No kidding. This whole situation is revealing who our friends really are.
"I am beginning to see that the there is going to be a split in the GOP...[...]...This whole Terri Schivio case maybe the breaking point. The religious people are getting fed up, and the power structure is just praying that she dies soon so they can go back to normal."
I think you're right. I am VERY ambivalent on this case, being essentially pro states' right and due process. I consider myself a low tax, pro-business pragmatic [what others will no doubt call 'limp'] Republican. Freerepublic has generally been a broad church where we can all josh and be welcomed - save usually for debates over Creationism, Free Trade and drugs. But this Terri case seems to have energized and split us like no other. I think Washington desperatly regrets getting involved and having geared up a movement that they can't control.
Interesting times, and it'll make for an interesting primary season in 2008.
"This whole Terri Schivio case maybe the breaking point. The religious people are getting fed up, and the power structure is just praying that she dies soon so they can go back to normal."
It is the breaking point.
First, the Bush boys both came up spineless. No matter how many times they say they "have done all they can do", and "are powerless", and no matter how many times their supporters echo that, it is false. It's a lie, and the religious pro-lifers know it is a lie. They could intervene, they CHOOSE not to.
Likewise, it was the REPUBLICANS in the Florida Senate who failed to pass the last state bill.
And REPUBLICAN judges have signed up for Terri's death on the reviews they have given.
But it won't be Terri's death that really does the Republicans in. The Bushes will be blamed, rightly, forever, and they will be diminished in the eyes of the pro-life right.
The bigger political story is that the Republican Party in the Senate is using this as an opportunity to back away from the Constitutional Option to override the filibuster and install conservative strict-constructionalist judges.
THAT will be the betrayal, if it comes to pass, that will split the party. Millions of pro-lifers will stop contributing, stop manning the phone banks and GOTV efforts, and they will stay home, heartbroken and unrepresented. Maybe an explicitly Christian Pro-life party will be founded. More probably, the demoralized Christians will drop out of politics and turn more fully to God and the other world.
And the result of that in the material world will be a new Democratic majority. Because without the pro-life Christians, the Republicans are the minority party in America.
Mostly, the shift to Democratic dominance will hurt secular Republicans. Christian pro-life Republicans are mostly poorer, don't have much in the way of capital gains or dividends, and are in the lower tax brackets. They benefit least from the Republican tax agenda, and would be hurt the least by Democratic tax-and-spend redistribution.
At any rate, they won't CARE. They organized and voted for the GOP because THEY believe life is sacred, and they believed that the GOP was the party trying to protect life.
In the Schiavo case, the Republicans in all three branches of government, at the Federal and State level, failed completely to stand up to the culture of death when the crunch came. They talked a good game, but bailed.
If they bail on the nuclear option, the Republican majority is finished. Absolutely nothing can keep millions of Christians in the party any more if that happens. And those millions of Christians are the margin of victory.
Of course, after a few years in the wilderness, the Christians might well form a Christian Life party whose central policy agenda is pro-life, and who cooperate with either the Democrats or Republicans on anything else, including caucusing in a Congress split three ways without a majority. Having a Christian pro-life party that was focused on the issue and only willing to enter into coalition if its views on life were respected would keep its allied major party honest.
But that might never happen, because Christians are not prone to be political. They BECAME political over abortion and life issues, and for 30 years SEEMED to be building something in the Republican Party. In one week, the Republican party completely failed them.
If the Republicans don't pass that Nuclear Option, the divorce will be complete and their star will fall.
Along with "who else will they vote for, the democrats?"
And the hue and cry that it's a states right thing; after wage and price control, minimum wage, unelected federal judges running school districts, the EPA putting people in jail for filling in a ditch or building where there's a bug, OSHA, ADA, the list is endless.
Yet all the states rights handwringing over trying to protect one innocents "life and liberty" is suddently the destruction of states rights.
Sign me a religious whackjob bible thumping nutcase (all of which I've been called the last week and frankly, quite proud of it).
I can see it here in FR. The religious right is treated at times like the minorities are in the DNC. Just vote straight ticket, and "we know what is best."
What a load of BS do they shove prayers down the throats of others or force feed you morals you may not want to follow.?
Lmao some people beleive that any mention of religion in public or in an open area is just to much must be rough to beleive in God and not want to be bothered with it !!