I’m pretty darn sure 90% of the people in America will say you're wrong.
88 posted on Monday, January 02, 2012 6:17:18 PM by usadave: “I’m pretty darn sure 90% of the people in America will say you're wrong.”
I think this shows just how divided America is on some very basic questions of the nature of life... even in conservative circles.
I don't know Mariner or USADave, but from their words I think it's clear both of them consider their views to be obvious common sense and don't understand how anybody could disagree.
The simple fact of the matter is we no longer have a consensus in America even on some of the most basic issues.
I've written more on this here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2827961/posts?page=300#300
I have major problems with secular conservatives on issues like this, but the fact of the matter is Mariner is at least partly right: lots of people **WILL** think taking a baby home to mourn is strange.
That says more about how modern America views life than it does about Santorum and his family's grieving process, but it is something we have to deal with as conservative Christians who want to win elections.
If Santorum, Huckabee, Bachmann or someone like them — or for that matter, Sarah Palin — ever wins the Republican nomination for President, we're going to have to deal with this split between social issues conservatives (who aren't just evangelicals but also conservative Roman Catholics and Orthodox and Hasidic Jews) and our secular conservatives whose focus is on small government, personal liberty, and promoting the economy.
This is not a minor problem and could easily split the conservative movement.
My solution, for now, is to say this to both liberals and libertarian-leaning conservatives: “You believe in freedom of choice. What gives you the right to interfere with another family's choice of how to grieve?”
Long-term, we as conservatives need to work on building a culture of respect for life; most libertarians truly don't understand the consequences of their beliefs and don't realize they are repeating the older liberalism of the late 1700s to the mid-1800s which focused on free enterprise and not the moral responsibilities of property owners and employers. For now, however, we have to realize that we can't win elections outside the South, certain parts of the rural North, and heavily Hispanic Roman Catholic communities without convincing people to vote with us whose main agendas are not social issues but rather the military or economics.
It's a three-legged stool. We need the social issues conservatives, the military conservatives, and the economic conservatives. Ideally I'd like to see people be in favor of all three positions, but that's simply not the case in modern America, and we need to take conservative support where we can get it.