Excellent question

"Here's what gets me. Perry's views are getting denounced by all the usual lefty suspects, but not much of anywhere else. And the reason for this is something very odd: in modern America, conservatives are largely given a pass for saying crazy things. They're just not taken seriously, in a boys-will-be-boys kind of way. It's almost like everyone accepts this kind of stuff as a kind of religious liturgy, repeated regularly with no real meaning behind it. They're just the words you use to prove to the base that you're really one of them. Why is this?"