Free Republic Network Conference a Roaring Success! Participants post your comments here

I just returned from the First Annual Free Republic Network Convention in Las Vegas.

The Free Republic Network Cruise last October was the most fun I've ever had in my whole life. The Free Republic Network Conference I just attended was the most informative and inspiring two days I've ever had in my whole life.

The Free Republic Network is stretching its muscle, not by talk, but by action. The Free Republic forum is liberty's college. The Free Republic Network is liberty's workplace.

If you attended, please use this thread to post your observations, comments and highlights of the conference. I will give mine below. But before I do, I'd like to take this time to thank Bob Johnson and the FRN board for putting on this conference. It's hard for me to find the words to adequately describe how great this experience was--and how much I learned.

You must have misunderstood something I said ... I certainly didn't mean to characterize you as a pro-abort even if you share pro-abort Barbara Bush's opinion of abortion as a private matter between a woman and her physician.

I believe that my view is more consistent with the vast majority of voters

I'll bet you're right. So what? Are truth and morality now determined by majority rule? Is that another page we're taking from the left?

I think the GOP is responsibly trying to capture the hearts and minds of the larger voting block, that will in turn allow them to set policies that "keep the government out of the abortion business," thus protecting the majority of unplanned babies

I take exception to your use of "Unplanned".

Even with the partial exception of Artificial Lives concocted to spec in the lab, all human lives are essentially unplanned babies. Neither all the procreating in the world at a woman's peak fertility window nor Perfect Lab Condition will ensure a child is conceived.

We could hardly have rationalized the manufacture of Human Embryos for sale unless it were difficult to "plan" one's children successfully .

It also seems ironic you would cite the GOP's interest in protecting Unplanned children when it's the GOP who's now taken the unprecendented step of targeting Planned Children, even, by using "Excess" Planned Children -- destined for the trashbin -- as commodities suitable for the government human research (if killed timely). On which research, should it prove profitable after all, the Private Sector will base its use of Leftover human lives as mulch.

Perhaps, instead of "Planned" or "Unplanned", then ... you could take a page from the left and call them "Wanted" or "Unwanted" children.

Additionally, if the government is in the business of abortion, it's likely they took their cue from the GOP who used a certain incrementalism to open the door to government regulation -- while insisting they believed the ultimate arbiter was the state, not the feds -- in their 1970 federal report on population:

(Remember ... this is the GOP Task Force talking. Just for fun, see if you can spot all the "pages" the left lifted from them!! Note especially the use of "therapeutic" ... a word being bandied about at present with regard to the human cloning. Dum-de-dum-dum ...)

Ideally, our entire healthcare system should be overhauled to create less reliance on specialized medicine and overburdened hospitals and more dependence on para-medical professionals in providing healthcare services and more reliance on providing proper nutrition for all Americans.

The legality of abortion and of sterilization does not come under the jurisdiction of the federal government, but they are properly within the purview of state governments where medical laws are widely divergent. The most disturbing aspect of the abortion issue that was brought before the Task Force, is the disparity between the availability of professional abortion services to those women who can afford the $500-$700 to obtain a therapeutic abortion and the estimated one million illegitimate abortions performed by the unlicensed practitioners for those women who cannot afford professional service. It is apparent that many women who desire abortions take extreme measures, and subject themselves to dangerous methods in order to obtain an abortion.

It therefore seems that the main objective of abortion law revision should be to eradicate the increasing number of unlicensed and unqualified practitioners who jeopardize the health and safety of these women and to establish a system that eliminates discrimination resulting from present pricing structures.

You see, although they were still tiptoeing around the Legal Abortion they characterized as "VITAL" to successful population control in 1974, it's the GOP who spearheaded in the 60's the government's taking charge of the healthcare system, providing birth control to the poor (in an effort to control their breeding and maintain ideal population differentials) and "Educating" the citizenry such that they understood the threat of overpopulation as well as their right to limit their reproduction. The report is very specific ... right down to the "right" for parents to determine and select the sex of their child.

It's George H. Bush who stated "population control" was actually a "healthcare mechanism". And it was Bush I's "Earth Resources and Population" task force findings in 1970 that noted quite clearly that the citizenry's failure to heed Education on population and the birth rate would indeed require the government to force certain strictures necessary to maintain State-mandated models for reproduction rates at home and abroad.

For, as the Task Force stated (quoting the American Academy of Sciences):

Either the birth rate must go back down or the death rate must go back up.

You may wish with all your heart you could lay the blame on Kennedy and Johnson and their Defense Secretary McNamara:

In 1977 Robert McNamara, as head of the World Bank, saw in population growth the "gravest issue" short of nuclear war and in a particularly prophetic statement lamented that the decisions that had led to this growth were "not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the literally hundreds of millions of individual parents who will determine the outcome."

But, just as with PNTR for China for which the all-purpose fallguy Clinton took credit, it was really the GOP who made it happen.

If it makes you feel better, then, it's not the GOP who's the "Stupid Party" after all ... though one might be tempted to think thus now that the DNC's traditional long pig conditioning, Image Is Everything appeal, school-of-fish voting bloc tactics and ostracizing of anyone not "with us" as being somehow "against us" now are seen as suitable for use by our side.

I think we're agreed. I too have often bemoaned the right's inability to think on its feet or be as clever as the left.

I don't think we're ever going to best them at their own game, though. It's like thinking that the "saving graces of western materialism" are going to change the hearts or minds of militant atheists.

I just don't see how you rationalize compromising the truth so as to deliver it in incremental portions. It seems the most utterly self-defeating tack I could possibly imagine taking.

I also wish to avoid anything resembling an apology or shame over my acceptance of the Scientifically Proven Fact that every human life begins at conception or the moral truth that taking an innocent human life is always evil.

When the left elects their representatives based on the stated Personal Convictions of the man or woman regarding abortion, the environment, gay rights, nuclear power, etc. etc. they rightfully expect and consistently receive votes that comport perfectly as promised.

It's the right who elects "pro-lifers" who perpetually cite "political realities", their need to appeal to women in order to get re-elected or the fact that -- horrors! -- Gore might get some good press coverage from the liberal media to EXCUSE their perpetual failure to vote in accordance with the personal convictions by which we decided to vote for them.

Something's not quite right here.

Until we get that much straightened out ... until we have a leadership willing to emulate the Left's Litmus Tests and lockstep voting and CONSISTENCY, I see no reason to dumb down the rank and file.

So let me get this straight. In your fevered imagination, the GOP went over to the dark side 35 years ago.

I suspect the "going over to the dark side" as you say was accomplished well in advance of the GOP's convening an "Earth Resources and Population" task force. My research leads me to believe that many of the notions and solutions they proposed as tenable were already being widely accepted by the political elite of this nation during the "scientific racism" used to ratchet immigration quotas for select nations sending Undesirables -- Jews, Slavs and swarthy Catholics from Italy -- to America in the early half of the 20th century.

These things take time.

Second, if you read the Task Force's report as liked, you'll see for yourself that it's the GOP who originally crafted many of the talking points we now find virtually impossible to effectively counter on issues regarding the Environment and population control.

At no time prior did the voters concentrate on the irrelevance of image and salesmanship, and everybody voted purely on matters of ideology.

I guess I balk at your use of "ideology". I'm not advocating "ideology". I think when you try to morph Constitutional precepts and the self-evident truths of the Declaration into an "ideology" is when you get in trouble and risk the error that is trying to force your personal values on someone else. Exactly what we don't want to do.

I'm advocating an objective, unapologetic, consistent and confident use of Scientific Truths and the Natural Moral Law to bust through the fog of ideology by which homosexuals, even, can consider the mother-only right to abortion their own Litmus Test issue.

(It would be perfectly absurd save for the fact that abortion underpins the artificial conception by which gays have a "right" to procreate with the help of for-profit Third Parties.)

No question but what the political arena has always been subject to Snake Oil Salemen and hucksters. I understand playing the game to a certain extent but I remain hopeful that the right will understand that nothing less than a STATESMAN serves to further their defense of Liberty by persuading others -- as statesmen do -- to their obligations to respect the rights of others, limit the State's intervention in our lives and ensure the maximum measure of personal liberty for all.

Is that what we can distill from your posts?

No. I trust the above explains why.

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