That, at any rate, is what DNC head Howard Dean calls us - we're just a bunch of white Christians, with the clear implication that being such means we're also a bunch of ignorant bigots. I've told the black and Jewish Republicans to stay out of sight until at least 2009, so as to not disturb Dean's worldview (I'm always very solicitous about the feelings of our Democrats).

US Today has an interesting op-ed from James P. Gannon, who details his switch from being a white, Christian Democrat to being a white, Christian Republican:

For most of my adult life, I considered myself a Democrat and voted for Democrats for president — from John F. Kennedy in 1960 to Bill Clinton in 1992. I began voting for Republican presidential candidates, and thinking of myself as Republican, only after it became abundantly clear that people with my views on abortion, prayer in school and other moral issues were no longer considered welcome in the Democratic Party.

A whole lot of us crossed over, taking our whiteness and our Christian beliefs into the party of the country-club set. We didn't feel so much that we had abandoned the Democratic Party as it had abandoned us. Borrowing the spirit of the "No Irish Need Apply" mentality of my grandparents' time, the Democrats posted a "no pro-lifers need apply" sign on their party doors...

That is about it - my grandfather was a Irish-Catholic American (pretty much in that order) and he voted the straight Democratic ticket from 1920 until 1980 when he cast the lone GOP vote of his life for Ronald Reagan. My father is actually still a registered Democrat, but hasn't pulled the Democratic lever for quite some time now...as for me, I was the first member of my family to register as a Republican (my still-Democrat uncle refers to me as "the Republican" in order to not cause confusion in the family). We were booted out of the Democratic Party because the powers that be determined that the support of upper crust trust-funders was more important than the support of blue collar and middle class conservative Catholics. So be it - we're in the GOP, the party of white, Christians...problem for the Democrats is we still constitute the majority in the United States; and we're poaching in the minority communities, too. In the end, we'll allow the Democrats to absolutely dominate New York, San Francisco and Hollywood...we'll take the rest.