God's Own Party? Only in Their Delusional Dreams

Found this at the Concord (NH) Monitor and thought I'd share:

As friend Glenn sees it, the Republican Party, to which he has belonged since registering to vote more than 40 years ago, is today nothing but the legislative arm of an essentially alien - to him - religious movement.

A former U.S. Army tank commander and retired business CEO, Glenn is the prototypical crusty conservative Yankee, born in the White Mountains town of Bartlett and now living near Augusta. But he's alarmed - and disgusted - by what today's GOP leaders have turned his party into.

"If Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA, the GOP is little more than the political wing of rightwing authoritarian religious zealots," he fumed not long ago. With time on his hands and a good broadband connection even in his part of rural Maine, he's spending a lot of time reading and researching, and he's decidedly unhappy.

He is aghast at the unholy spectacle that self-professed holy people made of Terri Schiavo's last days on Earth. He's appalled that GOP leaders are obsessed with gay marriage and adoption, public school prayer and other totems of the religious right. He's angry that Republican stalwarts in Congress are filing bills calling for the "impeachment and conviction" of hapless federal judges who run afoul of religious extremists.

He's incensed that pandering Republican representatives think so little of our constitutional system of checks and balances that they're eager to strip federal courts of the right to rule on everything from separation of church and state and public display of the Ten Commandments to whether "under God" has a place in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I'm a bit aghast myself. Today's GOP seems wholly unrecognizable. And it's not just totally unfamiliar to us, who aren't GOPers, but to those who have identified themselves as Republicans for their entire lives.