The Gay Debt

I am always amused by the human tendency to lump everything we dislike together into a big pile called "evil" and assume that it is somehow all connected. Here is Tea Party spokesman Bob Vander Plaats, explaining the link between homosexuality and the national debt:

When you start going away from core value issues, the ripple effect leads right to economic issues.

This is nonsense, of course; it was philanderer-in-chief Bill Clinton who actually balanced the budget, and the puritanical George W. Bush who sent us spinning into ever climbing debt. What ranting like Vander Plaats' does show is what the ever-growing national debt means to conservative populists. They have no conception of economics beyond a vague sense that we all ought to work hard and pay our bills. They don't know or care what the actual economic effects of deficit spending are or might be; to them it is just another sign of things going wrong with the world. From gay marriages in the society pages to terrorist attacks to rising gas prices to Spanish spoken on the street, they see threats to their world on every side. Government spending is a convenient proxy for the changes they want to oppose. Cutting spending (in the abstract, anyway) gives them a sense that they matter, and that they have some control over a world that seems to be sliding farther and farther away from them. They don't really care about the budget, and to take their budgetary demands seriously grants them a status as reasonable people that they don't deserve. They're just pissed off that the world is changing, and we ought to just shrug and get on with the business of changing it.