How The Romney Campaign Has Become A Modern Day Milgram Experiment And What It Tells Us About Romney's Dim View Of His White Male Base

In the now infamous Milgram experiment, an alarmingly high number of subjects were willing to deliver painful electric shocks to others if an authority figure in a white coat told them to do so. Readers who studied Psychology and remember the infamous Milgram experiment will notice that white male voters are now the "authority figures" in the white coats and Romney is the subject whose hand is on the controls that he thinks will deliver painful shocks to the people selected by the authority figures in white coats. And the manner in which Romney delivers these painful shocks tells us more about what Romney thinks of his white male base than he realizes.

For my readers who get all their news from AM Talk Radio and from Fox News, let me offer the following facts so you'll understand why Romney feels he must deliver pain to all but his white male base: 1. Romney is losing big with Hispanics, Blacks and Women. 2. He can't win the presidency if he loses with women and minorities unless he carries almost all the white male vote. It's the way he is trying to win that white male vote that resembles the infamous Milgram experiment.  Understanding what Romney thinks white males want him to do - to whom he thinks we wish him to deliver pain - explains everything he is doing lately - all his desperate foreign relations gaffs, all his flip-flops.

Romney, who once said he would get to the left of Ted Kennedy on same sex marriage, thinks white males want him to be against same sex marriage so now he is. Romney thinks white males want him to be even tougher on illegal immigrants than Obama (who deports illegals at a higher rate than any previous president) so now he utters all that non-sense about "self-deportation". Romney thinks white males want him to declare war on just about anybody with whom the US has even a minor conflict so now he talks about increasing the already bloated military budget, fighting wars on multiple fronts and how the recent Benghazi murders wouldn't have happened had a tough guy like Romney been president. Romney thinks white males want him to get their womenfolk under male control by denying them abortions and birth control so now this man who made $millions at Bain Capital by disposing of aborted babies through the Stericycle company, this man who once ran for the Senate as a pro-choicer, is now against abortion.

Let me be clear: in this modern day Milgram experiment called the Romney campaign, Mitt Romney is the guy behind a curtain where he is shown what he believes are electric shock controls. White males are the authority figures in white coats. But Romney doesn't wait for us to tell him to deliver electric shocks to gays, women and brown people. No, he just assumes that delivering pain to women and minorities will please us so he does it without hesitation and without even thinking about the things he is saying.

Romney's eagerness to deliver pain to people he thinks white males want him to harm tells us not only that he will do anything to get elected but it also tells us how poorly he thinks of the white male voters whose approval he is willing to win at any cost to women, minorities and brown people.

Oh, and for my friends and readers who get their news from Fox TV News and Talk Radio, President Obama will be re-elected. Handily. No, it won't be close. Why? Because there aren't enough white males like the ones Romney imagines to overcome his deficit with the women and minorities he has already written off.

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Higginbotham At Large Publishes no pseudonymous or anonymous comments. All submitted comments come to me for deletion or publication. I only publish comments from identified submitters. No exceptions. 

Rush Limbaugh Misrepresents Liberal Position On Separation of Church And State

On a recent broadcast, Rush Limbaugh said that this is how liberals interpret separation of church and state and the First Amendment: According to Rush, liberals think the First Amendment proscribes people like Pat Robertson or other religious people from running for office.

Rush may not have finished college but he knows full well that liberals don't think separation of church and state means religious people can't run for office.

What liberals believe vis a vis separation of church and state is that religious people shouldn't be able to use government to impose their religion on people who don't share their religion.

Some "issues" would vanish if religious people stopped trying to use government to impose their religion on the rest of us. Take same sex marriage, for instance.

The idea that marriage can only be "between one man and one women" is a religious idea. Without this religious definition of what a marriage is, there would be no basis for denying two men to marry each other or two women to marry each other. If same sex marriage were being opposed on grounds other than religious grounds, there would be no violation of the doctrine of separation of church and state and liberals would be open to hearing that argument but when opponents of same sex marriage oppose same sex marriage by using a religious definition of marriage, yes, of course liberals oppose that argument. We're OBLIGATED to oppose arguments that depend on a religious concept of marriage. The only way opponents of same sex marriage can deny tax-paying fellow citizens the right to marry the person of their choice is by using a religious definition of marriage and liberals, indeed all of us who understand separation of church and state, are obligated to oppose such religion-dependent, dare I say, "respecting an establishment of religion", arguments against fellow citizens.

Rush was probably throwing spit wads and daydreaming about football in Civics class, but even he knows that liberals don't believe separation of church and state means religious people can't run for office. What liberals think about separation of church and state is that religious people shouldn't use government to impose religion on others.

The recent flap over the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near ground zero and the flap over whether or not Barack Obama is a Muslim would not exist if our nation were serious about separation of church and state and if political candidates like Christine O'Donnell knew the 1st Amendment.

Why Jesus Would Support Same Sex Marriage

Gay marriage was back in the news again this week because former Bush administration solicitor general, Theodore "Ted" Olsen, filed suit in federal court seeking to overturn California's Proposition 8 and re-establish the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Conservative talk show hosts know that few things rile up their listeners like gay marraige so they took to the airwaves this week and asked their callers what they think of gay marriage with predictable results: call after call citing the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality.

If America were a conservative, evangelical theocracy with the Bible as its constitution, Bible verses against homosexuality might be the debate enders these conservative callers want them to be, but America is not a conservative evangelical theocracy. Had the founders wanted America to be a theocracy based on the Bible, all they had to do was adopt the BIble as the constitution of our new nation. The kind of Bible-quoters who find it inconvenient that the founders didn't adopt the Bible as the our nation's constitution are the same ones who find it inconvenient that the "City On A Hill" theocrats who landed at Massachusetts in the early 1600s were long in their graves before our post-Renaissance founders, many of them skeptics or deists, established this nation in the late 1700s. Yes, it's true that Puritans and Anabaptists first came to this land to freely express their religious convictions but it was not Puritans or Anabaptists who founded this nation. This nation was, in fact, founded by the likes of Thomas Jefferson who actually excised from the gospels the parts he didn't believe and published what came to be known as The Jefferson Bible.

When people say I should oppose gay marriage because the Bible condemns homosexuality, I ask them if they think the Jesus of the Bible would be against theft. When they say, yes, of course he would, I tell them that I don't think the Jesus of the Bible would condone theft either and that our government is committing theft anytime it collects taxes from citizens who are denied the freedoms and justice paid for by taxes. I tell them that whatever Jesus may or may not think of same sex marriage, we can all agree that injustices angered Jesus and that they should anger us too.

But there is a way for Bible-quoting evangelicals who think the US should be a Christian theocracy to have their justice and their theocracy, too, though I note with fascination that they never suggest it. If conservatives had the courage of their convictions, they would move to stop taxing gay people, to repay all taxes paid by gay people, revoke the citizenship of gay people and declare gay people to be aliens or visitors who are not entitled to the same freedoms enjoyed by straight people and not subject to the taxation of our great, straight nation.

Former Bush lawyer, Ted Olsen, is right when he says ""It is our position in this case that Proposition 8, as upheld by the California Supreme Court, denies federal constitutional rights under the equal protection and due process clauses of the constitution,. The constitution protects individuals' basic rights that cannot be taken away by a vote. If the people of California had voted to ban interracial marriage, it would have been the responsibility of the courts to say that they cannot do that under the constitution. We believe that denying individuals in this category the right to lasting, loving relationships through marriage is a denial to them, on an impermissible basis, of the rights that the rest of us enjoy…I also personally believe that it is wrong for us to continue to deny rights to individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation."