Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) - Is the Christian right the Republican Party's real political base or have conservative Christians taken over the GOP, forcing the party to meet their demands? For former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, the answer became clear when the Republican-controlled Congress intervened in the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died after her husband won the right to remove her feeding tube. "The effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive artificially became a religious crusade and Republicans in Washington responded to a core constituency, even though it meant abandoning traditional Republican philosophy," Danforth writes in his new...