I hate the Republican Party.
Not individual Republicans, though at this point I am hard-pressed to find a single one who doesn’t deserve the nation’s disgust and condemnation.
And that includes Republican voters as well as politicians.
There are a lot of reasons I say this, but one stands out from all the rest.
It’s what the Republican Party is teaching the nation’s children, starting with telling them that in a democracy it is acceptable to try to prevent certain people from voting.
Twenty-five Republican-led states have passed voter restriction laws since the 2015 Supreme Court ruling striking down the “pre-clearance” section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act because “it was no longer needed.”
Those states proved that what Chief Justice John Roberts said could not have been more naive. Worse, it gave Republicans the opportunity to enact voter suppression laws in the name of protecting the integrity of elections against voter fraud.
That argument was exposed for the lie it has always been by top Republican lawyer Ben Ginsburg who said he and a team of lawyers searched for decades to find voter fraud and came up empty. He went on to say – a Republican, mind you – that the real threat to the integrity of our elections is Donald Trump’s false claims that fraud was rampant.
At this very moment Republicans have filed dozens of lawsuits trying to prevent votes coming in the mail after November 3 from being counted even though they are postmarked before.
In other words, they want to stop democracy in its tracks because of a failure of the post office to do its job, something Donald Trump put in motion last June for this very purpose.
By their own actions Republicans across the country are telling our children that if a politician can subvert our democracy by suppressing voter participation and can get away with it, it’s okay.
And they call themselves patriots.
They are also teaching the nation’s children that the word “liberty” is synonymous with the word “selfish.”
That is how Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude described what the Republican Party is trying to convince Americans to believe.
According to Republicans, wearing a mask and keeping social distance are not ways to show concern for your neighbor, they are violations of your personal freedom.
No, it’s plain old selfishness and an awful thing to teach children.
It doesn’t stop there, though. The Republican Party is also teaching the nation’s children that ignorance is as good as knowledge.
Donald Trump believes his opinions are of equal value as facts and evidence offered by scientific research and study, and the Republican Party stands behind him 100%.
That tells children that knowledge is nothing more than someone’s opinion, which is a de facto way of saying there is no such thing as ignorance.
How ignorant is that?
Yet, it is the inevitable by-product of teaching children that telling the truth doesn’t matter anymore.
Donald Trump is a liar, period. That Republicans dispute this fact makes them complicit in the lies he tells and says to every child and youth in the nation that it is no longer important to tell the truth, that it’s okay to tell a lie if you think it will serve you better.
I really, really hate the Republican Party!
One other awful thing Republicans are teaching our children is not to take responsibility for any of their actions.
That’s what Donald Trump does. He possesses no moral courage to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong, which is why he said the other day that there is nothing he would do differently in the face of the pandemic.
He is not only a moral coward, he is about as arrogant as a person can be, and the Republican Party has no qualms about telling the nation’s children that refusing to take responsibility for your actions is okay.
Have I said I hate the Republican Party?
Not always, though, because the Republican Party hasn’t always been as decadent and dangerous as it is now.
Years ago when I was a young pastor in a small town I got to know several older Republicans with whom I spent hours talking politics.
As Republicans they believed in small government; as a Democrat I believed in an activist government.
That made our arguments philosophical instead of ideological, which is why we remained friends in spite of our political differences. Those were fun days.
My, how things have changed, none more than the Republican Party.
The party my older friends belong to was nothing like the Republican Party of today.
In fact, I am sure they would have never supported Donald Trump and would have left the party as many Republicans have done.
I doubt they would say they hate the Republican Party as I do. Old loyalties die hard.
But knowing them as I did I have no doubt they would wholeheartedly agree with me that today’s Republican Party deserves everything that is about to come down on its head in Tuesday’s election, especially because of the awful lessons it is teaching the nation’s children.
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