Why I would actively campaign against Orrin Hatch if I lived in Utah.

A Facebook conversation with a high school friend who lives in Utah after I criticized senatorial icon Orrin Hatch, who said the following in a recent speech at a college in southern Utah:

“Gays and lesbians don’t pay tithing, their religion is politics,” Senator Orrin Hatch told a crowd of 300 at Dixie State College in St. George, Utah on Tuesday night.

I can't speak for anyone else but I do  consider civic participation in these times as vital to our own baby-boomer future and to younger generations -more so for them.

The days of polite pot-luck supper social interaction have disappeared - partly because more persons are willing to express their opposing political attitudes publically - which in theory should then promote dialog and conversation, a sharing of ideas and movement toward thoughtful solutions.

That's not what manifests itself coming out of the heart of Zion.

I cannot apologize for being someone who out of necessity has learned to read now even more than he ever did previously, who listens to what people say and write, asks questions and demands substance when someone tells me what to think and how to behave.

My regard for Orrin Hatch as a genuinely moral and non-partisan statesman disappeared in the early 90's when he and his party began putting party above country.

His speech last Tuesday at Dixie State College in which he declared that gay members of his church don’t pay tithing was nothing more than political demagoguery minus any significant social redeeming value. It was typical of how he and his desperate party need to re-establish legitimacy. He was preaching to a choir his party had created through emotional manipulation and conservative religious orthodoxy.

There was a time when I would have easily supported and voted for Orrin as a possible presidential candidate. I in fact was more ready in the 80's and early 90's to support Orrin - had he chosen to run - and believe that the mormon folk lore regarding the constitution hanging by a thread was playing itself out at the time.

I was more ready then to support Hatch than I ever was in 2008 to support Mitt, who had to run and campaign on that party partisanship that was self-limiting by virtue of the party's principal narrow philosophical and religious support base.

I write this as a political independent who left the Democratic party after the elections of 2006 and I am telling you how that silly Republican partisanship masquerading as some kind of pretended conservatism was almost totally blind to which way the wind was blowing in 2008.

Be grateful Mitt did not win that nomination in 2008. He would not have defeated Obama - precisely because of the way the wind was blowing. The majority gullibility that carried Republicans to victory in Bush's surprise re-election in 2004 was gone by 2006 and further gone in 2008.

Because he would have been as far behind Obama as was McCain, Mitt would have been also advised to cow-tow to the national evangelical voters by picking Sarah Palin as a last desperate measure to garner enough votes.

Do you think Mitt would have resisted and made a more responsible choice? Having paid close attentions to the content of his speeches, I have serious doubts. He was not much different than McCain in how he campaigned and what he had to say.

To see several politicians for whom I once held a high regard offer rigid, blatant and stubborn resistance to any ideas coming out of someplace other than the GOP has been a strong disappointment.

Today, that constant and consistent blind obstructionism holds all of us back - the whole country and in many ways, the whole world.

The Republican party made no bones about being against health care reform, for example. They also made no bones about not having any alternative ideas with substance.

Recently your state Republican party threw out the better of your two senators because he isn't radically conservative enough. Is that the best reason for replacing someone who has proven capable at what he does?

In my opinion that political gullibility is one of the principle reasons why your home state has voted against its own best interests in the last five national elections every two years going back to 2000.

I also believe that to be the reason why residents lack sufficient political savvy to demand more substance from the rabble-writers and rabble-talkers so they can form opinions and make decisions from within rather than given them from without.

If I'm bitter it's because I perceive too many anti-liberal opinions based on little substance and expressed as if someone was reading a handout from a party PR team.