand the Religious Right’s need to explain the trouncing the Republican Party experienced at the polls and fight back against the idea that they were somehow to blame. I likewise understand their standard post-electoral trick when explaining such losses is to claim that the reason the GOP lost not because of the Right, but because the candidates and the party were not sufficiently committed to their right-wing agenda.
But what I don’t understand is this incessant effort to rewrite history, especially when the time frame at issue was just a few weeks ago:
Some pro-lifers, [Mike] Huckabee said, abandoned the Republican Party in recent years because it failed to stand up for pro-life principles. Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006 and then padded their majorities this year.
“We didn’t lose elections because we were pro-life,” Huckabee said. “We really started losing elections when we didn’t act like that mattered. And so, the people who really do care about issues — whether it’s marriage, life, Second Amendment — felt like, ‘If this party isn’t going to have a significant different stand than the Democrats, then why not just vote for the Democrats and give them a chance?'”
To hear Huckabee tell it, traditional Religious Right voters have started abandoning the GOP for Democrats because the Republican Party has abandoned the issues that they care about like marriage, abortion, and guns.
When did that supposedly happen? I’ve been watching the Right and the GOP pretty closely for several years now and I don’t recall them ever offering up a bunch of pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, anti-gun candidates. In fact, I don’t recall them offering up any such candidates.
And wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that the Right was crowing that the Republicans had produced the strongest pro-life, pro-marriage, most conservative platform in party history?
For some reason, the Right is busy trying to convince itself and everyone else that the reason the Republicans lost this time around was because they had become just like Democrats on the social issues that traditionally conservative voters care about which, as anybody whose been paying any attention knows, is not even remotely true.
