Liberals on this forum are irrational

[Tiberius]

Question Adrian, and I mean this as a question to understand your views:

Hypothetically, if I were to poll randomly at a Tea Party event on the following three issues:

1. Same gender marriage
2. Abortion rights
3. Prayer in schools

...what kind of results do you speculate we would get? Would we find a socially liberal group? Mixed results? Conservative? Have any polls on social issues been conducted that you know of?

Interestingly, for the first two issues you noted (gay marriage and abortion rights), there has been excessive polling of tea party members. You only need to do a simple Google search for "tea party gay marriage" or "tea party pro-choice" to find a few articles that may be surprising to a lot of people:

1) http://www.mediaite.com/online/video-of-...tea-party/

A video from Think Progressive (yup, the progressive and usually anti-"tea party" group) shows the reaction of some tea party members at a rally in new Hampshire, where they were asked whether the legalization of gay marriage in their state had affected them, and what they thought about it. The reactions were positive; with most of those questioned saying it did not affect them, and others going as far to say "if you’re in love with somebody, then it’s all good".

2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-sapp/...37061.html

Another progressive website reporting here. It has links to polling results from politico.com and nytimes.com that show the majority of the tea party do not support government setting moral standards or defining marriage, and a "sizable majority" (65%) say that abortion should either be generally available, or available with limits.

More interesting poll data is here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010...tics#tab=0

So for those two, I'd say the Tea Party comes across as it should do: socially quite liberal.

I wasn't able to come across any raw data that covered prayer in schools, but my guess (and it is only a guess) would be that either we'd see the tea party siding with the majority of Americans (65%) who want prayer in schools, or that they would take a more "liberal" approach and say that prayer should be allowed, but not enforced.

I'm sure it is different for the four popular speakers you mentioned, but you have to remember that those speakers are all individuals. They do not speak for all the values espoused by the Tea Party. In the nytimes poll I linked to previously, 45% of the Tea Party stated that the goal of the movement was to reduce federal government, as opposed to cutting the budget (6%), lowering taxes (6%), Electing their own candidates (7%), Creating jobs (9%), Something else (7%), All of them (18%), Don’t know or no answer (3%).

Nobody agrees with their leaders on 100% of the issues, but they do tend to agree with them 100% on the issues that matter, and all 4 speakers want to reduce federal government, which is why they are speakers at the Tea Party rallies.

Lastly, if you want to see the "real" Tea Party, I suggest you look at the speakers who go to the smaller events. I haven't looked at his videos for a while (been avoiding YouTube recently), but Lee Doren (http://leedoren.com) always made great videos concerning the Tea Party. He is young, intelligent, and usually sticks to the issues of what the Tea Party is actually trying to do.