Once upon a time I was a staunch Republican. At least, I was raised as one, and had I been able to vote during the Reagan and Bush #1 years, I probably would have gone their way. My parents, being in the medical field, tended to vote Republican for fiscal reasons, and to this day I can get behind a fiscally conservative method of running the country. Unfortunately, the glory of the GOP has not been in evidence for decades. Of late, it has become the party of hate and intolerance, openly embracing those who foster racism and homophobia and sexism. That’s no longer a question of opinion, it’s a matter of fact.

Witness their candidates: Donald Trump and Mike Pence. The former is a terrifying joke and the latter is a dangerous bit of milquetoast who all but destroyed Indiana with his anti-gay and anti-woman agenda. That agenda now forms a very frightening part of the official Republican platform.

The sad thing is that the GOP could very much be a party with sound support and incredible power. Many of their basic tenets for financial responsibility are sensible. Their original plan to have less government in our lives (and bedrooms) was a hands-off live-and-let-live philosophy that I found compelling. And way back during Abraham Lincoln’s time, it was the Republican Party that championed equality for everyone.

EVERYONE.

What a turn-around a crazy Tea Party can make.

Since giving in to the early demands of loons like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, and Donald Trump, the Republican Party has been poisoned by what looked like a quick chance-grab for a few extra votes from the lunatic fringe. Since then, they’ve allowed the poison to take hold, and it has weakened and destroyed the GOP from within. The metaphoric Republican elephant has been taken down like the very real (now dead) elephant that Donald Trump Junior killed on a trophy hunting expedition. Hijacked by these internal terrorists, whose beliefs espouse “traditional” marriage and gay conversion therapy (in which a gay person is subjected to torture treatments to make them straight – look it up) the Republican Party has now woven such heretofore extreme beliefs into their official platform. It’s made it impossible for even sane Republicans to embrace their party without attaching themselves to blatant hatred and discrimination. You can’t argue that they’re not anti-gay when it is explicitly there in the official party platform. For any of my friends who can even entertain the idea of voting for Donald Trump, please understand that he and his party will work to make my marriage invalid. They will work to destroy the marriage of countless loving couples who only want to enjoy the same things our straight counterparts enjoy. They will work to dismantle the rights we have won – and to what purpose and end? How does my marriage have any bearing on them? How does my loving partnership impede on their marriages or beliefs? It has nothing to do with them – yet they seek out our love to destroy in the name of religion, and I cannot understand that.

Much in the same way, I cannot understand the Republican Party anymore. To embrace a person who has repeatedly made racist, misogynistic, and hateful comments about everyone not exactly like him, who supports a ban on people based on religion, who wants to build a wall to keep those seeking the American dream out is something I do not get. And I have yet to hear a substantive argument otherwise.

(We now return to our regularly-scheduled frivolous programming.)