'Not a Nation Apart'

God, guns and gays. First time I heard this was more than 25 years ago, from a Democratic candidate for state assembly who’s now in Congress, explaining why rural America was going Republican. Didn’t ring true to me then, doesn’t ring true to me now.

When I was growing up on the farm in the 1960s and 1970s, Democrats represented our area. Today, it’s solidly Republican. Yet there were more churchgoers back then than there are now. Guns and hunting were deeply imbedded in the culture, still are. People in that neck of the woods were socially conservative and remain so, but are considerably more aware and accepting of differences in sexual orientation than when I was young.

As a new book on rural voting habits details, the caricature of rural communities full of Bible-thumping, gun-toting culture warriors badly misrepresents the politics of the countryside.

It’s not God, guns and gays that rural folks obsess over. Nor is it abortion that animates their politics. Rural Republicans are 10 pe…