Call the Vet

This is one of the pictures that Andrew Sullivan uses (The Dish) when he writes about a self-destructive behavior of the Republican Party.  Here's his latest complaint:

This is what so many on the right just don’t understand. Their very arguments against universal healthcare and gay marriage and immigration reform are all made as if the working poor, gays, and illegal Latino immigrants were not in the room. You think we don’t hear that in the tone and content of what they are saying? It’s the way in which people who desperately need healthcare are dismissed as abstractions, or in which gays are never offered any actual policy but avoidance and disdain, or in which hard-working immigrants – living in a kind of radical insecurity no white native-born Republican has ever fully experienced or imagined – are simply told to hang around for a few more years, or “self-deport”. That bespeaks a disconnect that obscures any capacity to govern this country as it actually is – rather than as they would like it to be.

Using empathy as one of the tools for making policy is a complicated balance.  It’s interesting that two prominent Republicans who support gay marriage have gay children.  Using empathy is complicated; not using empathy at all is often inhumane.