The Washington Post reports on an Iowa Tea Party group that is more religious than most:
Every other week for the past two years, the Westside Conservative Club has met over breakfast at the Machine Shed restaurant to do what tea party groups do: share worries about President Obama, federal spending and government overreach.
But unlike in many of those other groups, another kind of discussion regularly occurs here, too - the religious kind. Those who come for the conversation and the Shed's famous cinnamon buns are just as comfortable talking about their opposition to abortion as they are about federal bailouts and debt ceilings.
At last week's get-together, for instance, businesswoman LaDonna Gratias pulled aside the guest speaker, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), to praise him for likening abortion to slavery. "It's a good comparison," she told him
I'm not sure why this is news. Despite the Tea Party's emphasis on fiscal and "constitutional" issues, there is plenty to show significant overlap between Tea Partiers and the religious right. In a survey released last year, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 47 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters are also Christian conservatives, and 36 percent are white evangelicals. Sixty-three percent say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and only 18 percent say that gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to marry.
In other words, if Tea Partiers weren't social and religious conservatives, they wouldn't be as interested in blocking reproductive health care for poor women and keeping gays from marrying in the District. But they are, and on the main, it remains true that the Tea Party is not much different from the traditional Republican base.
