[SnacksOnAPlane]

Why are you associating those douchebags with the south? Newt I get, but aren't the rest of them in NYC?

The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.

I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

[creaghpatr]

Even Newt’s been in the DC machine for decades, he probably doesn’t even watch college football.

[CalChris]

Roy Moore and Newt Gingrich are about as South as South gets and they definitely campaigned against San Francisco values. Newt Gingrich essentially defined the modern Republican Party's approach to campaigning and governing.

[SnacksOnAPlane]

First, Roy Moore lost. It wasn't a resounding loss, but he did lose.

Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.

The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

Care to say what you experienced in Boston?

[ScottBurson]

It's been 35 years since I lived in the Boston area, so this may have changed some -- I certainly hope it has! -- but the ethnic animosities there shocked me, as someone who moved there from the DC area and had the idea that Northern cities would be more tolerant. I moved into an apartment in East Cambridge in 1982, in what was, unbeknownst to me before I got there, a Polish neighborhood, only to learn that a few weeks earlier, a Black residence on the same street had been firebombed.