Fellow travelers.

Digby has it exactly right. Social conservatism is a widespread movement, but trying to make nice with it is a dead end. Nobody else likes finger-wagging, nose-sticking busybodies.* The equation isn't so difficult: not every Republican is a religious nutcase, but just about every religious nutcase is a Republican. They've mostly received lip service over the years, but on the federal level over the past decade, between the disappearance of the GOP's moderates and the ascendancy of the wacko Texans, that has changed. The political machine the GOP has built can't run without the fundamentalist foot soldiers, and the Bush administration places politics before facts every single time. So religion becomes politics and the next thing you know the president of the United States of America is advocating equal time in science classrooms for a theory that has exactly as much evidence supporting it as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, blocking stem cell research, proposing Constitutional amendments to make gaybashing the national pastime, and putting up Supreme Court nominees who have argued on behalf of Operation Rescue. Encouraged by the trend, some pharmacists start claiming a right to refuse to distribute birth control and abortion foes similarly take aim at Griswold vs. Connecticut.

This is the true face of the modern Republican Party: not John McCain, not Mitt Romney, not some steroid-swelled hack actor with a stars-and-stripes Speedo and a full quiver of tired, unfunny one-liners. The GOP's strings are now pulled by James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and an army of bigoted, angry Luddites just two steps removed from snake-handling who desire to be all up in your most private and personal business. The ritual obeisance of non-insane conservatives to the fundamentalist fringe in pursuit of lower capital gains taxes or an ever-expanding military budget or sticking it to the hippies or whatever it is that drives you to keep doing it, well, what Kung Fu Monkey says. No, you don't get a pass on this one. You voted for this clown after he TOLD you he would do this. You voted for this (well, this and becoming a state sponsor of torture and creating the largest deficits known to man and waging endless war based on utter bullshit, but I'm trying to stay on topic here).

When Traditional Values Coalition founder Lou Sheldon got up at CPAC and squealed, "George W. Bush IS our agenda," that should have been clue enough. When John Ashcroft became attorney general, that should have been clue enough. Hell, when Bush kicked off his 2000 campaign at Bob Jones University, that should have been clue enough. The lip service was over. The time for paying up on all the IOUs you've been signing over the years had begun. Thanks so much. When you'd care to rejoin those of us who prefer to live in a world where the Enlightenment happened, we'll be right here where we always were. I guarantee you we're a hell of a lot more enjoyable to be around than Jesus' Stormtroopers.

Just don't be surprised that we're still a little pissed off.

*When Hillary Clinton decided that Congressional hearings were necessary to discuss the great threat to the nation from a software patch that would let you see video game characters gettin' busy in a game that can only be sold to adults, I shook my head and thought, "That is why you will never ever ever be President of the United States even if you live to be two hundred years old and develop superpowers."