Posted on 06/25/2009 6:24:15 PM PDT by MadIsh32
Remember Jimmy Swaggart? He was the TV preacher who wept before America after a tryst with a prostitute. "I have sinned against you, my Lord, choked Swaggart through tears. I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgiveness." The fall of televangelism in many ways foreshadowed the decline of the so-called moral majority. The Right is now reaping what it sowed. By making social conservatism central to its platform, it left no room in the GOP for sinners.
Now we have the Sanford affair. Many on the Right had pinned their hopes on the SC governor. Hes a solid, smart fiscal conservative and liberty lover. Yet his political career will very probably dissolve. Why? Not because what he did was unforgivable. Because back in the 1980s and 90s, the Right set itself up to make hypocrites out of human beingsif but by association with Jerry Falwell under the Big Tent. That's why I agree with Patrick Ruffini here.
As I have argued elsewhere, it is time to purge the Rights politics of social conservatism.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenextright.com ...
Elected officials who lack character make for bad leaders. If he can lie to his wife and kids then please tell me why I should trust him with my money or my country’s LT future?
I couldn't disagree more! We are called to be salt, but everybody knows that salt left in the saltshaker does not improve the taste of your food, it must be mixed with it. We must have our "Bibles, virtues and righteousness" in our public life! As for Gov. Sanford, I voted for him, and if he gets his life straight with God and his wife, I would vote for him again.
The article said — As I have argued elsewhere, it is time to purge the Rights politics of social conservatism.
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Baloney with that idea.... that’s a liberal idea for ya...
Best these guys who don't like feeling they're preached at go join their quite sinful brethren in the Democrat party where they can run naked in public and call little girls whores and their mothers sluts.
If they really get into the Democrat "swing" they can die a minimum of 20 years younger than the average.
What is worse? -
Screwing a willing female partner
or the US People as BO and his constituents are doing?
There's a post by a liberal on a thread to a report on this saying something to the effect "and don't you repubs bring up Clinton did the same and stayed in office - this is different". It was answered (obviously by a conservative) with "Yeah, Clinton looked us in the eye on national TV and lied about it. Sanford admitted to it right off. Clinton got to keep his job, so don't say Sanford has to step down."
I do think Sanford should step down. Who can trust him, if his wife can't?
Uh, what does this have to do with President Obama?
This article talks about how the right has boxed itself into the “hypocrisy” box and every single time this happens to a Republican, its a blow to the entire right wing
I don’t care what you do in public life, and I for one encourage religion and moral values
I just don’t think its needed as part of a platform. It is a very liberal idea of expanding the government through social issues
What is this guy, an idiot?
Even if someone doesn’t particular care about the moral issue of adultery, how hard is it to figure out that if a guy can’t even keep his vows to his own wife, there’s no reason to think that he’ll keep his trust with a bunch of people he doesn’t even know.
That's not the fault of "Moral Majority hypocrites" so much as it is an extremely biased, one-sided press corp.
Further, I don't think of the Right's response to Sanford as a bad thing. It's bad that we take our own people to task for being vow-breakers and adulterers? I just don't see it. As for the Democrats, well, it's sort of expected that they'll be adulterers and corrupt.
If I got caught hooking up what that class of 'ho I'd cry too.
I remember Swaggart. And Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell both telling us that God’s gonna pull his prophet up to heaven right now if we don’t give enough. And I remember PTL Jim Bakker and his girl Friday. And I remember ABC news showing Bob Tilton’s discarded, slit-open-with-check-removed prayer requests in the dumpster behind his office. I remember how scared the Mormon heirarchy was when Mark Hofmann was a-forging and bombing his way to riches in Salt Lake City. And I remember the Mother Church hushing up so many rape accusations. Yes, I remember.
I agree with you. If a person wants to be the leader, then we should hold that person to higher standards. That person is human and subject to human failures but that person has chosen to lead, and leaders should be above reproach in their ethics, character and morality.
Even if someone doesnt particular care about the moral issue of adultery
Adultery is only a moral issue if society doesn’t have to pay the costs involved in cleaning up the mess afterwards. Adultery is far more of a threat to the US than Islamofascists and communists combined.
However, keeping my word and acting with solid leadership IS important. While I don't like Sanford's affair, it was not a dealbreaker. That's more of a personal issue. The way he went AWOL and handled it was a major black eye. If this was on vacation, announced, that's one thing. This was no leadership.
One thing that most of us conservatives dislike more than anything else is the hypocrite. Sanford was very popular because he was seen as one who walked the walk in his values. All of them. He has to re-gain his trust he had, starting with that of his family.
The BIG social conservative issue though is abortion. If this one is hit, then forget winning the white house.
My bad....wrong ginned up politician pic post.
Nonsense. I’m no social conservative. I think all restrictions on sex between consenting adults are silly and fly in the face of biological facts. People should have sex as often as they like, with whoever they like, and not promise anyone they won’t. But a state governor disappearing without even notifying his security detail, and turning up again days later thinking nobody will notice he’s just gotten off a plane from Argentina, is mentally unstable and not fit for any job which entails serious responsibilities. When we hire someone for a job, they need to be willing and able to do the job. Sanford is unwilling and/or unable to do the job of state governor, and this has nothing to do with judgmentalism on the part of the self-appointed “moral majority”.
I do not disagree with your post at all
This bizarre stunt of his was not only irresponsible & immature, it was an outrageous dereliction of duty. If you or I had done that in our own careers we'd be pink-slipped! This man took an oath to serve & protect the public's welfare & he thinks its his prerogative to run off without telling a soul where he's going whenever he feels like it?
So, the infidelity issue is an unnecessary distraction from the real issue which is that this guy's neither reliable nor stable & has no business serving as steward of that state's operations. The people of SC ought to throw this flake out on his ear for capriciously abandoning his post without regard for their welfare - an obligation he assumed voluntarily, btw.
Exactly. Even a part-time fry-bagger at McDonald's would be fired for this. Why is there even a discussion going on about "whether" Sanford has to resign? Of course nobody can make him resign, just like nobody could stop him from disappearing without notice to anyone, but he has to *either* resign or be fired very quickly.
Did any reliable pictures of his mistress surface yet?
Yep - I didn't see your post before mine. You pretty well nailed it.
Firstly: The people wanting to ditch social conservatives for demanding too much of their officeholders have picked the wrong guy for a martyr, IMO. In this case his breach of faith against his wife was far superseded by his breach of faith against the citizens he volunteered to serve. His infidelity should be a secondary consideration, if it's to be considered by anyone at all, because the first consideration (his dereliction of duty) is so serious.
And secondly, it's pretty darn funny now in late June 2009, having just watched Barack Obama nationalize a goodly chunk of the economy without so much as an audible peep of protest from the population, that the clearly dwindling numbers of free market/small government conservatives still hanging around (and I consider myself very much one) should think they have the influence to dictate to anybody else who should or shouldn't be on the GOP bus at this point.
I think instead of worrying so much who else is 'cramping our style, man' & weighing us down as so many of us have for the last decade, we need to get back to the business of convincing everybody else why we should have the right to be on anybody else's bus. We spend far too much time moaning & groaning about everybody else & alienating the allies we need to promote our agenda, that we've neglected to make our own damn case.
Open your eyes & take a look around economic & national security conservatives: at this point, it is WE who are teetering on total irrelevancy, it is now WE who have become a quaint vestigial artifact from America's past.
Those of us who support low taxes, free enterprise, small government & individual liberty are lucky to still be riding on anybody's bus these days, frankly. Given our manifest inability to carry our own damn weight & successfully make our own case to the public, the spectacle of us trying to push anybody else off the coalition bus makes us look absolutely ridiculous.
We're kinda like Norma Desmond fiddling while Rome burns, or something: crazily out-of-touch & still seeing the world through the fogged-up lens of when we DID hold sway back in the day. The sad truth is, if anything needs to be ditched around here, it's our own pathetic delusions of grandeur.
Yes, that may be the ironic part of the whole story. I only ever heard him talking up fiscal issues. Since he was becoming a national figure, some people were beginning to pin the presidential hopes to him (and I was one of them), but you have to take the whole package and the whole package will unfortunately never be elected now. It’s not the end of the world; I don’t think the future of America and conservatism rests on the back of any single person.
The scary thing is that this is largely attributable to wild-eyed social "conservatives", who are so fixated on abortion and trivial crap like gay marriage, that they let *everything* else slide. I swear, a lot of these people would eagerly hand over the White House to Karl Marx and replace the Constitution with Das Kapital, if the reincarnated Marx just promised to outlaw all abortions (and they'd conveniently ignore the fact that the promise would be promptly broken as soon as Marxist political power over the economy was consolidated).
Mark Sanford never made social conservativism the centerpiece of his campaigns. For that matter, neither did John Ensign.
I wonder where the people that agree with you are in this chart?
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