A year ago, the Republicans who astroturfed the tea party phenomenon were adamant that it was a secular “movement” focused on fiscal issues and not on the culture wars. At that point, there was disaffection between the party and its extremist base. The GOP brand had been damaged by the incessant bigotry and invective streaming from the religious right, while the evangelicals and others were disappointed that the GOP had made so little progress on its issues — restricting the right to abortion and the civil rights of gays, for example — during the 12 years it controlled Congress and the eight years of the Bush presidency.
Lately, however, the tea party candidates have been backing away from fiscal issues, the specifics of which are political nonstarters — and trotting out old “culture war” issues from the 1990s. Top Senate tea bagger Jim Demint of South Carolina recently revived his call for banning from the teaching profession women (but not men) who have premarital sex and gays. Five of the tea baggers running for Senate — Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Rand Paul of Kentucky — advocate using the government to force women to have babies, even when the father is the woman’s rapist or a family member.
It’s not surprising then that this new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute finds that nearly half of tea baggers are holdovers from the religious extremist base:
Eight out of ten Americans who identified with the Tea Party were Christians and 47 percent said they were part of the Christian conservative movement, the poll found.
But the grassroots movement (sic) remains a small part of the population overall. Christian conservatives make up 22 percent of the population but those who favor the Tea Party only comprise half of that, about 11 percent of the population. An overwhelming majority of Americans, 94 percent, who support the Tea Party movement were white men and more than half were 50 or older, according to the survey.
The poll found overwhelming support, 80 percent, for Sarah Palin, and 75 percent opposition to Pres. Obama.
Another unsurprising result: 60 percent of the GOP-tea bagger base say their most trusted source of news is the Fox channel, which broadcasts Republican Party propaganda.
