Nineteen months after the first Tea Party rallies around the country, the political movement has gained steam. The message of ordinary people being fed up with career politicians and an ever-growing federal government has resonated with voters from Maine to California.

Unfortunately, other voices have threatened to drown out those seeking true change.

At last week’s Tea Party rally at Vicksburg’s City Park, a speaker railed about the decay of pop culture. Society had replaced “normal heterosexuality with abnormal, virgin homosexuality,” he said.

Other rallies have had their share of signs and speakers proclaiming President Barack Obama is a Muslim, Marxist or some combination of the two.

Are the Tea Party’s religious zealots and conspiracy theorists in the minority?

Yes. Most of the group’s members are simply ordinary citizens tired of government taking more and more of their hard-earned dollars for failing programs and bad ideas. It’s sometimes hard to see that, however.

The extremists in the party grab the headlines. Americans are entertained by off-the-wall speeches and theories, and those outside the Tea Party movement see only that.

Entrenched Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, have not been shy in their efforts to marginalize the Tea Party. Seeing the first real threat to their power base since Ross Perot won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 presidential election and 8 percent in 1996, the two ruling parties are quite happy to play up the Tea Party’s fringe element and play down the root cause of the group’s success.

The Tea Party started as a grassroots movement to take back the government from those who spend lifetimes profiting from it. In that goal, it has already been wildly successful. Thousands of American citizens have been excited by the feeling they had some control over the process, and several longtime incumbents have been defeated in primary elections.

If the trend continues, dozens more will be defeated in the general elections on Nov. 2.

Tea Party members, though, must be careful. Allowing the fringe element to hijack the movement will certainly result in it becoming another in a long line of failed third-party political movements.

There is great potential for true change with the Tea Party. It’d be a shame to see a handful of kooks waste that potential.