Answer: No, just the Republicans

Another View — DMReg.com

MARK POTOK is editor of the Intelligence Report/Hatewatch blog and senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center

Dear Iowa,

I used to think you were a pretty straight-ahead place, what with all that flat land and healthy vegetables and honest living. I mean, Iowans rejected slavery 20 years before the Civil War and they approved interracial marriage a century before the U.S. Supreme Court. Homosexuality was decriminalized almost 30 years before the 2003 Lawrence vs. Texas decision did so nationwide. Today, control of the state’s Legislature is split between Democrats and Republicans and, a few characters aside, it is not known for political extremism. Like the corn it produces in such copious amounts, Iowa generally seemed a healthy and sensible place.

That idea of the state ended for me last week when I read the proposed platform released by the platform committee of the Republican Party of Iowa.

Are you people totally insane?

The platform is absolutely thick with ideas from the extreme right, lunatic conspiracy theories, and barely concealed hatred for President Obama and anything that smacks of multiculturalism. It sneers at science, is down on poor people, and despises, really despises, the United Nations.

Here’s a sampling of the deep-thinking goals of the Iowa GOP:

• Require candidates for president to prove that they are “natural born citizens,” beginning with the 2012 election. After all, non-citizens serving as president have been a longstanding problem in American politics.

• Reject the “claims” of global warming, which are “based on fraudulent, inaccurate information” and pushed by people using “extremist scare tactics.” The Iowa GOP “recognizes” that policies and laws designed to combat global warming are really “a plan to take our freedoms and liberties away.”

• Entirely eliminate the departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Interior, Labor and Commerce, along with the Transportation Safety Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• Likewise, abolish the Internal Revenue Service and repeal the 16th Amendment, which legalized the federal income tax.

• Eliminate the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which oversees job safety.

• Repeal smoking bans because, as the platform statement asserts, “We believe this to be an issue of liberty.” Air quality in all businesses should be left up to owners’ “freedom to choose.”

• Repeal all hate crime laws.

• Build a fence along the entire U.S. border with Mexico.

• Eliminate no-fault divorce laws and require “good cause” to get a divorce.

• End minimum wage laws.

an ideology that the Iowa platform committee says is all about the party’s main goal, which is “nothing more or less than a world set free.”

Set free, that is, from any connection to reality, critical thinking, or common sense.

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