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To: lentulusgracchus

I’ve always been under the impression that, during the 1964 campaign, Goldwater did not run on what we now consider the issues of social conservatism. His calling card was plain libertarianism: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

As a Senator, Goldwater took positions explicitly opposed to social conservatism; as I recall, he was pro-choice, for medical marijuana, for gay rights, etc. I don’t know which of these positions extended back to 1964 and which he might have adopted later. But his libertarian core was constant throughout his political life.


104 posted on 03/21/2016 10:26:33 AM PDT by Persephone Kore
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To: Persephone Kore
Barry Goldwater's definitive speech in which he shows both strains of conservativism together is his May, 1964 campaign stump speech (a major speech, actually), as a useful benchmark.

Like the Framers', Goldwater's social conservativism was foundational, all questions being framed in a Judaeo-Christian perspective. He didn't pound the table about the moral foundations of his arguments, because he didn't have to. Except in Hugh Hefner's offices and lefty-trendy (NKVD-penetrated) faculty lounges, middle-class morality ruled everywhere in easy tandem with small-"r" republicanism under the epithet "Americanism", and Goldwater needed not make any special effort to footnote where his social values came from.

Later on, when one of his relatives unburdened himself of his homosexuality, Sen. Goldwater became defensive of his kinsman -- after the fact -- as people very often do. (This became a focus of the loathesome Human Rights Campaign, which immediately began to surface people close to socons -- Newt Gingrich, Dick and Lynn Cheney, Jerry Falwell, Robert Dornan -- in an effort to force them to repudiate their morals publicly. The oberdyke of the HRC pursued Mary Cheney for 10 years, badgering her to come out so the HRC could make that "fork play"` on her parents. She did, and they cratered. Big win for the HRC and their overspread of society with a caul of sexual dysfunction and squalor.

107 posted on 03/21/2016 11:04:32 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("If America was a house , the Left would root for the termites." - Greg Gutierrez)
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