It’s fascinating to watch religious-righters fight among themselves over which Republican candidate is extreme enough to support for president in next year’s elections. Today we saw one religious-right leader, Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum, even redefine “middle class” in her attack on Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s proposed flat-ish tax.
Schlafly — who says nice things about Herman Cain and Rick Santorum in the race for the GOP presidential nomination — argues in a column today that Gov. Perry “want(s) to undermine marriage.” She’s angry that his tax plan, which she says has an “anti-family bias,” isn’t hard enough on unmarried parents. And in rejecting the claim by a Perry spokesman that the plan “protects the middle class,” Schlafly even redefines what “middle class” means:
“No; giving that size deduction to unmarried parents, defined as ‘individuals and their dependents,’ means rewarding bad behavior and is, by definition, outside the middle class. Regardless of income, you can’t be middle class without respecting middle-class values, the most important of which is marriage.”