Gov. Mark Sanford is in love.

That’s the only conclusion I’ve come to after watching and rewatching the press conference he gave this past Wednesday upon returning from his mystery tour of Argentina:

Pundits can argue all they want about the political implications of yet another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful crumbling under the weight of expectation (see Bobby Jindal, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, etc.). Religious leaders can pontificate about the sanctity of marriage, the need for forgiveness, and the importance of sending our prayers to Sanford’s wife and four sons. And prigs disguised as newspaper columnists can scream and shout about yet another politician who is guilty less of committing adultery than of divulging “too much information,” as if our tender eyes can’t possibly bear the sight of lightly erotic e-mails.

But those seem to me tiny issues when compared to the reality that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is in love – really in love – and that, in a remarkable public act of contrition/admission/confusion/desperation, he declared as much, for all the world to see.

Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t your typical post-affair mea culpa designed to save some horny politician’s career. Instead it was a cri de coeur from a man who had just made the decision to deny love for the sake of duty and tell the world about it, a man set loose from his moorings, rambling incoherently, reaching for words that weren’t there, crying out for, if not help, then at least a little empathy.

Of course, he’s not getting any. This is America, after all, land of sanctimony. Instead he’s receiving scorn and skepticism and moral condemnation – always, always moral condemnation.

And, to be perfectly honest, on most occasions I would be right up there with the rest of the vultures, heaping scorn. I would be luxuriating in the sight of a hypocritical, self-important, sanctimonious windbag getting his comeuppance for all those times he tried to crush other men of weakness from atop his own personal Mount Sinai (see Sanford’s role in the Clinton impeachment nonsense). But, I just can’t summon any ill will toward Sanford today. I hate everything he stands for, disagree with everything he fights for, and loathe those pompous claims about being a “man of faith,” made while he was secretly slobbering all over the seventh commandment in Buenos Aires. But I just can’t seem to make myself indignant. And the reason is simple: How can you attack a guy who just publicly sacrificed love in the name of honor or duty or family or religion or confusion over all of the above? That seems to me the very definition of kicking a man when he’s down.

Check out the video tape. This is a Southern Republican governor admitting to the whole world that he had spent the last five days crying in Argentina. That admission alone is political suicide: Americans can tolerate their politicians showing emotion but not on foreign soil.

No, I can’t feel hate. All I can manage is fascination. And pity. A whole lot of pity. And a little bit of awe at what we’ve just witnessed.

Indeed, Wednesday’s press conference was a remarkable piece of political theater because it wasn’t theatrical at all; it was just an unscripted display of human desperation. Sanford wasn’t there to renounce and deny his mistress; he was there to proclaim his love, in all its jumbled, self-destructive, incoherent beauty. It wasn’t just guilt that drove him to that microphone, but a need for human compassion and understanding, a desperate cry for help from a man who has convinced himself, though years of religious indoctrination, that love – even true love – outside the bounds of wedlock is a sin. This past Wednesday, we got to watch a man’s religious convictions crash headlong into his human desires on national TV.

Listen to Sanford at the 14:17 mark, when he says, “She lives thousands of miles away.” Listen to the crack in his voice. Listen to him mitigating his speech with ungainly phrases like “zones of protectiveness.” If that sounds to you like a man cynically manipulating his way back into the public’s good graces after cynically manipulating a woman into bed simply for the sake of getting himself off, then you’re more jaded than I am.

I watch that footage, I listen to Sanford calling his mistress a “dear, dear friend” and talk about their “remarkable friendship” that “sparked into something more than that,” and what I hear is a man thinking to himself, “All I want to do is leave this press conference, resign the governorship, jump on a plane, and get back into the loving arms of my girl.” Like Mark Antony, he’d be willing to sacrifice the whole world for this woman … if he could only find the guts to do it.

Problem is, Sanford doesn’t appear to have any guts, and it looks like he’s going to sacrifice the whole world and sacrifice the love he was sacrificing that world for and, as a consequence, lose both and get neither. What kind of thinking is that, Governor? You’ve come this far; you might as well go all the way. True, you mistreated your wife and deceived your kids and maybe even broke your oath to the people of South Carolina, but turning back now out of some deluded sense of religious obligation means you did all that sinning for nothing. It’s a rare thing to find true love in this world. Are you really going to throw it away out of guilt?

Remember, Guv, God spits out the lukewarm.

Pray for Gov. Sanford, religious pundits tell us. But he doesn’t need our prayers. On the contrary, we should all be so lucky as to find true love in South America. And despite my cynicism and my political prejudices, the simple fact is, my heart’s with the guy. Because anyone who’s ever been in love knows it makes you do crazy, self-destructive, embarrassing things.

And that press conference was so crazy, so self-destructive, so embarrassing, it could only have been orchestrated by a man in love.

The Republican Party Casts Out the Infidels, Goes the Way of All Flesh

The last few months have been a bit of a catastrophe for the Republican Party. From the defection of Arlen Specter to the ideological battles between popular moderate Colin Powell and Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney to the firing of small-time party officials who dared to question the words of Rush Limbaugh, the Party has managed to shrink its tent down to the size of the Confederacy (minus Virginia and North Carolina and Florida) and a few Plains States, give or take. Of greatest concern isn’t why Specter left, or who’s speaking for the party, or even how these events just might give Democrats the elusive filibuster-proof majority that will finally allow them to push through all their favorite Marxist,  Stalinist, and Maoist pet projects. The real issue for Republicans is the fact that they have successfully purged from their party almost everyone with even a hint of moderate feeling in them. Cut Maine out of the Union and the Republican Party might as well  be the political wing of the 700 Club.

The most amazing thing is that conservative Republicans appear to be happy about the situation. From RNC Chairman Michael Steele to Senate leader Mitch McConnell, from Jim DeMint to Newt Gingrich, from Sean Hannity to Rush Limbaugh, conservatives are celebrating the expulsion of the infidels from their holy army, as if purity and not political viability were the name of the Washington power game. Recent events go beyond the triumph of conservatives over moderates. They even go beyond the triumph of righteousness over compromise. What is really frightening for moderate Republicans worried about their party becoming an irrelevant fringe group is that the events of the past few months signify the triumph of orthodoxy over political competence, a doomed approach to democracy if ever there was one. Just ask Barry Goldwater.

Tossing the notion of a broad-based coalition out the window, the Republicans have staked everything on ideological fundamentalism, choosing to view political pragmatism and wide appeal as heterodoxy and sins worthy of banishment, even going so far as to promote the insane belief that it’s more important to win a primary election than it is to win the office. Former moderate Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who underwent a serious primary challenge from the conservative zealots in the Club for Growth back in 2006 (just as Specter would have in 2010), mourns this approach as “the celebration of ideological purity at the cost of winning elections.” Carrying on that tradition, Limbaugh celebrated Specter’s defection by pleading with the senator to take John McCain with him. And then there’s Republican strategist and Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros, who was able to put an optimistic spin on Specter’s leaving the same way she rationalized the switching of some 200,000 registered Republicans to the Democratic party during last year’s presidential primary: by claiming that “the pool has been skimmed of its lukewarm constituency.” Translation: We may never win a national election again, but let no one ever question our purity.

If the whole tone of this discussion is starting to sound a little religious, it’s because the Republican Party’s current struggles begin and end with religion. Particularly Christianity. And even more particularly, Evangelical Christianity. The Christianity of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. The Christianity of the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. The Christianity that got George W. Bush elected twice. With the rise of Obama, the loss of Specter, the defiance of the centrists, and the decline of the Republican Party to a regional regime serving cranky creationist white men who feel besieged by a rising tide of Other-ness (including, but not limited to, brown-ness, gay-ness, and science-ness), the chickens born out of the conservatives’ 20-year love affair with the Christian Right have finally come home to roost.

These days the Republican Party is almost exclusively the stomping ground of religious ideologues and moral arbiters. Gone is the necessary backroom dealing and clever compromising of politics, the oil that greases the wheels of the republic; gone is the strategic big-tent pragmatism of the Reagan years, replaced by the un-nuanced sermonizing, unquestioning devotion, and self-assured moral purity of a religious sect. For more than 10 years, the Republican Party has been led by men who either sprang from the Christian Right or were swept into power by them, so it makes sense that their approach to politics would take on a tone of zealotry. Take that, subtlety! Move over, compromise! We’ve got God on our side, and God does not make deals!

No wonder the Republican Party is so ill-equipped to deal with changing demographics, shifting landscapes, internal defections, and evolving voter priorities: Religious fanatics don’t tolerate changes, shifts, or defections, much less evolution. It’s a political philosophy that seeks for unambiguous fundamentalism in a world of messy reality. And what could be more Christian than looking for meaning and order in the meaningless and the chaotic?

Let’s take that notion a step further. Republicans have argued that a Jim Toomey loss in Pennsylvania in November 2010 would be better for the Party than a Specter win, for the reason that they will have proven the strength of their convictions and inspired fellow conservatives to double their efforts for the cause. But a Toomey loss wouldn’t be merely better; it would be glorious – an act of ritual sacrifice performed in the name of righteousness and the realization of God’s will.

In Christian theology, the ultimate loss is also the ultimate gain. Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself, to lose everything, in order to save the world. As such, Christianity is a religion predicated entirely on the idea of the triumphant defeat. Martyrdom, sacrifice, liturgical devotion in the face of secular temptation: These are the tropes of the Christian faith. So it makes perfect sense for a political party that’s been devoted to the tenets of that faith to see virtue and redemption – even godliness – in defeat, so long as that defeat comes at the hand of infidels and is suffered in the name of ideological purity.

Republicans are now facing a perfect storm of political irrelevance, a confluence of two inevitable and destructive outgrowths of their generation-long courtship of Christian fundamentalists. Not only have they grown political unsavvy as a result of all that ideological complacency – dooming themselves to appeal to an ever-shrinking constituency – they’ve also driven away the very constituency they grew so unsavvy courting. After years of disappointment in the party and their theologically imperfect approach to legislating, Christian conservatives have grown impatient with even the minor compromises Republicans have had to make in order to stay politically relevant, and, as a consequence, they’re starting to flee politics in droves. According to a recent article in The Washington Post by Kathleen Parker, there’s a war brewing among Christian conservatives, with the old-school, politically motivated wing of the movement, exemplified by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, losing ground to a new generation that views the impiety and shaky morality of the political world as the devil’s playground. As a result, more and more Christians are leaving the Beltway and retreating to the home, the church, the family, and the soul – where unspoiled idealism actually stands a fighting chance.

Once Christian conservatives realized they were only choosing a slightly lesser evil by siding with the Republican Party, while getting almost nothing in return – once they figured out that George Bush wasn’t going to make abortion illegal; once it dawned on them that Congress wasn’t going to push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; once they saw that opposition to federally funded stem-cell research was a millstone around their party’s neck; once they realized that they were being taken for granted by a cynical political force looking to gain an advantage in the electoral math – they were bound to pack up their things and leave Washington. Because unlike gun-rights advocates or environmental lobbyists, evangelical Christians don’t need the political realm to do their work; they can afford to be idealistic. If that group of Republicans couldn’t get the job done, they’re starting to realize, then no one in Washington ever will. So it’s farewell Babylon, and back to Jerusalem we go. Back to our homes and our churches and our shelters, to do whatever quiet work pleases Jesus best.

So where does this leave Republicans, that once-proud coalition now teetering on the edge of political irrelevance? With a party that’s not pure enough for the religious constituents that make up its base yet too pure for the rough-and-tumble, philosophically malleable, morally questionable world of politics.

Caught, it seems, between the sacred and the profane.