Again if RP does not get the not, I will vote democrat just to punish the republicans for not keeping him in check.
Yet Ron Paul's
stance on the issues reads like a Religious Right wish list. He's anti-abortion, opposed to homosexual marriage, and stands for all the low-tax, small-government issues I mentioned earlier. The only real difference is that he usually wants to do things at the state rather than national level. And most religious conservatives would accept that. As a Religious Rightarian, I've never seen a politician who's domestic program I am more in love with.
My father is an anti-Iraq-war Religious Rightist who has supported everyone from Pat Buchanan to Alan Keyes to John McCain to the Constitution Party, and even voted for Bush in 2000. He is now in the Ron Paul camp. I would be there, too, but for my total disagreement with his foreign policy. And the Religious Right is by no means united on the issue of the Iraq war. There are plenty of them, like my father, who oppose it. But in any case, it is not a religious issue, nor is it one that the RR talks about much.
You've got me really intrigued that you consider Ron Paul conservative or libertarian enough to get your vote, yet you say the RR are not conservatives because they favor "passing laws to enforce religiously based moral stances or policy that effectively brings the government back into their lives." I assume you're talking about issues like abortion and homosexual marriage. What makes Paul's opposition to these things so much less theocratic than mine?
Fistful, Sorry to disappoint you, I do have my bonafides as a conservative, but I have some serious doubts about yours.
I don't recall questioning your own personal conservatism. I pointed out that you have a poor understanding of the various "conservative" groups, such as neo-cons, the Religious Right, etc. And now you think that Lyndon LaRaouche represents some great reservoir of Democratic conservatives?
You are very confused. You could at least acknowledge that you were wrong about what neo-cons are.
Quote from Fistful
To ditch them, or their more controversial planks, would alienate many non-religious people and make the Republican Party safe for big-government moderates like Bush.
Sorry to bring this to your awareness, but the religious right were the ones responsible for getting Bush elected in the first place. I remember the campaign very well back, in 2, towards the end, they were both trying to outpious each other. They still have not realized their mistake considering most of the front running GOP candidates for presidency are also big government moderates.
I was talking about intra-party politics. In terms of the Presidential election, you can hardly say that the RR are less conservative because they voted against Al Gore. You could claim that if they were more conservative, they would have voted third-party, but then you'd be confusing political ideology with practical politics. The fact that most of the religious right voted for a main-party candidate doesn't make them non-conservative. It simply means that most of us, like most Americans, vote against a bad candidate who may actually win (Gore), rather than voting for a dream candidate who will certainly lose.
Or are you saying that the Religious Right chose George Bush over that noted libertarian, John McCain, or some other primary candidate that might have won? Let's say they had thrown their support behind McCain. Is he more of a Goldwater disciple than Bush? Or do you think that the RR had enough pull to nominate someone like Ron Paul? I don't think they did. And if they could have, would he have won it for us, or just led to eight more years of Clinton - I mean Gore?
brer, I don't know how much the RR had to do with choosing Bush in the primary. But I do hope that, if you're going to wade in these waters of discussion, you at least know that Bush, like Clinton, campaigned toward the right in order to win the presidential election. That had as much to do with courting religious conservatives as with any other kind.
You are apparently not aware of how the Bush Administration has alienated the Religious Right in any number of ways. By averring that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, by being the first president to fund embryonic stem cell research, by calling Islam "a religion of peace," and on and on.
Quote from Fistful
In areas other than social or religious issues, the religious right also tend, in my judgment, to be just as "true conservative" as non-religious conservatives. Religious conservatives are just as likely to favor lower taxes, liberalized gun laws, border enforcement, etc. and to oppose the Kyoto treaty, the U.N., the welfare state, etc.
Considering the many conservative democrats that vote for these things that are not part of the religious right that also vote that way, it really does not prove much.
What did you think I was trying to prove? I'm not sure what democrats have to do with the discussion. I was talking about the Goldwater-conservative views held by the majority of the religious right. Whether or not they are your kind of conservative, they make the Republican Party more conservative, not less. I'm addressing the notion that "losing the religious right" will somehow attract hordes of secular conservatives and libertarians that will help the Republican party to win. In fact, the opposite is true.
