The GOP did not court the Religious Right, but has relied on it at most as a crutch because the Religious Right is mainly religious, not rightist, and fled to the GOP when it began suffering from scummy bigotry from the Left. (Same for those small-government types who want the GOP to return to its roots, who are broadly libertarian, standard American, but who by default find a harbor on the Right since the change of liberalism from libertarianism to government interventionism that began as far back as the 1880s.) If you were awake and aware, you'd clearly notice right away that the GOP frequently takes the Religious Right (and social conservatives, to a lesser extent) for granted (Huckabee was correct in his use of “back of the bus,” a timely statement this year) and cynically exploits it, tossing it a sop now and then to motivate them to vote Republican again in the next election. (And “beware of those Godless atheists!”)

The broader problem of the GOP is that it has been “me, too,” “Dem Lite” in its behavior, often perfectly at ease with “Big Government” (as the general phrase goes) in Washington, and even becoming the subject of corruption scandals there. (The history of the 1994 GOP “revolutionaries,” so many of whom are permanent “fixtures” now in Washington, says it all.) That they appeal to social conservatives to misuse government (which triggers the mentally ill among those on the Left inheriting the radical changes of the 1960s, the abhorrence of things being called “bad” or “wrong,” or ever being told “no”) is merely one choice they've sometimes made in turning Big Government to meet some of their own current constituencies' desires.