By Frank Schaeffer on 12/17/2009, 1:32pm PT  

Guest blogged by Frank Schaeffer

Dear Republicans: I used to be one of you. In fact you'd likely have no "Tea Bag" movement if it hadn't been for my dad and me, and many others who, back in the 1970s and 80s, instigated the rise of the Religious Right. Dad and I were leaders of that movement. Then, after 1985, I got out, quit, left. But I hadn't given up on the Republican Party altogether. As late as 2000 I worked to get McCain elected in the primaries instead of W Bush. (Later, as a "thank you", McCain wrote a long and wonderful endorsement of one of my books about the military family.) When I saw the lies told about McCain --- and others --- by the Bush people and my old buddies on the Religious Right I finally quit.

These days I'm an Obama supporter. I'm also horribly aware that what we did, in bringing the Republican Party together with the Religious Right, is the root of one of the great American tragedies: the takeover of the Republican Party by very sick, simple and religiously deluded fundamentalists. And now you are out of ideas to the extent that all Republicans stand for is, well, nothing but obstruction.

What you've been doing in the Senate to stall health care reform is just too sad for words. And I take it personally. Who should I send my rising impossible-to-pay health insurance premiums to? Dick Armey?...

To the Republican jokesters in the Senate spending hours reading amendments out loud while trying to quash my health care by stalling, I add my voice to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who said from the floor of the Senate: "We have two wars, global warming, we have a twelve trillion national debt and the best the Republicans can do is try to bring the United States Government to a halt!"

After that stalling nonsense you Republicans turned to a "Prayer cast" to pray the health care reform to a halt. And, in that, we saw the absurdity of the convergence of all that is wrong with you. You are in bed with religious flakes from C-Street ("The Family") to the whole evangelical, amorally bankrupt, and hate-driven anti-gay movement and its whole cast of "characters". You are the people who like torture to be legal but not health care that's affordable. So to stall action in the Senate you brought in a bunch of right wing flake preachers who'd pray for defeat of health care for the poor!

Well, it's time to call it truthfully: the Republican Party is the enemy of America. You aren't just another party; you are an insurrection against law, living and love. You trade in hate and fear and religious mumbo-jumbo. You trade in "death panel" lies. You do all this instead of the job you were elected to do, which is govern.

You are doing to our whole country what Bush did to New Orleans after Katrina: looking the other way and playing politics while the rest of us go down.

You Republicans are the ones who --- to use your very own Sarah Palin's words --- are not the "real Americans." You are members of a lie-based evangelical paranoid cult.

Enough! If prayer is what you call for now, here's my prayer: May the Republican Party with its lies, hate, stagnation and obstructionism be swept away by our first black President's success against all odds!

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Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism).

His previous articles at The BRAD BLOG can be read here...

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