Just how is it that conservatives seem to have been painted as black-lynching, witch-burning, Poland-invading grouches?
Some of us ARE witches (or close enough). The primary conservative party isn't exactly always friendly towards us. Most of us just want to do our thing and we don't have a reputation for being overly militant about it. Whiney, sure. Militant, hardly. If you ever find a Wiccan trying to force public schools to put the Reed up on the wall, you'll find other pagans staring at them like they grew a second head.
If you had to venture a guess, what is the political affiliation of the folks who have hassled me strictly due to my religious beliefs?
If you think gays in general have any reason to remotely think of conservative political groups in ANY sort of positive light... For better or worse, fundimentalist religious groups have tried to claim ownership of the entire conservative moment. I'm not claiming it's remotely true, but such groups have tried to promote it. Here's a general thought, if one side of an argument claims the other side is pure evil and an abomination in the eyes of their deity, the other side won't be overly eager to join forces.
Basically, roughly every complaint you can think up about liberals has some somewhat legitimate counterpart that can be made about conservatives. You can argue all day long about which is worse or better, but a lot of the accusations are hardly unfounded. Those idiotic groundless pseudo science comments a certain lady made? Uh, Rush makes a equally false comments that are just as groundless every time he speaks more than five sentences. Conservatives gripe about the destruction that the "war on poverty" has done to our country. Yea, entitlement programs are wasteful, expensive, difficult to kill and dependency forming. Well, liberals gripe about the "war on drugs", which is equally destructive to our country. I don't care that pot's illegal and I don't give two figs about it. Asset seizure laws DO scare the ever lovin tar out of me and wonder what the judges were smoking when they ruled it Constitutional.
"Tax and spend" liberals vs "Borrow and spend" conservatives. Do not even try to lie to my face that the GOP does not blow money like drunken sailors with an unlimited Visa card when they can do so and not lose political points of their voters. Gods, it is a sad day when a Republican administration makes Clinton's administration look like the very definition of financial prudence and restraint. Of course, the Obama administration wants to spent more than both combined. Sigh
It all adds up to a certain perception. Toss in the Us vs Them thing drilled into every human. Every group assumes the best about their own group, ignores the bad, and assumes the worst of the opposite group we choose to affiliate with. That's not a liberal or conservative thing, that's every human on the planet.
