CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- The election of a new president for our country is at hand and the Republicans are again trying to make liberal Democrats into social pariahs when, in fact, the Republicans and the conservatives have ruined our country.

Since the Reagan administration and the conservatives have mostly taken over, liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they've taken from the right that they've tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles and handguns.

I am not a progressive or any other label the liberals have given themselves to appease the Republican conservatives who have managed to turn "liberal" into a bad word. I am a true, bleeding-heart liberal. I have been a defender of social justice all of my adult life.

This country has been ravaged by Republican politics, corruption and unbelievable hubris. I am worried that the Republicans will take the White House because of fear-mongering and outright lies and a Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited money to campaigns from corporations, after defining them as persons. Unbelievable!

Just think about this for a minute. Without the contribution of liberals, from some of our outstanding presidents to the protesters and organizers who founded the civil-rights movement, the ecology movement, the food and drug movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and the AIDS movement, would you want to live in the United States? I would not.

Our actions ended the horrifying Vietnam War and the disastrous war in Iraq, and our president has presented an exit plan for the war in Afghanistan.

We, as liberals, should be proud that we have made our country what it is today.

For instance, there would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or a Hillary Clinton or even a Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.

Remember, the liberals gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full voice to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression. An outrageous position.

Liberals gave us Medicare and Medicaid. My mom is on Medicare. How many of your moms and dads or your loved ones are benefiting from these programs?

Ronald Reagan saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism. He predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in America when men were free. Unbelievable!

Democrats often act like they are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real. In fact, when President Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said that older Americans no longer would be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.

Without the accomplishments of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to our young people.

Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for minorities and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long, and not yet ended campaign to change things.

Liberals ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination and are about to end sexual orientation discrimination.

Liberals gave this country Head Start and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air. There was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh or Charleston. Polluted rivers actually caught on fire.

Liberals made your food, your workplace and your children's clothing safer. Your ability, and that of your children or grandchildren, to go to college is incredibly easier. Most all of our children are able to go to college, if they choose to do so.

These are accomplishments that deserve to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned. Liberals have made the America we live into today for all of our citizens. The Republicans have made a paradise for themselves and not our citizens, and it must be stopped.

Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Howard Swint, who is running for Rep. Capito's seat, embody many of these beliefs. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Shelley Moore Capito do not.

Barack Obama captured and eliminated bin Laden. He revoked Don't Ask Don't Tell. He has stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act, and he is supporting revoking it. The auto industry is alive. He has signed into law the Affordable Care Act, the most far-reaching relief for the middle class since the New Deal.

Be proud that you are a liberal.

I am voting for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Howard Swint. I am not voting for Mitt Romney, the man who strapped his dog to the roof of his vehicle for a family vacation trip, or Paul Ryan, whose budget plan will gut Medicare.

Severino, of Charleston, is a founding member of the Pride Committee and co-founder of the Living AIDS Memorial Garden Inc.