The Immoral Lifestyle Republicans Won't Condemn

[dalton99a]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/covid-vaccine-refusers-immoral-gop.html

The Immoral Lifestyle Republicans Won’t Condemn
They’re excusing the reckless behavior of COVID vaccine refusers.
By William Saletan
Aug 13, 2021 12:31 PM

Conservative politicians like to talk about morality. Over the years, they’ve portrayed various kinds of people as degenerate, dissolute, or reckless. But there’s one constituency these politicians won’t criticize: people who refuse vaccination against COVID-19. Vaccine refusers endanger their communities and the country, but they’re part of the Republican base. So instead of confronting them, Republican politicians are excusing the bad behavior, retreating to moral subjectivism, and trying to block anyone, including private organizations, from imposing any standard of personal responsibility.

Two months ago, at the annual Faith and Freedom Conference, Republican lawmakers targeted their usual list of villains. Sen. Ted Cruz asserted that “children do best when they’re raised by a mother and a father,” and he scorned pastors who didn’t preach this view of marriage. Sen. Ron Johnson decried “unwed birth rates.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn accused liberals of trying to “destroy our Judeo-Christian ethic” and force girls to compete against “boys who self-identify as female.” Rep. Barry Loudermilk declared that “God intended marriage between a man and a woman” and that “government assistance … should not be a lifestyle.”

The speakers also claimed to represent science. Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Steve Scalise, the House minority whip, made the case for banning abortions. “Life begins at conception,” said Scott. “If you deny that, you are anti-science.” Loudermilk made a similar case against people who claimed to be transgender or non-binary. “There’s two sexes—male and female—period,” he decreed. These assertions of scientific clarity, like the right’s assertions of moral clarity, advance a self-serving narrative: that liberals are gutless and mushy-headed—in Cruz’s words, that they cower in “moral relativism”—while conservatives are clear-eyed and resolute.

COVID has shredded this narrative. Faced with a right-wing audience that rejects science and behaves recklessly, conservative politicians have abandoned moral judgment. “Getting vaccinated is a personal choice,” says Johnson, and we should “respect each other’s medical decisions.” Blackburn agrees, arguing that if some people “don’t want the shot, it is their choice.” At the Faith and Freedom Conference, Loudermilk rotated effortlessly from piety to anarchism. Seconds after criticizing same-sex marriage and the welfare “lifestyle,” he told liberals: “It’s none of your business if I’ve been vaccinated or not.” The crowd applauded wildly.

[lees1975]

1. They abandoned moral judgement when they were duped by Trump into nominating him

Cruz is especially a spineless wimp. Trump attacked him by accusing his father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination and called his wife "ugly", hinting at her shady past, and labelled Cruz "Lying Ted", as if he had any room to speak. But Cruz came crawling back, proving that he is a spineless political whore, completely lacking in character and totally self-absorbed. He has zero credibility.

If Cuomo has to step down, the GOP has to come clean and let the hammer of the law smash down on Trump, against whom the accusations of abuse are evidence based and admitted to.

[Skittles]

2. their entire schtick is "owning the libs"

they stand for NOTHING and they no longer believe in AMERICA