After a Crushing Defeat, the Religious Right Still Won’t Get It Right

[Lakhota]

By David Sessions

Christian conservatives admit Tuesday’s election was a stunning blow to their agenda, and they’re blaming it on the GOP’s narrow appeal. Did they learn their lesson, or are they signing up for four more years of partisan codependency?

If there’s one thing the religious right agrees on after Tuesday’s election, it’s that they lost—big time. Not only did Obama win reelection, but gay marriage won in all four states where it was on the ballot, and the two most outspoken senatorial candidates—one of whom was heavily funded by religious-right groups—were defeated.

“Last night really is a big loss, no way to spin it,” gay-marriage opponent Maggie Gallagher wrote the morning after. “Evangelical Christians must see the 2012 election as a catastrophe for crucial moral concerns,” wrote the Rev. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “It’s not that our message didn’t get out,” he added. “It did ... An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

It’s when the conversation turns to why a majority of voters rejected those positions—and what to do about it—that things get messier. In the wake of Tuesday’s liberal landslide, there has been plenty of overwrought analysis that has little connection to reality. Gary Bauer, for instance, blamed the Republican Party for downplaying gay marriage, which he insisted could have been the “winning issue” that motivated more social conservatives to turn out. (Actually, as many white evangelicals turned out as ever and overwhelmingly voted for Romney.) American Family Association rabble-rouser Bryan Fischer chalked it up to Romney’s Mormonism and the fact that he isn’t a “genuine conservative.” In the wake of the four ballot victories for gay marriage, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council predicted a violent revolution by America’s conservative majority if the Supreme Court makes gay marriage the law of the land.

But the emerging conventional wisdom in social-conservative circles is less dramatic: their message failed because the Republican Party failed to appeal to a broad enough base of voters. “We did our job,” top organizer Ralph Reed said at a debriefing the day after the election. “But we can’t do the Republican Party’s job for them, and we can’t do the candidate’s job for him or her.” Like hundreds of mainstream conservative pundits, the focus was suddenly on minority voters. “The map just does not add up for Republicans in terms of the present reality, much less the shape of the future,” Mohler wrote. “Put simply, the Republican Party cannot win unless it becomes the party of aspiration for younger Americans and Hispanic Americans.” Gallagher added, “Either we figure out how to win a much larger share of the Latino vote, or the conservative movement could be over.”

More: The Religious Right After Obama - The Daily Beast

 

[Lakhota]

An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.

Correctamundo! It's that simple...