Bush and Ralph Reed court Southern Baptist "I Vote Values" campaign

[solarbird]

The Southern Baptist Convention seems to be trying to rally the troops towards more than just the amendment. (Which should surprise no one.) Stolen from Andrew Sullivan's website:

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PARTY OF GOD, CTD: The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical Christian churches is now well-entrenched, as this latest NYT story reveals. Ralph Reed, of course, was unrepentant in his courting of the Southern Baptists for the Republican party last month. And the president addressed the SBC conference by satellite, while Richard Land launched the voter registration drive called "I Vote Values." "I, for one, believe people of faith have the same rights to participate in the political process as any other citizens," Reed said. "Christians should not be treated as second-class citizens." Of course they shouldn't. Still, it's worth checking out the IVoteValues.com website to see exactly which values the president is endorsing. In the section on homosexuality, the Southern Baptists remind us of what the founding fathers thought of gays:

During the American Revolution, when the Continental Army Lieutenant Enslin was found "attempting to commit sodomy," Commander George Washington issued an order "with abhorrence and detestation." Enslin was to be "drummed out of the camp ... never to return." Thomas Jefferson authorized legislation to penalize sodomy with castration. At the time the Constitution was ratified, the states of New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Connecticut, Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Jersey each implemented the death penalty for those who committed sodomy."

Why is the SBC reporting this? There are other sections on the dreaded homos, entitled: "Targeting You ... And Your Children." And: 'Homosexuality Costs You Plenty!" This is what Bush Republicanism is now about - beneath the surface. Worth considering in this campaign. (Hat tip: Roger Abramson).

Comments

[avram]

Banner, I agree with you that Bush is not a true conservative (he’s a right-winger, which isn’t the same thing), but you seem to be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Libertarianism is by no means conservative — taken seriously, it’s a deeply radical idea.

To be a conservative is to support existing traditions and institutions. If the existing traditions and institutions are statist (which they are, to varying degrees, in every nation in the world, including the US), then conservatism will involve being statist.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Umm, no. Conservatism in the United States is not what you are saying, remember it's a name of a political movement that is made up of several different schools of thought, key among them is libertarianism. Remember that when the Conservative movement started it was also commonly refered to as 'Classic Liberalism' because of the anti-Statist issues and the pro individualism goals.

A lot of people get tagged with the 'Conservative' label even though they are not. I think it's an intentional attack to blur the Conservative message, the biggest parts of which are private propery, individualism, and free market. Too many people these days want Statism (the Supreme Court has been all for it), and want the state to step in every time anything happens. Even though that leads to us all being serfs, dictatorship, and failure.

Also I don't think I'd call Bush a rightist. He's pretty close to the center of the road with right leanings. Just because so many big people on the left these days are so FAR on the left (Dean, Moore, Hillary, etc), doesn't redefine the center.

[avram]

Dude, seriously, you’re writing from another damn planet. Again, the anti-statist idiology that sometimes calls itself “classic liberalism” (it wasn’t called that when it started; the “classic” is a reference to the past, the implication is that it was called “liberalism” way back when) is libertarianism.

The conservative movement got started in the 18th century with Edmund Burke, a monarchist and anti-democrat. Modern American conservatism is generally traced to the works of Russell Kirk (see his short essay “The Essence of Conservatism” for a synopsis). You might have something with Barry Goldwater, whose failed candidacy is considered a milestone in the American conservative movement, but you’re ignoring a whole lot of stuff.

And you’re nuts if you think Howard Dean or either of the Clintons is very far left. Not one of them seriously advocates a revolutionary restructuring of society or the abolition of capitalism. Yeah, they’re friendly to unions (though not too friendly), and they talk about expanding government health care (though not too much), but only an American could think of those as “far left” ideas. (Jeez, if I was going to talk about leftists in American government, I’d at least mentioned Vermont’s Bernie Saunders, the only Socialist in the US Congress!)

When I call Bush a right-winger I mean that he’s authoritarian (his administration has claimed the power to imprison American citizens without charges or access to courts for unlimited amounts of time), and pro-aristocracy (hence his attacks on inheritance taxes), that he appeals to religious traditionalism (do you need examples given the post that started this thread?), and that he supports management and capital over labor.

[wrog]

Again, the anti-statist ideology that sometimes calls itself “classic liberalism” (it wasn’t called that when it started; the “classic” is a reference to the past, the implication is that it was called “liberalism” way back when) is libertarianism.

hm. I would say modern libertarianism, at least if we're talking about the 'capital-L' version espoused by the US Libertarian Party in which, it seems, property rights and contract law are the only things that really matter, large corporations should otherwise be free to do whatever they want, and any other expression of government power, no matter how well-intentioned, is just evil-evil-evil,

is at best something of a bastard stepchild of classical liberalism, whose theories date from before it was decided that limited-liability corporations, no matter how large, were deemed to be "persons" entitled to all associated rights and privileges. Keep in mind that the framers of the US Constitution and other thinkers of the (neo)classical period (late 1700s) had fairly direct experience with large entities like the Hudson's Bay and East India companies and their corruptive influence on British politics, arguing long and hard about e.g., whether such concentrations of economic power as the Bank of the United States should even be allowed to exist.

So I wouldn't want to make too many assumptions about what the (neo)classical folks would make of modern Libertarianism.

Never mind that the small-l "libertarian" is used by people to mean lots of different things.

E.g., Noam Chomsky calls himself a libertarian. And if your focus is on individual rights, I'd even argue he might have a better claim to the label than the capital-L folks (who, e.g., tend to completely shrug off scenarios in which individual rights are sacrificed as conditions of employment or by pervasive private real-estate covenants). To be sure, his priorities are completely different --- figure property rights are somewhere down near the bottom of his list of what's important.

[banner.livejournal.com]

The founding book of libertarianism and Conservatism in this country is 'The Road to Serfdom'. I'm not really ignoring anything, there is a tremendous amount of things out there. The American Conservative movement started in '45, right after the war.

And I wasn't talking about the Clinton's, I was talking specifically about Hillary Clinton. I point to her recent statement in SF about 'taking money away from you for your own good' (paraphrased).

[avram]

The Road to Surfdom by Friedrich Hayek? If you want to say that it's the founding document for American libertarianism I won't argue, but Hayek himself denied being a conservative.

Hillary said "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good", and conservatives do exactly the same, but with a different notion of what the common good consists of.

[solarbird]

The centre has drifted far to the right. In the last round of Democratic primaries, the most left-leaning Democrat economically was Dennis Knucinich, and his policies were very similar to Richard Nixon's. A little to the left, but not all that much. And Nixon was considered very conservative. So there you go.

[solarbird]

Of course, I'm speaking economically. Bush considers himself a conservative, as do most people in his party, and he's less conservative economically than, say, Bill Clinton was, in actual policy. ("Deficits don't matter" - really quite Keyesnian in many ways; huge new entitlements (where Clinton cut them); etc.)

Socially, the centre has moved to the left in that queers aren't universally hated and nearly-universally illegal anymore - though the modern Christian right is doing its damnest to change that.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Clinton didn't cut anything. Newt Gingrich did. Remember that Congress spends the money, not the President. Clinton just tried to take credit for what he had no control over.

[avram]

If you really believe this, you ought to be voting for Democratic presidential candidates. After all, by your own belief, it's the party controlling Congress that really determines what goes on with taxes and government spending. And having the White House and Congress controlled by opposing parties will slow down the passage of liberty-eroding legislation. You should be hoping for a Republican Congress and a Democratic President.