Much of the attraction of the Tea Party to Americans has been its avowed commitment to downsizing the government and limiting government’s influence on our lives and the Republican Party has been pleased to play to this mythic tribute to the so-called stubborn independence of Americans.
Recently the woman who calls herself the leader of the Massachusetts Tea Party was on TV demanding the elimination of federal support for PBS because – and I could not make this up – Sesame Street was such a left leaning – possibly Communist show. Her immediate example was that first lady Michelle Obama had been on the show promoting more broccoli rather than cookies for the health of child followers of Cookie Monster. So here was an incidence in her mind of an intrusive government forcing children to consider broccoli over cookies. (The irony that the Tea Party woman was quite fat and could have done with more broccoli and fewer cookies did not enter her limited mindscape.)
But while they claim to want freedom from government intrusion in their lives, Tea Partiers and their Republican soul mates are nonetheless committed to a strong and intrusive government role in limiting the rights of others, including gay Americans’ rights to serve in the military and to marry; women pregnant from rape or incest’s rights to choose abortion; artists’ rights to express non-conformist views of Christianity; Muslims’ rights to build cultural centers in their chosen locations; and American women’s right to ready access to birth control information and resources.
The Tea Party is in reality a loose confederation of people intent on telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do in our personal lives and committed to a government bent on forcing their narrow-minded social agenda on the rest of us.