Where did "empathy" go wrong?

Question: Since when did empathy become a bad thing?

Answer: Since the Republican Party went into meltdown and irrelevance, circa 2009

From Wikipedia:

"Empathy is the capability to share your feelings and understand another's emotion and feelings. It is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes," or in some way experience what the other person is feeling. Empathy does not necessarily imply compassion, sympathy, or empathic concern because this capacity can be present in context of compassionate or cruel behavior.

Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry:em·pa·thy
Pronunciation:\ˈem-pə-thē\
Function:noun
Etymology:Greek empatheia, literally, passion, from empathēs emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion — more at pathos
Date:1850
1: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner ; also : the capacity for this

See? You can tell, right here, above, what the Republicans would be so totally against, when it comes to empathy and President Obama's thought that empathy would be good in a new Supreme Court Justice.

"Understanding".

"Being sensitive to...", "expressing feelings, thought, and experience of another..."

This is all WAY too "touchy-feely" for Republicans.

WAY too feminine.

Shoot, for that matter, way too intelligent.

Republicans will have none of that.