Over at ReligionDispatches, Sarah Posner uses
the list of anti-DOMA members in the House of Representatives to show
(again, correctly) why it’s a mistake to see Tea Partiers as economic
rather than social conservatives. I’d just add that there’s a
longstanding reason why the Tea Party has become the movement of the
moment for social conservatives. They joined the fray back in the 1970s
as opponents of what they saw as government-mandated secularism. Big
government has always been the enemy. Obamacare is just another
manifestation of it, in their mind’s eye.