I can clarify for Alex why Colorado 48 was such a loozer (73% to 27%) here, since I am in Colorado.
The media (radio, tv, print) was pretty much saturated with adds pointing out that Prop 48 would criminalize several forms of birth control, the estrogen based pill, RU-86, the “ring” etc.
Colorado is going to be painted blue for a long time, just based on the dumb quotient of the local GOP organizations.

Truth be told, many of the problems are probably mostly style. But honestly when I listen to most religious conservatives any more, it feels like I am seeing Cromwell’s Roundheads coming over the hill. Which is not a pleasant sight.

So the neocons brought us a disastrous war, the economic libertarians and pro-business types brought us a financial crisis, and the solution is to stomp on social conservatives? I would have thought they were the only conservatives remaining who weren’t totally discredited.

GW was neither a neocon or an eco-libertarian. He was a well-intentioned evangelical bumbler, a socon, that was trying to save the country from terror-from-abroad and a domestic recession that we should have had on September 12.
He simply wasn’t bright enough to understand that the 700 billion dollars he borrowed from the chicoms to finance the Grand Misadventure of the Manifest Destiny of Judeoxian Democracy was coming right out of our childrens pockets, and that the recession bubble could only be pushed out so far with Greenspan’s artifically depressed interest rates and Americans using their homes as ATMs.

y81 :
So the neocons brought us a disastrous war, the economic libertarians and pro-business types brought us a financial crisis, and the solution is to stomp on social conservatives? I would have thought they were the only conservatives remaining who weren’t totally discredited.

Wait, exactly when have religious conservatives been on the right side of history?

I would think that their opposition (in reverse chronological order) to gay rights, the MLK holiday, integration, interracial marriage, women in the workplace, and women voting — along with their active support of prohibition, poll taxes, Jim Crow laws… isn’t this a pretty thorough repudiation of religious conservatism since 1900?

(I do concede that some religious conservatives were on the right side of the slavery debate in the mid-1800s, although, of course, many were convinced with equal fervor that their God was on the other side. But still, even if you’re feeling charitable, 150 years of shutouts is a pretty scary track record.)

Religious conservatives were hardly proponents of Jim Crow. You should read the interesting book “A Stone of Hope.” Just as an examply culled therefrom, both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly passed resolutions in 1954 supporting desegregation. It may comfort some to believe that opponents of desegregation were religious yahoos, but it comports poorly with reality. (Yahoos maybe, but not religious ones.)

Now, if Andrew T is making the point that social conservatives, economic libertarians and neoconservatives are all equally discredited, leaving the conservative movement with nothing to do but join in the demand for gay marriage and the exposure of Sarah Palin’s fake pregnancy, then that may be true. I don’t see the point of such a “conservative” movement, which demands the exact same things as the left, but for different, better, “Oakshottian” reasons, but maybe some people do.

I seem to remember hearing that, as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has not imposed her religious beliefs on the people. That would help explain her high level of popularity will all, not just socon, Alaskans. Why, then, is she excoriated as an example of the religious tyranny that others are so afraid of?
Over the last ten years, as I have looked over web sites, I keep running into the same theme on libertarian leaning, and conservative economic leaning sites; that the Republican Party would only be improved if the social conservatives could be kicked out. You may not be advocating that here, but should it come as a surprise that social conservatives have become ambivalent about the Republican Party?
As for what you hear from religious nutjobs on the news, who do you think is going to get air time – the sane, but boring religious person; or the flaming whackjob?

Frank :
As for what you hear from religious nutjobs on the news, who do you think is going to get air time – the sane, but boring religious person; or the flaming whackjob?

I think the answer to that is clearly “Sarah Palin.”

y81: Strawman much?? The writer was not talking about refraining from throwing acid in the face, by talking about “the core principles of what Alex calls ‘religious conservatism’.” If it were, then religious conservatism would not be a lighting rod of controversey.