Goldwater destroyed the GOP
Posted on 11/19/2008 7:45:33 AM PST by EveningStar
As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.
Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.
I'm bathing in holy water as I type.
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
I happen to agree with you. Roe v. Wade needs to be reversed and then a real debate and political action taken at the state level. Homosexual marriage is being dealt with at the state level right now though judicial fiat has established it where it is being practiced. People can move between states if they find their local government engaging in policies to which they are adamantly opposed. Or they can work to elect people who will enact law according to their own principles. As it stands now with much of this stuff being decreed by judges there is no effective democratic way to address it. And this is why there is such frustration and anger over these issues.
If you read what I just posted, you will notice that I recommended that people organize their family and neighborhood for the crisis. One person alone will not be able to do it.
absolutely. If everyone is each for himself and doesn’t care about other people, we will be in big trouble.
“Abortion is a state issue. It should not be dealt with at the federal level.”
that sounds a lot like what James Buchanan and Stephen Douglas would say. I’m a Republican and just as slavery was abolished on a federal level, so should abortion. At least we need to keep the federal ban on partial birth abortion.
>>>>Goldwater destroyed the GOP <<<<<<
Silly and a favorite disingenuous spin from the Religionists whom Goldwater warned the GOP about.
Other facts:
1) Goldwater didn’t want to run for POTUS but was drafted.
2) Johnson ran on the coattails and memory of JFK who had been murdered a year earlier. No imaginable GOP candidate could have overcome that handicap.
3) The conservative baton was passed from Buckley to Goldwater to Reagan. To deny that or assert otherwise is simply a lie.
Reagan brought together the Moral Majority and the fiscal conservatives. Previously, the way to the south was to bring up race (i.e., opposition to the civil rights act, the southern strategy of nixon) or to simply lose it, as in the case of Ford vs Carter.
Hispanics are the future. We will not be able to win them over with economic theory and we should not pander to them with amnesty but they can be brought to the party by talking about values.
Our discussion was in the arena of politics and what we expect from government.
If you are not discussing what government should do about gay people, then it’s of no consequence in the political arena.
I believe government should not do anything to encourage deviant behavior of any type.
But government should not punish people for personal “abberant” behavior either, because I do not trust government to define “abberant” appropriately.
Society can try to apply appropriate disincentives to bad behavior. I am less fond of using the legal system to do so — which in some ways makes me a bit more libertarian I guess. I do think government can and should use laws to protect the “commons”, to defend the foundations of society, and to support the building blocks of society — so I support government-sanctioned marriage between a man and a woman.
How very odd that you feel confident that government can define deviant behavior well enough to prevent itself from "encouraging it", but not define it well enough to discourage it. Just enough to allow the rampant hedonism that is sure to be our downfall- As it has been the downfall of every democracy and republic that has ever been.
One cannot legislate in a moral vacuum. "Amorality" is a term of fiction. So it is really a matter of whose morality one is comfortable with. In the words of Bob Dylan, "You've gotta serve somebody."
Society can try to apply appropriate disincentives to bad behavior. I am less fond of using the legal system to do so — which in some ways makes me a bit more libertarian
No, that would make you more liberal, in the socialist sense. Classic Libertarians/Liberals know that social order is necessary for small government. What you advocate breeds neither social order nor small government.
Actually, I don't think Government can do either. But by preventing Government generally from trying to "encourage" things, we can prevent government from encouraging bad things.
In general, that means keeping government from encouraging generally good things either. The founding fathers did not give the federal government the authority or the responsibility of making our nation moral -- simply to keep it safe and then stay out of the way.
When you try to use government to encourage things, you will always end up encouraging bad things, because bad people will misuse the power you grant to government.
That said, there are some basic building blocks of society that are so important that I think it is OK to have government encouragement. Marriage between a man and a woman is such a thing, because the biological family unit is the foundation of society that makes our form of government work.
Without families, we need a much stronger, more intrusive government to keep society together. The family unit provides a small, tightly bonded "governmental unit" on which we can build a society. BTW, churches also play an integral part in building the society -- and the founders saw that to make that work, federal government had to stay out of religion, neither encouraging nor interfering with it.
I think of this as basic conservative principles. Don't try to legislate morality -- teach morality. We can't force people to be sinless. We can legislate punishment for those who harm others. We are much less capable of legislating general societal "good", and the more we conservatives try to make government do that, the more power we give to those who will use government against us.
My church thinks it is wrong to show pictures of Jesus. Should government pass a law making it illegal to show pictures of Jesus, since doing so is a sin and an "abberant" behavior? That of course is what the muslims think about Muhammed.
Who defines "abberant"? I think it odd that you believe government can do that, or would trust government with the power to regulate behavior.
Of course rampant hedonism could destroy us. But nothing in the founding documents gives government control over that -- the founders knew that we needed a moral society to survive, not a government trying to enforce morality.
Not that state governments didn't enforce morality. Heck, there's still places I guess where you can't buy alcohol on a Sunday.
Imagine that -- I wonder if Jesus could be arrested for changing water to wine if he did it on a Sunday......
And what does "oogedy-boogedy" mean? Is that like "hocus-pocus"? Or is it Haitian voodoo? If anything does not rely on magical concepts, it's unaffiliated, evangelical Christiantiy. What a dunce!
It’s just another way she can make fun of the Bible: intentionally misusing seventeenth-century English.
Yes, they couldn’t even get a pro-life statement into it.
>>It’s just another way she can make fun of the Bible: intentionally misusing seventeenth-century English.<<
That’s assuming she knows the difference between correct and incorrect 17th century English. In any case, her ham-fisted and tin-eared writing makes her sound dumber than the people she is criticizing.
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