Posted on 11/14/2010 3:38:40 PM PST by kristinn
A gay conservative group and some Tea Party leaders are campaigning to keep social issues off the Republican agenda.
In a letter to be released Monday, the group GOProud and leaders from groups like the Tea Party Patriots and the New American Patriots, will urge Republicans in the House and Senate to keep their focus on shrinking the government.
"On behalf of limited-government conservatives everywhere, we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the Tea Party movement," they write to presumptive House Speaker John Boehner and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell in an advance copy provided to POLITICO. "This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue."
The letter's signatories range from GOProud's co-founder and Chairman Christopher Barron a member of a group encouraging Dick Cheney to run for president and who has been known to post images of his bare torso to Twitter to Tea Party leaders with no particular interest in the gay rights movement.
As of Sunday evening, the letter had 17 signatories. They include tea party organizers, conservative activists and media personalities from across the country, including radio host Tammy Bruce, bloggers Bruce Carroll, Dan Blatt and Doug Welch, and various local coordinators for the Tea Party Patriots and other tea party groups.
"When they were out in the Boston Harbor, they weren't arguing about who was gay or who was having an abortion," said Ralph King, a letter signatory who is a Tea Party Patriots national leadership council member, as well as an Ohio co-coordinator.
King said he signed onto the letter because GOProud seemed to be genuine in pushing for fiscal conservatism and limited government.
"Am I going to be the best man at a same sex-marriage wedding? That's not something I necessarily believe in," said King. "I look at myself as pretty socially conservative. But that's not what we push through the Tea Party Patriots."
That indifference is essentially the point of the gay conservative group.
SNIP
TEXT OF LETTER
Dear Senator McConnell and Representative Boehner
On behalf of limited government conservatives everywhere we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the Tea Party movement.
Poll after poll confirms that the Tea Partys laser focus on issues of economic freedom and limited government resonated with the American people on Election Day. The Tea Party movement galvanized around a desire to return to constitutional government and against excessive spending, taxation and government intrusion into the lives of the American people.
The Tea Party movement is a non-partisan movement, focused on issues of economic freedom and limited government, and a movement that will be as vigilant with a Republican-controlled Congress as we were with a Democratic-controlled Congress.
This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue, nor should it be interpreted as a political blank check.
Already, there are Washington insiders and special interest groups that hope to co-opt the Tea Partys message and use it to push their own agenda particularly as it relates to social issues. We are disappointed but not surprised by this development. We recognize the importance of values but believe strongly that those values should be taught by families and our houses of worship and not legislated from Washington, D.C.
We urge you to stay focused on the issues that got you and your colleagues elected and to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests.
The Tea Party movement is not going away and we intend to continue to hold Washington accountable. Sincerely,
Christopher R Barron
Chairman of the Board, GOProud
Andrew Ian Dodge
Coordinator, Maine Tea Party Patriots
Pam Stevenson
Coordinator, Arizona Tea Party Patriots
Dianna Greenwood
Executive Director, New American Patriots (Ashland, OH)
Jim Mason II
Chairman and State Coordinator, Nebraskas Tea Party Patriots
Ralph King
Co-coordinator Cleveland Tea Party Patriots
Co-coordinator State of Ohio Tea Party Patriots
Jack Lien
Coordinator, Tea Party Patriots of Great Malls (Montana)
Tammy Bruce
National Radio Talk Show Host
JP Weber
Coordinator, Annapolis (Maryland) Tea Party
Doug Welch,
Blogger and member Southern Illinois Tea Party
Bruce Carroll
Conservative Activist and Blogger
Pam Stout
Coordinator, Sandpoint Idaho Tea Party Patriots
Dan Blatt
Conservative Activist and Blogger
Everett Wilkinson
Coordinator, Florida Tea Party
Jimmy LaSalvia
Executive Director, GOProud
Paul Crockett
President Santa Clara (California) Tea Party
David Thor Andreasen
Cumberland County (Maine) Tea Party
“Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests
of society require the observation of those moral precepts ... in
which all religions agree.” —Thomas Jefferson
>>They can only resolve a handful of issues per cycle.
That’s right, so I’m sure you won’t mind if DADT stays as is and prevents homosexuals from openly acquiring power in the military - and allows them to be expelled when they are discovered where they are not supposed to be.
I try to disconnect my strategic thinking from my emotions. Strategically, the easiest way to kill the beast is to starve it to death. Reduce its power to move and react and when it’s weak strike and end it for all time.
We must incrementally take over the courts and defund the programs that enable government to lord over us. The vacuum will leave the states in control, where power should reside in our republic.
I here what you are saying and I agree the government is being used for nefarous purposes. However, we must keep a calm and cool head and disconnect our emotions from our strategy making. One need not be (religiously) passionate about pursuing the correct ends. I’m past being “emotional” about my intentions and now I’m acting on past decisions, coldly, precisely and without regret.
We want liberty (as equated with depravity) but we dont want to pay for the consequences
BINGO!
Absolutely not! And it was also never intended to be a tool for evil! They cannot FORCE atheism or abortion or homosexual marriage on us any more than they can legally take away our guns or over tax us or force us to buy an insurance policy against our will.
America was founded on the principle that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are the rights to Life and Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness!! Look it up!
Limited government! Individual Liberty!
The government needs to butt OUT!!
As it is the liberals run rough-shod over us and the evil they cannot accomplish legislatively, the scum in black robes takes care of for them. Time to bring back tar and feathers!!
DON'T TREAD ON ME!!!
Huh.. The tentacles of the homosexual subculture are everywhere.
Amen Jim. I hope and pray we can restore power to the states and neuter the federal abomination. Every year the government gets bigger and takes more, it’s time to reverse the trend. I have high hopes now that we’ve retaken the house.
You sound just like the Siren who attempts to convince the sailor their are no jagged rocks beneath those calm waters... You cannot separate social from fiscal... one entails the other. You cannot separate morality from government... one requires the other. Amoral or immoral men cannot govern themselves:
In A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791, Edmund Burke wrote: What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves.
Edmund Burke continued: Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
This portion particularly applies to those holding your opinions:
“...in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves.”
Those words by Burke are among my all time favorite quotes.
>But why open up a second, unnecessary front on the battlefield?
Note the tagline ...
A: Individuals operating within the constraint of a moral frameworkorB: Activists operating however their animalistic urges tell them to.
Jefferson would’ve been a FReeper.
Jefferson wouldve been a FReeper.
and a RINO :)
“So if someone decides to become a alcoholic, I do not have to hire him, I have a right to fire him, I dont have to pay for his treatment through taxes or increase in my health insurance cost. Alcoholism his problem and he must take responsibility for it.”
One of the problems with prop 19 was that it restricted employers from doing anything if their employees were known to have used pot.
Indeed!
A lot of our problems these days stem from the disproportionate distribution of government. We should be paying more in State Taxes than Federal Taxes. In fact they should be flip-flopped for starters. We have more say on who our state legislators are than we do for who our senators and federal representatives. When we have so little say over the people who legislate such intimate details of our lives on a federal level the balance should be moved more to a state level.
This makes America stronger as policies that are abysmal do not impart they tyranny against the entire nation. The sick an tired liberal dogma of “diversity is strength” was completely ignored when those same liberal attempt to push us all under the umbrella of federal dictation. Diversity IS strength when applied to giving more of the control into the individual states. The problem is the progressives have brainwashed most Americans that it is the federal government’s place to act as emotional janitor when it comes to dealing with the “squishy issues” such as social welfare, health care, education, etc...
We are most certainly NOT a Democracy, we are a Republic and keeping the politics more local gives the people who pick their representatives far more power.
“Power to the People” in the context of the 60’s radicals means to become a Democracy where mob rule trumps over any minority viewpoint even in areas of a country where people have more traditional values than their urban dwelling counterparts.
“Power to the People” as our founders intentioned means we give the states and the people within those states the power to make good decisions and sometimes mistakes. This distributed power makes the country stronger as a result. One bad decision in one state’s capital doesn’t bring down the people of the entire nation unwillingly. We need to stand together as states to defend ourselves against threats against our collections of states, not treats to the country as a big amorphous homogeneous unit.
The Federal government has been distracted in the last 50 years over the issues that it shouldn’t be dealing with in the first place on a conceptual level as prescribed by the constitution. These distractions dilute the real reason for having a Federal Government over the states in the first place. These reasons are to protect our borders, deal with international trade, defend the states against foreign enemies, promote free trade BETWEEN the states (Interstate Commerce) and to uphold the limits on federal government placed there BY constitution.
Now how well have we been doing in the last 50 years on protecting our borders? Not very well, How abut International trade? China is kicking us tot he curb on this one and the federal government has failed us there as well. Defending against foreign enemies? We created a whole new bureaucracy called Homeland Security after 9/11 instead of firing the people who failed us in the FBI and CIA, and promoting the ones who where screaming warnings that were ignored by their superiors. And we are finding out slowly these days that this new Bureaucracy we created is pointed more at our own patriotic citizens in the name of being politically correct. Interstate Commerce seems like something the federal government has done right, but it has been twisted to take away our rights so many times with the “Commerce Clause” that it just isn’t funny anymore. When it comes to the Constitution and protecting the limits of government placed on it, only the most basic of rights described by the bill of rights have been enforced by the Supreme Court and even now they are being eroded by loopholes and exceptions to the rules.
The Federal Government has bitten off way more than it can chew, the power needs to return to the states, because when the power returns to the states it returns to the people who live in those states. We can all drive in our own cars to our own state capitals and raise hell in an afternoon or less than a day in most cases, but can we all easily drive to Washington D.C. ? When the people who govern us are isolated from the people who put them there they tend to take for granted and abuse the sacred power we entrust them with.
That is my 2 cents, of course with inflation it is probably a few dollars worth of information to ponder.
RINO? explain?
wonder how many freeper “what culture war?” types are in cahoots or agree?
I would like to purge the Supreme Court of those activist judges that said labor unions and foreign corporations could give big money to our politicians without identifying themselves.
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