The chairman of The Johnson County Sun in suburban Kansas City says his newspaper plans to turn away from 56 years of tradition and endorse a slate of Democrats this year.
Steve Rose writes that as a life-long Republican he is "shocked" by the shift in his newspaper and in his own thinking. It's not that he agrees with Democrats, Rose says; he just can't stand what the Republican Party has become.
Rose writes that the paper plans to endorse "Kathleen Sebelius for governor and Mark Parkinson for lieutenant governor; Dennis Moore to be re-elected to the U.S. Congress; Paul Morrison for Kansas attorney general; and a slew of local Democratic state legislative candidates."
Rose writes that he can't stomach the new GOP because:
It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.
It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.
It means anti-stem cell research.
It means ridiculing global warming.
It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.
It means immigrant bashing. I'm talking about the viciousness.
It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.
It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.
It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education.
Note, I did not say it means "anti-abortion," because I do not find that position repugnant, at all. I respect that position.
But everything else adds up to priorities that have nothing to do with the Republican Party I once knew.
3 comments:
I have been waiting for the revolution of thought to hit in Johnson County since I lived there. Now if Sedgewick would fall in line, there is a voting block that would change the tenor of politics in Kansas.
Now if I could just get my Republican friends to see it this way. Their party was stolen from them years ago. Barry Goldwater said it best. He was a strong believer that religion did not belng in politics.
Hey there, BlueInKS!
The significance of Steve Rose's column is that he IS a Republican, a lifelong, rock solid Republican, who can't stand his party anymore. Maybe not all Republicans feel this way, but many do now.
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