There’s a lot of inside baseball head-scratching going on about why the GOP lost, and one that is (naturally) getting a lot of traction with the media is the idea that some independent voters who leaned right were scared into voting Obama by the Christian right personified by Sarah Palin.

Marc Ambinder sums it up:

Is there evidence that suburban independents chose not to vote Republican primarily or even pluralily* because they worried about what Kathleen Parker calls the Oogedy Boogedy sect within the party? (i.e., Andrew’s Christianists, Ross’s conservative evangelicals.)? Lots of people assume that there is. This assumption is common more to liberals and centrists than it is to conservatives, of course.

Now maybe it’s because I actually live out here in fly-over country and, despite being an atheist, harbor none of the fear or loathing for these so-called “Oogedy Boogedy” people but I’m not seeing it.  It’s pretty clear to me that Republicans lost the election because they don’t practice what they preach any more.  Back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s when they talked about limited government and then backed it up action they did fine in elections.  When they started growing government and expanding spending but kept talking about limited government they begin to lose.

It really is as simple as that, and while I can understand why the “cocktail party Republicans” (as Limbaugh so hilariously puts it) wants to hang the election losses on the Christian right in order to cover up their contribution to the GOP’s fall - and while I can even agree with them to an extent in that I don’t think school prayer and gay marriage are going to be effective national political platforms any more, it doesn’t mean they’re right.

But what’s most interesting to me is how the GOP can be up in arms about Sarah Palin talking about her faith and God (and get mocked ruthlessly for it by the political and media elite) but Obama doesn’t get the same treatment for the whacked-out church he went to.

I mean, did these people not hear Rev. Wright talk?  Did they not follow along with his conspiracy theories about the US government inventing AIDS to wipe out black men?

You’ll get no argument from me if you say that creationism is goofy, but holding Sarah Palin to one standard with regard to her religion and holding Barack Obama to another is grossly unfair.