Andrew Sullivan.com
EMAIL OF THE DAY (2003): After 9/11, I realised my position was unsustainable. Ever since my boyhood in Michigan, I had been a true liberal. I knocked on doors every day for months campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, and then raised over $5,000 for McGovern. I had my reservations about a President as right-wing as Jimmy Carter, but I held my breath and supported him right up to the eighties, which until recently I always looked back on as a nightmare decade. When Clinton won in 1992, I greeted it as a new dawn for America. I have long supported all the truest liberal causes. I want to see punitive corporate tax, compulsory sex education for five year olds, most of the military replaced by robed Buddhists who will disarm our enemies with a message of love, and all employment to be approved by the federal government. I want a total ban on guns and big knives, the Bible declared illegal hate speech and ultimately for America to become a Spanish-speaking Latin American country.
But when September 11th came, I looked around my country, and what I saw of my party made me ashamed to be a registered Democrat. Criticism after criticism was levelled against the war on terror. People said the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong. Now they say we won't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The current stock of Democrat candidates is terrifyingly left-wing, a disgrace to their country and to the liberal principles I thought they believed in. Hard as it may be for me to say this, I am going to be supporting Bush 100%. I don't think my principles have changed at all. I am the same ultra-liberal I always was. But my party has retreated into extremism and anti-Americanism, and I cannot belong to it while that is the case.
EMAIL OF THE DAY (2004): After Bush gave his support to the Federal Marriage Amendment, I knew my position was unsustainable. Ever since my boyhood days in Oklahoma, I have been a committed conservative Christian. I believe every word in the Bible is true. I don't wear mixed fibre clothing, I handle venomous snakes every Sunday and every four weeks I turf my wife onto the streets to fend for herself during the duration of that unholy time of the month. As well as getting the teaching of evolution and chemistry banned from my boy's high school and getting equal time for the Stork theory in sex education, I campaigned for Nixon, for Ford, for Reagan, for Bush, for Dole and for Bush again and when he came to office I really believed it would mean a better America.
But now I see an administration entirely in the grip of the religious right and that terrifies me. I am a true conservative Christian and I still believe what I always did. But look at what we now have. A Republican President publicly endorsing God's definition of marriage and refusing to submit to the expressed will of five of the Massachussetts Supreme Court's nine justices. To take such a major issue out of the hands of liberal activist judges is to violate everything our founders fought for, is to make the war on terror meaningless and the Constitution a lie. Hard as it may be for me to say this, I shall be voting Democrat next time. I long for the day when the Republican Party will accept my more moderate vision of America, and only hope they see reason and fight the right-wing to which the party has retreated.
