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Sunday, March 18, 2007

It's okay if you're a Republican

Susan Paynter has a great column in tomorrow's Seattle P-I. An excerpt:
Turns out, if my husband contemplated a career turn from journalism, he could run for president after all. This despite the fact that I am his third (and last) wife.

Of course, he'd have to join the Republican Party, a.k.a the party of family values, where divorce is apparently no longer the ballot-booth bugaboo it once was.

[...]

...None of the Democratic front-runners to date comes anywhere close to approaching the GOP record of marital malfeasance while, among the key Republican candidates, only Mitt Romney can claim just one wife. And, as a Mormon, he's the one plagued by misperceptions about that church and polygamy?
Alas, it seems that the leading old men of the Republican Party who seek their party's nomination for the 2008 presidential race aren't outstanding exemplars of the values the religious right professes to care about. Of course, depending on your perspective, that's either a good thing or a bad thing.

The trouble with purity begins when exceptions are made:
Last week even Baptist leader Richard Land, head of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, told The Associated Press that evangelical voters might tolerate a divorced presidential candidate.
If the religious right isn't going to adhere to a rigid canon, at least they'll be consistent - remember, it's okay if you're a Republican! Exceptions come standard when you wear an elephant on your lapel. After all, it's so much easier when you don't have to practice what you preach.

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