Where Have All the Republicans Gone?

I used to like Republicans. Okay, let me rephrase that. There was a certain kind of Republican I admired. Hell, I even wanted to be one of them. Part of me wished I had a father who wore green golf pants and knew how to mix a perfect martini. I longed for a tumbledown beach house in Maine, one that our family had been going to for years, right down the dirt road from Binky and Skitter Britteridge. (Pop went to Yale with Skitter, and Mom and Binky were at Bryn Mawr together, way back when.) You know what I'm talking about, Republicans in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller -- let's ignore the Rockefeller drug laws for the moment. Tall, patrician white people who considered themselves social liberals and fiscal conservatives. Remember them? Proud heirs to Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Fiorella La Guardia. What the hell happened to those folks? Christine Todd Whitman's got a manifesto coming out about the death of the moderate wing of the party, and at the same time, that wing nut, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, has her knickers in a twist about Buster Baxter. What's ol' Buster's crime? He's hanging with the homos.

Wait. Roll that back a minute. He's visiting American families. Mormons. Hmong. Families in trailer parks. And the children of a lesbian couple in Vermont.

Well that just won't do. Our fearless leader responds by holding a press conference quoted on the front page of the New York Times. He cites studies describing children who grow up in heterosexual families as better off. Except that's not true. The studies don't, in fact, show that. The studies show no difference. Not to mention my non-empirical data. Which shows no difference, either. In fact, the children of my gay friends are all way smarter and less neurotic than my own children. My friends Alison and Judy’s daughter Talia was cheerfully talking in complete sentences and planting kisses on her older brother’s cheeks while Rosie was still staring blankly at the ceiling and smacking her brother on the head with a mega block. So go smoke that, Ms. Spellings.