Is party affiliation a disease?

I'm pretty liberal. No, really, I am. And I vote very heavily democratic. I have to admit that I'm even registered as one. But, as any liberal in SLC knows, that's a bigger political statement in Utah than it is most places.

But anyway...
This week, some evangelical groups began to fight back on global warming... not that we should protect the world, but that, for some reason, to argue that accepting the concept of global warming was anti-evangelical.

This isn't really about evangelicals, however. Religion-as-disease will wait for another day.

How is it that anti-gay rights, cutting taxes, belief in a strong interpretation of the Second Amendment, pro-death penalty, against art funding, etc etc became one side of a single divide? Is there some kind of diagnosable condition here? Some kind of syndrome? How do gun rights and belief that welfare is bad come together? Is there some kind of bug that apparently makes strong belief in a vengeful Christian God and a strong belief in the sacred rights of hunters and hatred of the French all the same?

In the spirit of fairness, why does patchouli, white dreadlocks, and liberal social policy all end up in a bundle?

I guess I'm just a little confused sometimes.

I dress pretty conservatively. I have a conservative (and these are the old style of the word) haircut. I am in favor of gay marriage. I don't hate the French (well, at least not as a political statement.) I was against the Iraq War. I am pretty strongly pro-choice. I am in favor of the death penalty, although I think it's so poorly and unfairly applied as to be untenable in the current context. I try very hard not to follow a party line or orthodoxy. More importantly, how does half the country not like welfare as a whole? Immigration? Free choice about euthanasia? How do they make it consistent to favor draconian drug laws but only a minimum of food regulation? How can they with a straight face say that Scooter Libby committed purjury about something that didn't break the law, therefore it wasn't "real" purjury but not remember that they themselves thought President Clinton had committed purjury about something that wasn't against the law, and therefore deserved to be thrown out of office in a constitutional crisis?

What the hell?