Conservative does not equal bigoted

I was a little disturbed to see this article on CNN today. Obviously, when you lose a bunch of seats in Congress and a presidential election, a party is going to be a bit in disarray. But I think this is a little wrong-headed -

Pointing to measures in California, Florida and Arizona barring same-sex marriage that passed Tuesday, Perkins said President-elect Barack Obama's election did not mean the country had embraced liberal social views.

"There was clearly no mandate to shift the country to the left on social issues," Perkins said. "What Tuesday was, was a fact that people wanted change, and it's a rejection of a moderate view."

This bugs me a little. I know a lot of conservatives (and on some issues am one myself), and I know a lot of bigots. They aren't mutually exclusive, but by no means does being one automatically grant inclusion into the other group. In my never-ever-humble opinion, a big chunk of what you saw this week had practically nothing to do with social issues, and was almost entirely about economic issues. People saw a Republican in the White House, their 401(k) plan in the shitter, and voted in the other direction. It certainly didn't hurt that Obama was the most inspiring political speaker I've seen in my lifetime, but if we'd been cruising along with cheap gas and a Dow over 12,000, it may have been a whole different outcome on Tuesday.

But the politics of hate are not going to be successful much longer, and that's what Prop 8 was about. If the Census Bureau is right, then in 2042 (significantly less far away than it once seemed) non-white people will outnumber white people in the US. That means that if you're only appealing to white people, you're going to increasingly have issues in the upcoming years. And the narrow Gingrich/Rove politics of the recent GOP will continue to have issues.

For the record, I'm not a Democrat. I'm a fiscally conservative socially liberal registered independent who voted a split-party ticket for both state and local elections, and I'm a little disturbed to see the huge Democratic majority in my local government now. I think it's better when there's some dissent, and would like to see the Republicans take back at least one house of Congress in the mid-term elections to create that dissent. I know a lot of people consider my support for Obama to not be fiscally conservative, but I at least hope he remembers what it was like to be broke, and tries to look out a little more for lower-income folks than McCain, who has never been poor. But hey, the only thing I'm really an expert on is my opinion, so there it is.