Party Switcher

Via Ed Cone, it looks like my red state just got a touch bluer:

State Rep. Russell Capps of Raleigh will be getting a most unusual Democratic challenger next year — the president of the Wake County Republican Mens Club.

Chris Mintz, a Raleigh financial planner, is not only resigning as club president, but is changing his registration to Democrat.

Mintz, 30, said he decided to leave the Republican Party because he thinks it is too focused on social issues rather than on economic issues. He also said the GOP is becoming less tolerant of different viewpoints.

"The Republican Party appears to be going further and further to the right," Mintz said. "It's really not the party for me any longer. I'm not bitter. I have a lot of friends who are Republicans."

"I think we are ignoring issues that are important — like education, economic development and health care," he said.

A few or more years ago, when I lived in South Carolina as the Republican Party was growing in strength, it was common to hear some former Democrats explain their switch this way: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me." That was usually a coded way to express opposition to civil rights, an issue which represented, unfortunately, a real problem for many people after the Democratic Party's embrace of it in the 1960s. But today, perhaps, we're seeing the mirror image of that old trend, as some people are starting to realize that a Republican Party increasingly obsessed with god, guns, and gays has left them.

Merry Christmas, Charles Darwin

This is very good news:

In an opinion issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled that teaching "intelligent design" would violate the Constitutional separation of church and state.

"We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents," Jones writes in his 139-page opinion posted on the court's Web site.

"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions," Jones writes.

Abso-freaking-lutely. You can get the full opinion here.

Have a Holly, Jolly Holiday

Such is the title of an article by Neely Tucker in today's Washington Post, which takes a really good and — yes — balanced look at the claims of those who are fighting the "War on Christmas". It's a good piece, and you should read the whole thing as they say, but this quote from Tucker Carlson during an interview on his show perfectly illustrates the silliness of this season:

"It is kind of heartening, I think, for Christians to see this, all this outrage, all this fear at Christmastime, you know, Christmas tree, Christmas carol, 'Silent Night'— oh, that's a, you know, that's a subversive song — because it means that Christianity isn't dead. It still has the capacity to scare people. It still gives people the creeps."

I'd like to make some kind of joke about how much Tucker obviously gets that whole spirit of Christmas thing, but the sad fact is that many people watching were probably nodding their heads in agreement as he went off on his fearsome Christmas rant. (OK, maybe not "many" people in some absolute sense — I don't think that "The Situation" has that big of an audience).

But if Tucker misses what the spirit of Christmas should be, he does get what it's becoming — a mixture of anger, resentment, and the need of the majority to ever-more dominate the discourse of the minority (variously defined as needed). It's Christmas, O.G.-style: "Say my name, bitch!"

In the end, maybe the secular celebrants have a better sense of how to celebrate the modern holiday — you show your superiority by how much stuff you can buy, not by how many people you can annoy with your rude and uninformed blather about the war on your mythologized version of Christmas. The former sure sounds like more fun to me. Happy Holidays!