The Latest Republican Hypocrite

Has there ever been a bigger group of hypocrites than the Republican party and its supporters? Don’t answer, of course there hasn’t been. Around here we’ve known that they’re hypocrites, but of recent it seems that Republicans are finally ready to come out of the closet and show the rest of the country what it is that the Republican party really stands for:

• Big intrusive government (i.e., government intervention in private/personal issues such as end of life decisions.)
• Deficits Run-amok (i.e., record deficits by the Bush administration, even though it inherited record surpluses when it first came into office.)
• War based on hype and lies (i.e., Iraq — enough said.)
• Advocates of institutionalized discrimination against fellow Americans (i.e., the anti-marriage amendment against same-sex couples.)
• Anti-Constitutionalists (i.e., mounting attacks against a co-equal branch and undermining its legitimacy.)

This list could go on and on, but I need to get to what inspired this rant: the latest hypocrisy by a Republican operative. Over the years we’ve seen Republicans use all sorts of social issues to drive wedges between Americans and to agitate the Republican base. In the last election we saw how Republicans used the anti-marriage amendment to get their base out on election night and, in part, to somehow unilaterally claim the mantle of being the party of “moral issues.” Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, far from being the the party of “moral issues,” Republicans are the party of moral opportunism — as illustrated by their crass misuse of the Schiavo tragedy. And now we have another example of the lack of moral integrity that the Republican party and its operatives lack, from the NYT (April 9, 2005):

Arthur J. Finkelstein, a prominent Republican consultant who has directed a series of hard-edged political campaigns to elect conservatives in the United States and Israel over the last 25 years, said Friday that he had married his male partner in a civil ceremony at his home in Massachusetts.

Here’s a Republican that, according to the article, has worked for the past 25 years to defeat “Democrats by trying to demonize them as liberal,” and yet when it comes to his personal life he rejects his party’s platform and, instead, avails himself of the rights “Massachusetts’ Liberals” have afforded him. What’s more, here’s a Republican that has surprised many of his conservative associates:

[T]hey were startled to learn that this prominent American conservative had married a man, given his history with the party, especially at a time when many Republican leaders, including President Bush, have campaigned against same-sex marriage and proposed amending the Constitution to ban it. Mr. Finkelstein has been allied over the years with Republicans who have fiercely opposed gay rights measures, including former Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and has been the subject of attacks by gay rights activists who have accused him of hypocrisy.

And here’s the clincher, this hypocrite rationalizes his lack of moral integrity by, according to an associate, claiming that:

[He] did not view his marriage as a political statement and had specifically decided to have a civil ceremony rather than a religious one. This associate argued that over the past 20 years, Mr. Finkelstein had identified himself as a libertarian and an opponent of big government, distancing himself from social conservatives as they have gained political muscle and dominance in the party.

This Republican’s lack of a moral compass — and the many others like him that exploit base social issues to ride the resultant backlash to power — fostered a climate wherein Republican politicians see the threat of violence against judges as a legitimate political tool and, too, a climate wherein dissent is considered nearly treasonous. And, while I wish the happy couple a long and joyous life together, I sincerely hope that Mr. Finkelstein, and all the other Republican collaborators that deny responsibility for the uglier element residing in the underbelly of their party, soon realize that they’ve violated this old axiom, leave the world a better place than how you found it; and, too, they’ve created an America that has stopped and may, in fact, be taking a few steps back on its long march towards democracy and towards a guaranteed equal protection for all its citizens.