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If there is a nonentity in the Republican ranks for 2016, it is Marco Rubio, whose highest aspiration seems to be being the new Rick Santorum. Like Rick “Frothy” Santorum, Rubio is bubbling over with hate and intolerance, but there really doesn’t seem to be anything else there.

Maybe that’s why Pat Robertson hailed him as “the Democrats’ worst nightmare.”

If he only knew. We welcome people like Rubio. We’ve tired of Santorum. It’s time to move on. Bring on the stupid.

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With Republican candidates literally falling over each other to see who can exude the most bigotry, that sort of behavior really doesn’t set Rubio apart. As they try to outdo each other, their rhetoric becomes more and more senseless, more on the order of a prolonged comedy skit than a political dialogue.

Like Scott Walker’s bizarre “ultrasounds ought to be mandatory because they’re cool” shtick.

Maybe he can impose them on ISIL. That’ll teach ’em.

You remember when candidates used to talk about the issues? Here’s Rubio’s issue: marriage equality is “a real and present danger” to Christianity.

Rubio told David Brody of CBN’s “The Brody File,” that “We have to have policies, tax policies, regulatory policies, debt policies, healthcare policies that make us globally competitive.”

So why the hate? Does hating gays more than Putin’s Russia make us globally competitive, too?

Certainly nobody is going to try harder to make us globally competitive in hate than Marco Rubio. He went on to tell Brody:

If you think about it, we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater. So what’s the next step after that? After they’re done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech. That’s a real and present danger.

I am not sure what is more offensive: Rubio’s claim to be representative of mainstream Christianity, or his claim that giving people the same rights he has threatens his rights. I have mainstream Christian family and they think Rubio is…well, I can’t use the words they think Rubio is.

The fact is, much of what the Church has historically taught IS hate speech. The Bible is one long anti-Pagan diatribe.

Hate the other, is the message. There is another message: turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Do unto others. Blessed are the poor.

The Religious Right eschews that message. They prefer hate. Jesus is weaponized but strangely silent, because they can’t quote him without undermining that message.

Yet there are good people out there too, who take a live and let live attitude toward their neighbor. They have always been there. Those are the mainstream Christians. But those people generally lose out to extremists. They always have.

Extremists are ruthless, end-justifies-the-means thinkers.

Marco Rubio is one of those. A religious extremist. He says that’s just being Catholic. He says he’s a victim.

In fact, he says he’s THE victim. Poor Marco. Watching his privilege erode away as other people attain the same rights he has.

Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, sounds just like Rubio, and that same hate drives Cruz, which just makes Rubio’s job harder, setting himself apart.

Rafael said recently that marriage equality is an attack on liberty and “of course, if you don’t have liberty, you’re a slave and if you’re a slave, you can’t pursue happiness.”

So of course, marriage equality must be anti-constitutional.

First he has to prove that marriage equality is an attack on liberty, and we must request he and Rubio do better than the 2,000 year-old myth that Christianity is a persecuted minority even while it has spent centuries systematically eradicating every alternative to itself, while becoming the world’s largest religion.

I mean, the rest of us just laugh because the level of absurdity is so high. The world’s largest religion is being persecuted?

Right.

But Rubio soldiers blindly on, like every Republican candidate as confused about his own religion as the workings of the Constitution:

“Ultimately my view of it is you go out and do the very best you can and ultimately it’s going to turn out the way voters and God decide,” he concludes.

Of course, in American democracy, God doesn’t get a vote. This is, after all, government of, by, and for the people, as in “We the people” as opposed to “I the Lord your God.”

The voter will decide the outcome in 2016. God will thankfully have nothing to do with it. People like Rubio, who think they speak for God, on the other hand…

There is “a real and present danger” to Christianity. And it is people like Rubio, who are driving young people away in droves with their endless message of hate and exclusion.

You can’t get less American than that.