I don’t agree with Whitman usually but I think most of the Party platform belongs in the trash. It needs to be short and with common sense. They ramble on and on so some groups can insert what they want. Our State Platform was a bad joke that belonged in the trash.
People don’t understand when you insert certain religious items in the Platform for schools, you open up the slippery slope to the Koran or anything else. Federal Government has no business being involved in most social issues either way — it belongs to the States.
I supported the Contract with America because that is something Conservatives can run on and be proud. There are no social issues in the Contract because those issues do not belong at the Federal level.
Social issues belong in my home, in my church, and my community and on rare instances at the State Government. The Feds have no right to tell my state what we can or cannot do and that includes Education. Feds should not be responsible for Education. The older I get the more State’s Rights I become. SCOTUS should never have gotten involved in ruling on social isues from a state. Their only rulings should be on the CONSTITUTION.
“There are no social issues in the Contract because those issues do not belong at the Federal level.”
Darn straight, they don’t BELONG there—but they ARE there!
Party policies/planks define and reflect an underlying philosophy. Whether or not those tenets be decided at town, county, state, or federal level, they’re intended to flesh out that underlying philosophy and to portray the default position of its standard-bearers absent deliberate disavowal by individual candidates (as if candidates are always candid!). Otherwise, why bother with party labels?
Part of the philosophy of today’s GOP, I think, is the notion that truth & error, right & wrong are knowable options, not exclusively as a result of Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization identity but as a result of common sense. The “social” issues I think we’re talking about here (abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, among others), issues never directly addressed in the Constitution, have come to be portrayed as religious issues only because certain religions, religions that espouse the knowability of right-wrong options (or natural law), still oppose them. Up until late in the past century, churches and “religion” in general needn’t have played any role at all in identifying and opposing these obvious affronts to natural law. It was common sense to believe that the deliberate killing of a preborn was at least as heinous as killing a postborn. Even if the former offense wasn’t punished (and in the overwhelming majority of cases, it wasn’t), the idea that such life-taking could become “legal” was simply unthinkable. Ditto the “right” of gay marriage, etc.
As to inserting “religious” items into any platform, it wouldn’t be necessary if newly enacted laws hadn’t already bullied their way into the federal square.
Very well said.