DeMint — Tea partier or conservative?

Jim DeMint told a Spartanburg audience last week that homosexuals and unmarried women who sleep with their boyfriends should not be allowed to teach in our schools.

Do you know what this means? Yes, Sen. DeMint was actually campaigning in South Carolina for once.

DeMint made these remarks at the Greater Freedom Rally, which is a group of people who apparently want the government out of their lives but shoved down the throats of everyone else. The senator has said this stuff before, he noted, and no one defended him.

'But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down,' he said, according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. 'They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.'

But apparently it's perfectly OK to fiddle with someone else's rights.

More and more, it looks like the two main forces within the Republican Party — tea partiers and social conservatives — are headed for a big train wreck.

And DeMint is straddling the tracks.

Inspectors needed?

On Tuesday, GOProud, a conservative, Washington-based group that supports gay rights, said that DeMint was 'trying his best to make Alvin Greene look sane.'

Jimmy LaSalvia, the group's executive director, said DeMint is apparently one of the people behind the efforts of big government social conservatives to derail the tea party, which is just beginning to percolate.

'Does he want yearly ... inspections to make sure these teachers are virgins?' LaSalvia said.

Yeah, like the FBI has the manpower for that.

Bottom line, DeMint spends all his time flying around the country, ignoring his home state and its harbor, then comes back to drop a wacky sound bite that will embarrass South Carolina. Again. And he's spouting two differing political viewpoints while he does it.

So which is the real DeMint — social conservative or tea partier?

'You can't categorize him,' LaSalvia said. 'This is out there in Crazyland.'

Exactly.

Liberty or values?

Now, never mind the implied message in DeMint's pronouncement — that it's apparently fine for unmarried men teachers to, well, go to town. This is potentially a big problem for the Republican Party.

The tea party folks don't like the preaching of social conservatives, and the social conservatives are not real crazy about the tea party's penchant for finding the nuttiest, most flawed people on the ballot — and then blindly supporting them.

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You can't go from impossibly high standards to no standards and not expect a few problems (See Mosteller, Cyndi, and her Nikki Haley news conference last week).

Now, DeMint is either just pandering to whatever audience he's addressing or he's trying to have it both ways.

Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. You can't be a Libertarian-leaning tea party king who wants less government intervention and a social conservative busybody who wants to peek through everyone's blinds.

That's the very definition of ideological hypocrisy.