Mr. Hines And The GOP

If you took a poll of  the students at Wheeler High School in the mid 70’s ( School Motto: Where The Leaders of Tomorrow Are Smoking in The Smoke Hole of Today), Roger Hines would probably be named the most popular teacher despite the fact his classes were difficult and he taught English.

I am happy to say that I survived a Roger Hines class despite having an IQ that is somewhere near Forrest Gump’s.  He was a demanding teacher that expected excellence. However, he was also one of the nicest people you have ever met and actually cared if his 17 year old charges read Beowulf.  (Beowulf

is the conventional title of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182-count ‘em-alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the reasons high school students contract Sudden Narcolepsy.)

I have two fond memories of my Mr. Hines class. One: there was a student who was super smart and was doing a paper on Acupuncture and Horses. At that time, there were not a lot of resources regarding this form of analgesia on humans, much less horses. He told the student, “You be the resource”, which I thought was a neat way of inspiring this person because 99.9 per cent of all the other teachers would have told the student pick another topic. By the way, my paper was titled, “Why Do You Park On A Driveway But Drive on a Parkway?”

My second favorite memory was Mr. Hines admitting that he would pick up and read few pages of a new Harold Robbins book at the bookstore when it would come out. For those of you that don’t remember, Harold Robbins wrote really fancy high class pornography. Mr. Hines added that he would always put the book back in the stack, disappointed that someone with such great talent would misuse it in such a way. This taught me that you could acknowledge someone’s talent without approving of how that person uses their talent. This helps out a lot if you are talking about Howard Stern.

This book was the basis for the Elvis movie, King Creole. Really.

Back in 2010, Mr Hines wrote a column for The Marietta Daily Journal in which he praised then candidate for Governor Nathan Deal.  I contacted Mr. Hines by Facebook and urged him to read and grade my  September 28, 2010 Humor Me post, "I Don’t Know How To Love Nathan and Roy”. He gave me an “A” in grammar and a “F” in content. That is a solid “C”, my friends.

Mr. Hines is now a regular columnist for The Marietta Daily Journal. He recently wrote a column titled “Does GOP Have A Future?”  It seems The Republican Party has lost two Presidential elections in a row and the reason, at least according to some, is that The GOP wasn't out front on this newly found Constitutional Right of two men marrying each other.

Mr. Hines isn’t too happy with this. He says, “If national Republicans continue to waver on the issue of homosexual marriage, I predict by 2016 the Republican Party will be split, having driven away its most loyal conservative base”.  He’s got a point. It has become very convenient to blame Evangelical Christians for the results of 2012 instead of the National Party’s 1998 computer model of voter turnout. In 2012 in Ohio, Obama’s campaign contacted everyone in their data bank three times on election day to make sure they made it to the polls.  The Romney campaign was still using dial-up.

Mr. Hines says, “If in 2016 Republicans nominate a candidate who caves on the definition of marriage, I for one, will not vote for that candidate. If there is also no third party candidate who will hold his or her ground on the matter, I will stay home”.

Frankly, my first thought reading this was “Dick Cheney”.  In 2004, the EVIL DARK LORD RICHARD CHENEY expressed his rather Libertarian view of marriage (that it was a matter left to the states) that even Barack Obama and Joe Biden hadn’t evolved to. But I think Mr. Hines is right in that a lot of Evangelicals are past holding their noses and voting the lesser of two evils which in most cases are Republican. The only problem is that we’ll continue to get the greater of the two evils.