I'm very troubled by the "us v them" attitude that has invaded the conservative movement and this forum. For the longest time, the divide was between conservative and liberal except during general elections when predictably, the people would separate to promote their own candidate.
And then there were the individual subjects which caused dissention here and there - like Elian, the Westerfield trial, etc.
But now we see dissention all the time. As an example, there are individual posters on both sides of the evolution v creation debate who say the other doesn't belong at the conservative table.
The Lurking Democrats are probably gleeful.
Remember the Democrat convention when Gore made his acceptance speech? It was all about us v them - poor v rich, labor v. capitalist, homosexuals v boy scouts (they even booed the little kids.) He took the Democrat party back decades and messed up their chance of keeping the White House. Once rooted, resentment is hard to weed out.
I am also very much troubled over the group victim attitude. That's another liberal/Democrat trademark - where each victim distinction is a badge of honor.
We conservatives used to have a "stand on your own two feet" attitude - where being an individual was the important thing. What's with all this "woe are us" hand-wringing I keep reading?
Sorry to be so long winded, but I have one more point. It is not logical to say all Christian fundamentalists are the same. We are individual beings with our own, personal strengths and weaknesses ... just like everybody else.
Conservatives can surely have heated discussions among themselves. Where this ceases to be useful, IMHO, is where the point starts to be made that 'anyone who holds viewpoint x is not a true Conservative', as in the recent rash of 'Darwinism is Marxism is Naziism' posts. At that stage, one can hardly expect the targets to resign themselves to playing defense; rather, they themselves are likely to look at the credentials of the self-defined 'True Conservatives'. Thence the foodfight.
This has gotten worse recently, but it has always been a problem. Evos have done an awful lot of ignoring over the years. Almost all of us ignore f.dot, whose posts, if you actually take them seriously, are quite frequently hateful and occasionally obscene. There has been an organized campaign to ignore ALS and a cohort of the like-minded he has tracked in. However, threads are still getting killed or relegated to the backroom. At some stage, some self-policing has to be done. These people are posting, whether you like it or not, in your name, and profess the same beliefs you do. Unfortunately, Alamo-Girl, you are not the typical fundamentalist Christian on this forum.