FACT: GOP voters are overwhelmingly older, whiter, and maler

[Hekate]

44. I contributed to that thread. As a human being, as a woman, as a liberal, I have tried...

... throughout my 66 years to keep from saying that all people of any particular category are the same.

People do outrageous things and I have been outraged. I'm sure that on occasion I have failed to moderate my language when I write, but it has been as sincere as religion that I do not to say that "all Southerners are racist," or "all Evangelicals are Dominionists," or "all Catholics are altar-boy diddlers," "all Republicans are *holes," or even "all men are potential rapists." It just ain't so. It's one reason I keep my human touchstones in my heart and mention them here when discussions get too hot: Jimmy Carter of Georgia, my next-door neighbor, the Berrigan Brothers, and on and on.

Therefore -- it does feel a bit strange to find myself an unwitting subject of the "all people" slur, and to see that some of my friends here are participating in it. Are they trying to make the point: "See that's how it feels when white people do it to us?" It doesn't feel like it somehow. Because what started out as something about the GOP kind of drifted.

There are a lot of rifts at DU these days. There are some here who want a really ideologically pure party -- but the definitions of purity vary from faction to faction. Now it feels as though there are some who also want to divide us along racial lines, and I just don't get that -- I feel like I missed something really vital here, or profoundly misunderstood it.

Final word: Either the Democratic Party is a big tent, or it isn't.