Obama's victory is a harsh lesson for Republicans

[Atypical Liberal]

16. The key, and impossible passage here is this:

The key, and probably impossible passage here is this:

"That does not mean a conservative cannot become president. A pragmatic fiscal conservative with an enlightened view of immigration and a tolerant attitude on social issues could do quite well. Romney could have run as just such a candidate."

The problem here is that "social issues" are lost for the Republicans on two fronts:

First, there is this underlying fear of any kind of "handout" program. There is an underlying fear that someone, somewhere, is abusing welfare. There is this over-arching, incorrect feeling that most people, given the chance, would rather be deadbeats than productive. If you give someone who is hungry food, you will somehow breed legions of people who don't want to work for food. If you give someone who is sick or injured free health care, the quality of the care must be terrible.

There is an absolute refusal to acknowledge any benefit that taxpayer-funded services might have given them in their lifetimes. There is an absolute refusal, even disdain for the idea that virtually no one in modern society is entirely self-made.

I don't see this attitude changing.

The second, and bigger, problem here is that many of these "social issues" are really "religious issues". Birth control. Abortion. Contraception. Gay marriage. The problem here, as someone else pointed out, is that the Republican/Conservative population is essentially living in Victorian times, or rather they like to tell everyone they are. Like the Baptists who refuse to look each other in the eye when they bump into each other at the liquor store, Republican/Conservatives talk a good game about "family values" but invariably they are the ones with wide stances or some other peccadillo. I remember a study that showed that since 1945 something like 95+% of people had pre-marital sex. To hear the Republican/Conservatives talk, though, everyone before 1960 was a candidate for monasteries and convents.

Modern social morals concerning sexuality have changed, and drastically, even from when I was a teenager 20+ years ago. When I was coming of age, finding an uncle's Playboy was some serious shit. Today's kids have the internet, and are exposed to every kind of kink you can possibly imagine. Their attitudes towards sex are light-years more liberal than my generation. Today's young adults embrace sexuality and expect to be able to enjoy sex routinely and casually. That means unquestionable access to contraception and abortion. And it means and end to trying to legislate who can get married and who can't based on who has a penis or not.

And that attitude I don't ever see changing. The Republican/Conservative population is the final political refuge of the religious nuts. It is who they are. It defines them. Thus expecting them to change their attitudes on any social issue that revolves around sexuality is a complete lost cause.