Texas Governor Rick Perry has demonstrated once again a major reason why today’s ultra-right-wing conservative Republicans are losers and will continue to be losers until they catch up with what’s happening in the 21st Century.
He’s the personification of the archetypal Republican Party loser: an angry old white man with his head buried in the Bible.
Perry declared emphatically last week that the Boy Scouts of America should remain a steadfastly anti-gay organization; not soften its strict no-gays membership policy; and never bend to the whims of "popular culture;… to have popular culture impact 100 years of their standards is inappropriate," he added
He simply will not accept the fact that politics is a popularity contest in which politicians are chosen by the whims of the popular culture. That’s the explanation for why Barack Obama got elected twice as President of the United States.
Fifty years ago Governor Rick Perry would have been standing in front of the school house doors right alongside his fellow traveler, Alabama Governor George Wallace, chanting: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
An Eagle Scout himself, in 2008 Perry authored the book "On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For," explaining why it should continue to embrace traditional, conservative values -- including excluding openly gay members and Scout leaders.
You see, this man actually believes in his heart that it is honorable and worth fighting for to discriminate against ten percent of the planet’s population simply because they were born, like black people, with a slightly different organization of genes and body chemistry than his own.
In his bigoted mind, God hates gays, therefore so does he.
That is precisely the kind of thinking that buried the Republican Party in the 2012 presidential election. A majority of the American people, to their credit, just as they did fifty years ago with racial discrimination, have soundly rejected those kinds of traditional conservative values.
Americans no longer believe that being anti-gay is a core American value.
Perry insists that the Scouts was a key reason he joined the U.S. Air Force and later sought public office; that society's failure to adhere to the organization's core values is a cause for high rates of teen pregnancy and wayward youth who grow up to be "men joining their fathers in prison."
Huh?
How in the world can society's failure to adhere to the BSA’s core value -- discrimination against homosexuals of all people -- be responsible for high rates of teen pregnancy? Doesn’t he know that it’s the heterosexuals like him who make girls pregnant?
"Hopefully the [BSA] board will follow their historic position of keeping the Scouts strongly supportive of the values that make Scouting this very important and impactful organization," says Perry. "I think most people see absolutely no reason to change the position and neither do I."
But the Boy Scouts of America, once an American icon illustrated in Norman Rockwell paintings, has become a dying organization just within the last decade because of their strident discrimination against gays and non-religious boys. That’s the reason why the Scouts are at least considering a change in their bigoted membership policies.
Perry said his views on the subject haven't changed since writing his book, in which he noted that profits would be donated to the Boy Scouts of America Legal Defense since "they continue to be under attack from the forces of secularism."
That’s the nub of the issue in the discriminatory thinking of Rick Perry. It’s “the forces of secularism." The Scouts have been sued repeatedly over their insistence on the right to government sponsorship and support while at the same time maintaining a religiously discriminatory membership policy.
The organization has been booted out of virtually all American public schools because to that – it’s why BSA is dying -- and Perry thinks it’s a shame. He’s one of those politicians who believe that government should sponsor Christianity.
"Governor Perry and the Boy Scouts are both completely out of touch with where America is going on this issue," explains Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group. "It's a shame that Governor Perry has chosen to be on the wrong side of history… There should be one national, non-discrimination policy. We can't quite wrap our heads around why that is so difficult to do in 2013."
Rick Perry can’t wrap his head around it.
That’s why Rick Perry is the archetypal Republican loser.
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