perhaps what he really means is something like

"Because most bigots tend to be conservative does not mean most conservatives tend to be bigots."

And I don't mean this as a slam on conservatives, for example, there appears to be a very high correllation between wacko New Age mysticism and political liberalism, too; political conservatism tends to manifest itself spiritually as fundamentalist Protestantism, instead, but not exclusively. We all know of counterexamples such as atheist conservatives or Evangelical and Pentecostal liberals.

It is unfair to characterize any individual as a member of a stereotype because he holds an opinion or position peculiar to its archetype. Still, fairly or not, stereotypes usually have some basis in reality.

Personally, I believe that the current conservative movement had its roots in the Southern Democrat resistance to Civil Rights; Civil Rights at one time was considered a Republican philosophy going all the way back to Abraham Lincoln himself. I lived in the South during this period, and I noticed even as a child the merging together of States Rights, Strict Constructionism, Separate-but-Equal and a host of other Conservative proto-concepts as buzzwords and euphemisms for resistance to integration. Somehow, when the South went Republican, it adopted many of these positions and the Democrats suddenly became the party of Socialism, Big Government, Welfare,Civil Rights, Appeasement, Big Taxes, Softness on Crime and Atheism. These stereotypes are now so firmly established that they are accepted without question on the Right.

Today, when there are blacks in prominent positions in the Republican Party, these political roots are dissolved into ancient history and meaninglessness, but those old constituencies still survive as cultural groups. They may be diminishing in numbers and influence, but they are still there. They are still ugly, we all know who they are, and we can still recognize them when we hear them.