Someone should have told Steve Schmidt that when you have a personal emotional stake in the strategic planning for your political party it’s time to back away from the planning table. Schmidt was John McCain’s top adviser and political strategist in the 2008 contest with Barack Obama.

As I recall, the McCain campaign was a tactical and strategic disaster that might have assumed catastrophic proportions if Sarah Palin had not been brought aboard to prevent the conservative base from walking away en masse. As it is, a significant enough percentage of conservatives stayed home, voted for third party candidates or actually voted out of spite for Barack Obama, to ensure McCain’s defeat.

Because politics, like the entertainment industry, operates on the “what have you done for me lately?” principle, it is not entirely inappropriate to ask Mr. Schmidt: what have you done for the Republican Party lately, Steve? Last I heard in November of 2008 you were leading the McCain campaign on a re-enactment of the Charge of the Light Brigade. How did that work out for you?

And now Schmidt is back, dosing out more of the very poison that brought the Republican Party down, couched in an anti-religious, pro-secularist psychobabble that would have left Ronald Reagan scratching his head in irritated bewilderment.

John McCain’s top adviser from the presidential campaign urged fellow Republicans on Friday to warm up to gay rights and warned that the GOP risks becoming the “religious party” with its opposition to same-sex marriage.

Steve Schmidt, in his first political appearance since the election, spoke at the Washington, D.C., convention for the Log Cabin Republicans — a grassroots group for gay and lesbian Republicans.

He urged Republicans, in the near-term, to endorse civil unions and stop using the Bible as rationale for gay-marriage opposition.

A civil union is one thing; gay marriage is another. And I take offense at the “religious party” swipe. Whether Schmidt and other RINOs want to admit it or not, Americans are, by and large, a religious people who generally believe in God and have a healthy respect for the Bible. The majority of the country is to the right of center and perceives marriage - for reasons not necessarily religious - as the union of one man and one woman.

“If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party,” he said. “And in a free country a political party cannot be viable in the long-term if it is seen as a sectarian party.”

A stupidly fatuous remark, but I can understand the line of reasoning that triggered it. Schmidt assumes that, because conservative Republicans generally are religious people (certainly more religious than Democrats), it follows their opposition to gay marriage is Bible-based. He then makes a false induction and assumes that, since the Republican leadership reflects the rank-and-file, it logically follows the Republican Party officially opposes gay marriage because it is condemned in the Bible.

This, of course, is nonsense. While it certainly is true that many Christian conservatives oppose gay marriage based on its condemnation in the Bible, most conservatives oppose it for no reason other than the fact it is not the norm of civilized society as we have known it since even before the days of ancient Rome. Even the Greeks (who often practiced homosexuality) and the Romans in the days of the Caesars (who accepted bisexuality) nevertheless did not regard the marriage  of two men or two women as the norm and would have considered such a union absurd and unnatural. Yes, there are historical accounts of such “marriages” and Nero is even reported to have conducted at least two of them, but I would hardly consider Nero the benchmark for ANY societal norm.

The basis for the union of a man and a woman may be found in nature among the higher species (certainly among primates) where propagation is possible only through the physical union of males and females.  Even primitive societies which practiced polygamy and homosexuality nevertheless acknowledged that the natural order of the world dictated males be paired with females. One doesn’t need Leviticus or St. Paul to comprehend this.

As human civilization evolved, this norm became ritualized and eventually codified as marriage: the recognition on the part of society that a man and a woman have pledged themselves to each other in an ostensibly monogamous relationship in which progeny could and in most cases did ensue. It ensured the familial and ultimately the societal stability that follows when a man and a woman establish a homestead for the purpose of rearing their offspring. It’s a perfectly natural evolution of the male-female relationship from its most primitive form in nature to its most refined form in civilized society.

To deny this is to deny the reality of the world around us; that two men pair themselves in a monogamous relationship does not mitigate the fact that such a union is a flimsy simulacrum of the natural order and no real union at all, because it cannot ever result in natural procreation.

In a colloquial nutshell: it’s just not normal. Normal - as society generally understands it - is a man and a woman joined together in marriage. Anything other than that is not normal and for the purpose of this discussion, we need never reach for the Bible at all.

Schmidt, whose sister is a lesbian and who supports same-sex marriage, said he understands the Republican Party probably won’t reverse its resistance to same-sex marriage anytime soon.

This certainly explains a great deal and I would not be surprised if there are some traumatic religious issues from the past lurking beneath the surface. If so, it calls into question both the gravity and balance of Schmidt’s judgment and leaves me wondering if his perception of conservative Republicans in general and their opposition to gay marriage in particular does not so much arise from a cold political calculus as it does from another, more emotionally tendentious, source. If so, I can certainly understand why he would be impelled to conjure a Religious Republican strawman.

Schmidt predicted gay marriage will create a bigger and bigger divide between the GOP and the electorate in the years ahead. He said that as young voters age, they may adopt conservative views on the economy and national security — but they will not abandon liberal, social beliefs.

Actually, the gay marriage issue is part of an ever-widening cultural divide that already exists between so-called Blue State and Red State Americans, with the overwhelming majority of Blue staters supporting gay marriage and the overwhelming majority of Red staters opposing it. These viewpoints generally extend even to younger voters and Schmidt of all people should know that the so-called youth vote is not monolithic on this issue.

Moreover, the divide of which Schmidt warns already exists in the GOP, with conservatives on one side and RINOs on the other. In the wake of the 2008 electoral disaster a pitched battle is now being fought for control of the Republican Party, with the conservatives determined to return it to its Reaganite roots and the RINOs determined to fashion it into a fiscally conservative version of the Democrat Party.

This would put the Republican Party at odds with a swath of voters, Schmidt said.

“I believe Republicans should re-examine the extent that we are being defined by positions on issues that I don’t believe are among our core values,” he said, while still calling social conservatives an “indispensable part of the conservative coalition.”

The swath of voters at odds with a more conservative Republican Party would be liberals - both Democrats and RINOs. What Schmidt - and most other RINOs - seem  to have difficulty grasping is the fact that the fault line for the division in this nation is no longer Democrat and Republican - it’s Liberal and Conservative. The traditional party designations - while certainly convenient for classification purposes - are ultimately meaningless when one considers the existence of RINOs and Blue Dogs. For every Lincoln Chaffee there is a Zell Miller.

That said, Schmidt is right when he refers to “social conservatives” as an indispensable part of the conservative coalition. They are its backbone and the foundation of the party itself. Lose them and the party will be marginalized for the foreseeable future.

Schmidt also said Friday that Republicans need to reach out, not only to gay voters, but young voters and Hispanics. “The rapid growth of the Hispanic-American population for instance could soon cost Republicans the entire southwest if we don’t recover our previous share of the vote,” he said.

If Schmidt thinks that pandering to Hispanic voters on immigration or social welfare issues will bring them running to the tender embrace of the GOP, he better think again. His prescription for this demographic is no less poisonous than his prescription for hot button social issues.

Once more we come back to what is becoming a chicken-egg conundrum for the Republican Party: have we been losing elections in the past 10 years because we have swung too far to the right or because we have swung too far to the left? Did John McCain lose the 2008 election because he was too squishy and moderate - thereby forfeiting a sizable chunk of the conservative base or did he lose because Sarah Palin was too conservative - thereby forfeiting a sizable chunk of the moderate and independent base?

Schmidt would likely argue that Sarah Palin cost John McCain the election. I argue that McCain was his own worst enemy and Gov. Palin exerted enough political gravitational force to hold in much of the conservative base who otherwise would have sat out the election, thereby preventing what would have been an electoral rout for Barack Obama.

The question will ultimately be settled this coming November in New Jersey. If New Jersey Republicans choose Steve Lonegan (an unreconstructed Reagan conservative) over Chris Christie (an unreconstructed Christine Whitman RINO) in the June primary and Lonegan subsequently defeats liberal Democrat Governor Jon Corzine in the general election in November, then Steve Schmidt - and all RINO strategists - will have to seriously reconsider the premises of their arguments and recalculate their political equations.

On the other hand, if Lonegan loses, then Schmidt will be in a better position to advance his strategy in 2010.

Time will tell.