Posted on 08/02/2004 8:48:15 AM PDT by FrPR
Michael "Mike" Peroutka, Presidential nominee for the Constitution Party, will be on WorldNetDaily RadioActive with Joseph Farah today, Monday August 2. The interview should begin at 4:05 EDT. The show starts at 3 and ends at 6EDT. You can stream at www radioamerica org - the call-in line to speak with Mike is 1 800 510 8255. Freepers especially welcome -
Should be good for a chuckle. I'll get over there if I have time.
It's sad, true but sad, that the only candidate in the race for President with any real respect for the Constitution only good for a chuckle.
They are hitting a christian forum I participate in hard, well four or five of them that is. When confronted on how they would actually handle terrorism and if there are enough competent people for the cabinet positions they don't have an answer.
Mike Palooka, the Nader of the right... ideological purism is so 9/10. Now it could actually get us killed. I say this as a "recovering" libertarian who never voted for a GOP candidate. Until this year, at least.
Thanks for the tip, and I'll try to call in. Peroutka is the only candidate in this race who stands for constiutional principle.
Republicans like to talk about the Supreme Court. Ask Peroutka who he would appoint.
Peroutka: CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN, HIDE FROM THE TERRORISTS AND MAYBE THEY WON'T SEE US!
Peroutka's acceptance speech:
http://www.constitutionparty.com/news.php?aid=107
Mr. Chairman, Madam Secretary, Members of the National Executive Committee, Delegates to the Constitution Party Convention, Members of the Constitution Party, My fellow Americans, Dear Brothers and Sisters…
I am proud and honored and humbled to accept the nomination of the Constitution Party for the Office of President of these United States.
Just four months ago in Maryland, when I publicly announced that I would seek this nomination, we talked about the cultural and spiritual decline that we see all about us in America today.
We expressed our deep concern for our republic. We wondered what sort of Country we've become.
We wondered what sort of Country sends mothers and Daughters and wives and sisters to fight and bleed and die its foreign – undeclared -- undeclared wars.
We wondered what sort of country sends sodomites to fight its foreign – undeclared wars.
We wondered about what kind of an administration declares war on something so vague, so amorphous, and so undefined as Terrorism. We worry about such dangerous and sloppy thinking. Since terror is not an enemy, but the tactic of an enemy, we wonder how such a war could ever be won. How could such a war ever end? How do you defeat a tactic – especially when you practice the same tactic yourself?
We wondered that it's the same sort of country that tortures and executes more than one million of its unborn every year.
We worried about becoming a country whose president backs homosexual civil unions -- whose president wants to give asylum and welfare benefits to millions of illegal aliens -- and whose president insists that both he and the Muslims worship the same god. Well, perhaps they do.
We worried about judicial tyranny. We never thought we'd see the day when a federal judge would tell the highest elected judicial officer of a State that he couldn't acknowledge the sovereignty of the God of the Bible and attribute to Him our religious freedom. But this is exactly what U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson told Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore he could not do.
We also discussed the dangers of the one world government agenda and the headlong rush of both major party candidates to give away America's sovereignty to foreign bureaucrats.
We talked about the out-of-control spending on unconstitutional programs that are the dirty habit of both democrat and republican administrations despite endless promises to the contrary. These unlawful spending sprees have bankrupted America and made her vulnerable to her enemies –both economically and militarily.
Keep in mind that those high gas prices mean that the purchasing power of the dollar is slipping, and the weak dollar reflects the low confidence that foreign lenders have in America's economy.
Ask yourself, if I came to you for a loan, would you have some concern if my told you I was going to spend more than I took in this year to the tune of one half of a trillion dollars?!? And, by the way, would it also concern you that I'm 7 TRILLION dollars in debt already!
We talked about the black hole of consolidated, centralized power that our forefathers warned would plague us if we didn't stay true to republican (not democratic) principles. We talked about the dishonor that would be our reproach if we failed to honor God and acknowledge Him as the source of Law and Liberty and Government.
So, we find ourselves today standing amidst the ruins of an American Constitutional Republic, the foundations of which have been destroyed.
This is the key point, ladies and gentlemen – the foundations have been destroyed.
These conditions I've just described – significant and challenging as they indeed are – are not the problem. They are the symptoms of the problem.
The problem is that we no longer stand upon the firm American foundation that was won for us by the courageous and visionary men who lodged here in the winter of 1777.
We talked about rebuilding those foundations and why it is important -- indeed essential -- that we do so.
The Themes of our campaign – God, Family and the Republic are designed to reflect this vital task.
We must Acknowledge God, Defend the Family and work to Restore the Republic
We begin – like our forefathers began – at the beginning.
"In the beginning, God created…" Genesis 1:1
America – perhaps the only Country ever founded on a creed – began right here. This first sentence of the Bible is the cornerstone of an American understanding of law and government.
"God Created…" is the very first presupposition upon which the Declaration of Independence and an American view of law and government rests. Jefferson expressed so eloquently in that document that "All men are CREATED equal…" (not evolved equal). He went on to say that the Creator God endowed all men with rights – unalienable rights – of life, and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among others. He went further still and declared that the purpose of government is to secure and protect and defend these God-given rights.
Ladies and gentlemen, this AMERICAN view of government's foundations and purposes – that there exists a Creator God – that rights come from Him – and that the purpose of civil government is to protect and defend and secure these God-given rights – are the very foundations that we've been talking about.
These are the footings upon which can be poured the structural elements of a safe and prosperous and just and decent society -- A society in which religious diversity is tolerated and not suppressed.
Such diversity is tolerated, it's important to note, not because the men in charge decide to tolerate religious expression, but because God tolerates liberty of conscience.
To those who wrongly criticize our Party saying that we want to establish a Theocracy, we must ask them to give careful attention to what we are saying. Like America's founders, we believe that the acknowledgment of God is not the exercise of a religion. Rather it is the founding philosophy of a government that allows religious diversity.
You know, we live in such a secular age today that it seems strange to talk about God and government at the same time. We've been so brainwashed that we ask, "What does God have to do with government?"
Well, this question would have been easily answered by our founders. They understood the connection between the two.
For example, in his October 3, 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation, George Washington, the father of our country, said "It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor."
You see, our country was founded by men and women who believed that "righteousness exalts a nation," and that "unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it."
If I am elected President, I will, like our forefathers, acknowledge and honor God as the source of law, liberty and government. And I will do everything in my Constitutional power to see that no person who fails to acknowledge God will be appointed to the Federal judiciary!
I will support and pledge to sign the Constitutional Restoration Act introduced in the Senate by Senators Shelby, Brownback and Miller and Graham and in the House by Representative Aderholt of Alabama and others. I support this effort to limit the jurisdiction of the Federal Courts under Article III of the Constitution and will do all in my power to ensure that our right to acknowledge God in public places is in no way infringed.
Furthermore, I will seek to remove from office any federal judge who advocates reliance on foreign law or the decisions of foreign courts -- as some Supreme Court Justices have recently done.
Let me speak for a moment about our second theme -- Defending the family.
MARRIAGE
Strong families are the backbone of a peaceful, just, and prosperous society. Many don't realize it but the family is a legal jurisdiction. It was actually the first institutional jurisdiction ordained by God. Even before the legal jurisdictions of the Church and the State.
No institution in America is under greater attack than the God-created, God-ordained family. Increasingly we are told by tyrannical, out of control courts, and others, that marriage is whatever people want it to be.
But this is a lie.
Marriage is defined by God alone. And He HAS defined it. He says it is to be only between a man and a woman. PERIOD! And Godly marriage does not need the approval of any civil government.
Let me here declare that I oppose homosexual marriage and civil unions, even as I oppose the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies which President Bush and Republicans and Democrats in Congress have supported to promote "safe sodomy" and underwrite the infrastructure of the homosexual movement.
FATHERHOOD
Last Sunday, we celebrated father's day across America, a tradition going back to 1910 when a woman from Spokane, Mrs. Sonora Louise Smart, grateful for the Godly example of her self-sacrificing father, a man who lovingly raised six children following the death of his wife, drew up a petition to honor all fathers in America.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon formalized the third Sunday in June as a day set aside to give thanks for the special role of fathers.
But today, perhaps the most insidious attack on the American family is the decades-long denigration of fatherhood.
The father is the head of the God-ordained family. He is the leader, the teacher, the provider, the protector. He is the lawgiver, the judge and the enforcer. The Bible defines his role as the special representative of God and His Word in the sacred institution of the family.
As such, he is the federal head and is responsible for the instruction of his wife and the training of his children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
To those who seek to destroy our Christian, civilized culture, he clearly poses a threat.
This is why the enemies of America and American law and American government have sought for decades to besmirch his character, render him irrelevant and, indeed, put him to death.
Hollywood movies overwhelmingly portray fathers as drunkards, bullies and buffoons. Television programs show him as selfish, stupid, greedy, uncaring and incompetent.
Government programs, including federal grants to States, actually reward state welfare and social service agencies with monetary incentives when they succeed in BREAKING UP families and removing fathers from their own homes.
You see, by destroying the good name of fatherhood, America's enemies seek to destroy the authority and influence not only of American dads, but also the memory and lasting influence of our FOUNDING FATHERS, The attack on fathers and fatherhood is an insidious attack on the very concept of moral authority, and thus, an attack on the Character of God Himself.
If elected, I promise to end all unconstitutional spending, including grants to State agencies that are rewarded for destroying American families.
ABORTION
Abortion is also a part of the attack on the family. Our current President has failed to lead on this premier moral issue of our time – which is the systematic slaughter of innocent, defenseless, unborn children in the womb.
For example, he has approved legislation to send additional scores of millions of tax dollars to Planned Parenthood and other groups which promote infanticide.
He has failed to stop the Food and Drug Administration from authorizing the distribution of RU 486, the abortion pill which has already been used to snuff out the lives of thousands of unborn children.
As President, I would do everything in my power to end the national disgrace of abortion -- Starting with a formal acknowledgment of the personhood of every child from the moment of conception.
Furthermore, I will obey my oath, and defend the Constitution, by refusing to enforce the unconstitutional ruling in ROE v. WADE, and will appoint as U.S. Attorneys, only those who will ensure that none of America's precious children are deprived of their unalienable right to life without due process of law.
As President, I would advocate a total ban on all abortions and a total ban on any federal funding of abortions, here or abroad.
Since the first priority of civil government is to protect innocent life, the defense of the unborn would be my first priority in office.
Finally, let me address our third theme – Restoring the Republic.
Regrettably, millions of Americans have no idea that the form of government our founders bequeathed us was not a democracy but a Constitutional – Representative -- Republic. Even sadder – and a lot more dangerous – is the obvious fact that most of those running the three branches of our national government – both Democrats and Republicans – do not care that our founders gave us a Constitutional – Representative – Republic.
A few weeks ago, comedian Jay Leno made a remark about the sinking situation in Iraq and the struggle to adopt (impose) an Iraqi constitution. Leno Said, "Why not just give them our Constitution…we're not using it anymore?"
If Jay Leno can get this right, why can't we?
If you have ever read the Constitution, and you've listened to my opponents, you know that neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Kerry intend to be faithful to the plain text of the Constitution of the United States.
Moreover, you also know that President Bush has recklessly committed hundreds of billions of dollars to programs that are beyond the delegated, enumerated functions of the federal government.
You also know that the major media never seriously questions or investigates this illegality-- or expresses any moral outrage about this oath-breaking.
Anyone who does complain about these outrages is patted on the head, or mocked as an extremist, and told that the Constitution is a living document that must change and adapt with the changing times.
Beware America -- Beware this glib excuse for lawbreaking.
My friend, Franklin Sanders, has written that "to say that the Constitution is a living document is to say that it is dead". He's right. To say that the Constitution evolves is to say that it is not fixed standard and is therefore, in his words, "dead as a hammer".
If the Constitution is dead, it is because the meaning of its words have been crushed and broken by its murderers, and those who have killed it through "deconstruction" -- the redefining of the meaning of its words – have now become the Supreme Rulers of the Land.
I want to pause here and express my gratitude for two excellent campaign assistants who are everyday and almost everywhere telling the American people why they must vote for Michael Anthony Peroutka and for the Constitution Party. These two men have great media access and they have large and well financed staffs. They work tirelessly and constantly and make the case over and over again that America must elect Michael Anthony Peroutka.
I'm talking of course about George W. Bush and John Forbes Kerry.
It is startling to realize that as you listen to them campaign – as you listen to them propose unconstitutional spending on unconstitutional programs --they are revealing to you the reasons why you cannot, in good conscience, as an honest American citizen, give them your precious vote.
They are telling you that they will violate their oath of office even before they take it.
Despite what my opponents believe:
- The purpose of civil government is NOT to make sure everyone has health insurance.
- The purpose of Government is NOT to make sure everybody's seat belt is buckled.
- The purpose of Government is NOT to spread democracy to other nations. (First of all, we are not a democracy and "Nationbuilding" is nowhere found in our Constitution.) (Likewise, the title "policeman of the world" is not listed in the powers of the President in Article II)
- The purpose of civil Government is NOT to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. As nice as this idea sounds, this is the job of the family or the Church. These are separate jurisdictions.
- The purpose of government is NOT to educate the children of the State. The State has no children! (The State has never even been pregnant!)
- The purpose of Government is NOT to protect the environment. Government should defend – not attack – private property rights.
These are all SOCIALIST Goals that are based on a Socialist paradigm. They come straight from the Communist Manifesto. They are not based on an AMERICAN foundation.
Remember -- What did Thomas Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and the men who suffered at Valley Forge say about the purpose of government? They said, "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
So, again, the purpose of government, in an American understanding, is to protect God-given rights.
The sad truth is that most elected and most appointed officials today think that the purpose of government is to redistribute wealth -- your wealth.
You see, it has to be your wealth because, in the case of the federal government, there is no wealth. In fact, our federal government is broke. Actually it's worse than broke. It's about seven trillion dollars in debt.
At least it was seven trillion when I began my remarks. I'm sure it's worse now.
And it's getting worse and our leaders don't care. At least if you judge how much they care by their commitment to do something about it.
Imagine if we could somehow pass the hat in this room and collect seven trillion dollars and give it to President Bush. Then – then… the federal government would be broke.
So how are the foundations destroyed? They are destroyed because both major parties have forsaken the true purpose of government and the true source of law and liberty.
Both major parties are working to end the American dream.
It is the Constitution Party that is working to realize the dream that Washington's men at Valley Forge fought -- and froze – and died for.
Those soldiers didn't fight for the United Nations and the New World Order.
They fought for American Sovereignty.
Those men didn't fight for a Social Security Number, a progressive income tax or socialized medicine, or other chains of dependence.
They fought for independence.
They men didn't grab their muskets and fight for federal gun control laws.
They fought for personal liberty.
Those heroes didn't risk their lives so that their children would be sent on yellow buses to propaganda mills where they were dumbed down with ritalin (sp?) and psycho-babble -- told that they couldn't pray to God – and instructed in "Values Clarification."
They shivered and worked and drilled and ran and bled and died so that they could raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
For the past four months, I have been traveling the country, discussing our campaign, its themes and the issues, with people from all walks of life.
I am very encouraged!
All over America, there is a revival of appreciation of, and desire for Constitutional Government.
I see it everywhere from Great Falls to Concord -- And from Portland to Pensacola.
The American people want to support a President and a party that represents the ideas and principles upon which our country was founded.
They want an honest government.
They want an efficient government.
They want a smaller government.
They want a lawful, Constitutional government.
They want an American government.
They want a government that keeps the covenant with the American people.
They are done with federal bureaucracies that parasitically devour the resources and the liberty of a people to whom they are pledged to be accountable.
They are done with federal courts that have forsaken the rule of law -- and seek to rule illegally and unconstitutionally by the fiat of judicial oligarchs who have been methodically eliminating all acknowledgment and memory of our Christian history and heritage.
They are enraged by blatant attacks on the right of the people to acknowledge the God upon whom our nation was founded.
They don't want to waste their vote on the lesser of two evils anymore. They have seen more than enough evidence of evil and corruption from both major parties to realize that it's just as wrong to vote for Gomorrah as it is to vote for the slightly more evil Sodom.
They know that to keep doing the same thing over and over – and to expect a different result – is the very definition of insanity.
The American people are done with this national insanity. They are finished with wasting their vote on democrats and republicans who have demonstrated, indeed promised, their lack of fidelity to the United States Constitution.
You see, I'm honored to be associated with the Constitution Party because it is the genuinely American Party.
I know you are not collecting signatures, stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, conducting meeting and giving your hard earned money because you see this party as a path to personal power.
I know that you are doing it because you see it as your Duty to do what you can to Restore the Republic –
That's why I am proud to be standing before you today accepting your nomination, proud – and humble.
I am honored – and grateful – and determined to do my best!
I am deeply proud to be associated with people who truly care about their government and willing to get constructively involved – not for their own gain but for the glory of God recognizing their covenantal obligation to secure the blessings of liberty to their children's children's children – their posterity.
I believe that with a knowledge of our history and with faith in Divine Providence, we see that God has placed each of us is a particular place, at a particular time, with particular resources and particular passions. We must discern what is His particular purpose for us.
He placed you and me in this room today. He didn't place us at this venue in the Winter of '77. He placed you here at this time in this place for a purpose – for His purpose. You are an important part of His plan.
It's not a question of whether you will respond to his call. He has already called and you are already responding.
I ask you to carefully consider what is happening here. You must listen, and respond and act.
My high school debate teacher, Sr. Theodore of the Sisters of St. Francis, used to say that the result of effective speech is action.
Not emotion – not just a nice fuzzy patriotic feeling -- but ACTION.
She was right. You must listen. And you must respond. But then you must ACT – or my speech was a failure.
A number of years ago, before I had actually met Dr. Curt Frazier, the Constitution Party's Vice Presidential candidate in 2000, I heard him speak to a Party gathering in Baltimore. After the meeting, speaking to a small group, he told of his first encounter with the Constitution Party and its principles, ideals, purpose and vision. He said that this is what he was looking for and felt blessed to find such a group of committed, courageous and self-sacrificing Americans.
He said he turned to his wife and said, "Honey, we're home."
Ladies and gentlemen, like Dr. Frazier, I am home. And the Peroutka Family is home.
You have honored me and my family by placing your faith and trust in us. I thank you and covet your prayers for my family and our campaign team led by my great friend, Attorney Scott Whiteman, as we face the next four months and all the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Taking inspiration from this historic venue where brave Americans displayed patriotic devotion to God and country, I will do my duty and do my best to represent you honorably.
It's good to be home. Thank you.
Great, Peroutka says American soldiers are terrorists. SUCK IT, PEROUTKA! Go way back and siddown with Osama and your other buddies!
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=5324
God • Family • Republic
Pasadena Attorney Michael Peroutka is the Constitution Party's Favored Candidate for President of the United States. Is it a Match Made in Heaven?
By Van Smith
Michael's Eighth Avenue, the Glen Burnie catering hall, is famous for drawing thirsty crowds to such earthy attractions as its regular "Ballroom Boxing" night, a sweaty mix of bouts, babes, and beer. On the afternoon Saturday, Feb. 21, though, it hosted a decidedly more devout affair: the announcement that Michael Anthony Peroutka, a Pasadena attorney, is seeking the 2004 presidential nomination of the 12-year-old arch-conservative Constitution Party. The party has secured a spot on November's ballot in a dozen states so far, though not in Maryland, and Peroutka won nearly 25,000 votes in California's March 2 primary.
Peroutka, with his brother Stephen G. Peroutka, runs the debt-collections law firm Peroutka and Peroutka, as well as the firm's educational-outreach arm, the Institute on the Constitution, which sells 12-week seminar kits about the biblical perspective on the U.S. Constitution for $145. If he is voted the party's nominee at its late-June convention in Valley Forge, Pa., the history books say he'll be the first third-party presidential candidate from Maryland on general election ballots since Joshua Levering of the Prohibition Party in 1896.
"If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" Peroutka rhetorically asked the Michael's Eighth Avenue gathering of about 300 faithful, his dark suit and well-groomed sandy-gray hair lending a sensible air to his fundamentalist zeal. "We must not flee to the mountains," he answered, citing a verse from Psalms, but instead "stand and fight" and "rebuild the foundations," as did King David in the Old Testament.
"This is not a time for despair and discouragement," he railed. "This is a time for discernment and decisive action! . . . This is why I am seeking the presidential nomination of the Constitution Party. I want, with your help, to call this country back to its original, godly constitutional greatness!"
Peroutka, like the Constitution Party itself, toes a well-defined line when it comes to matters of dogma. As his 20-minute speech made clear, he believes that the federal government routinely ignores the dictates of the U.S. Constitution, which he contends is a biblically grounded document written by divinely inspired Founding Fathers. Chronic, long-term erosion of these godly constitutional foundations, he believes, is advancing society's moral decay, a trend made especially evident in what he calls "attacks" on the family, such as abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage. The task for Peroutka and the Constitution Party, he says, is to fight the forces of decay and to present a loud, growing, and unwavering political voice to challenge the major parties. Taking jabs at President George W. Bush for his "failure to lead" on abortion, his "reckless" government spending, and his "unconstitutional" war on Iraq is a current staple of Constitution Party oratory.
"People may say, 'Don't you know you can't win, don't have a chance?'" Peroutka declared earnestly from Michael's balloon-adorned stage. "But I just don't believe in chance. I believe in divine providence. . . . With God, all things are possible."
"The themes of our campaign are God, family, republic," he continued. "In short, we are called to honor the sovereignty of God, defend the American family, and restore the American republic. The God of the Bible must be first because--well, because He says so."
After God, Peroutka continued, comes family--an issue of central importance to the Peroutka campaign and the Constitution Party as a whole. Before Peroutka's speech, party luminary William Shearer, a lapsed Republican who founded late presidential candidate and Alabama governor George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968, had praised the Peroutkas for having "created that thing which we stand for as a party--the family." Shearer admired the couple's "three lovely children"--Beth, Patrick, and Timothy, all teenagers, who took the stage with their father and mother. Spear Lancaster, the 2002 Libertarian Party candidate for Maryland's governorship, was there and commented afterward that the Peroutkas "seem like the archetypal Christian-type family"--an image that is reinforced by a family portrait on the Peroutka's campaign Web site.
So, up on the stage, Peroutka put particular emphasis on family issues. Whereas government exists simply and exclusively to "secure and protect God-given rights" of citizens, he said, most politicians fail to comprehend this, suggesting instead that government exists for a myriad of other, extraneous reasons: "to create a level playing field" in society, or "to maintain the infrastructure," or "to take care of people who can't take care of themselves."
Or to "take care of the children of the state," Peroutka added. He then paused as Albion Knight, a retired U.S. Army general and conservative radio commentator from Gaithersburg who was sitting in the audience after having made an earlier speech, suddenly shouted, "Not mine!" Approving chuckles rippled across the room.
"We love that one, don't we?" Peroutka continued, remarking sarcastically that "I didn't know the state had any children."
The crowd was audibly amused. The reaction, though, may have been different had it been known that in the early 1990s Peroutka and his wife, Diane, forced her two teenaged daughters from an earlier marriage--Dawn and Holly Hubbard--to become wards of the state foster-care system until the age of 18. (Diane Peroutka's previous husband died of cancer in 1978.) This happened after Dawn told members of her Catholic youth group and her basketball coach at McDonogh School that she recalled sexual abuse at the hands of Michael Peroutka from when she was 9--memories that were not substantiated in an ensuing state investigation, and which she later recanted. And it happened after Holly, who suffered from learning disabilities and a troubled relationship with her stepfather, displayed behavioral problems.
The Peroutkas transferred parental responsibilities for Dawn Hubbard to the State of Maryland on her 17th birthday, May 1, 1992, and Holly met the same fate on the day after Thanksgiving 1992, when she was 15. The sisters, now in their late 20s and living outside of Maryland, say they never wanted to be estranged from their mother and have tried without success to reconcile with her several times since being removed from the Peroutka household more than a decade ago.
Many of these facts were uncovered when a cursory Google search led to a 1997 Maryland Court of Special Appeals opinion that rejected Michael and Diane Peroutka's libel claims against Dawn and Holly Hubbard's state social worker, Marsha Streng. The alleged defamatory statement was made by Streng in her Towson office on Jan. 12, 1995, when Diane Peroutka showed up, Dawn Hubbard in tow, and angrily and repeatedly demanded to know whether Streng thought she was an emotionally abused spouse. Diane Peroutka had been moved to confront Streng when, during a conciliatory lunch with Dawn Hubbard earlier that day in Towson, she saw that her daughter had an informational packet about emotional abuse that Streng had mailed her daughter, then in college and majoring in psychology. Confronted by Diane Peroutka, Streng at first repeatedly refused to answer the question, but ultimately said yes. Diane Peroutka told her husband what Streng had said, and Dawn Hubbard told Holly about it as well. Nine months later, in October 1995, the couple sued Streng for libel.
The libel case was rejected at the first opportunity by the Baltimore County Circuit Court a year later, when the judge held that Streng's statement was "an opinion . . . given at specific request to give an opinion. That cannot constitute defamation." The Peroutkas appealed, and lost again. The appellate court opinion, filed in June 1997, said that "because all the persons who received the alleged defamatory statement knew the underlying facts of the conflicts within this family . . . Streng is not subject to liability, although, as with any opinion, [the Peroutkas are] free to disagree. We hold that the statement . . . was not defamatory." The court also ordered the Peroutkas to pay the state's costs for the year and a half it spent defending Streng from the claims.
Since Streng's statement was about the Peroutkas' family life, by suing her they opened up their family history to public examination via documents, affidavits, and depositions gathered for Peroutka v. Streng. According to those case records, on May 13, 1992, two weeks after the Peroutkas placed Dawn Hubbard in state custody, Michael Peroutka petitioned for a court order barring Dawn from having any further contact with the Peroutka family or from approaching their Baltimore County townhouse. When Dawn's state-appointed lawyer, Anna Davis, successfully warded off the attempted restraining order by arguing that Michael Peroutka had no standing to petition the court because he had never adopted Dawn and was not her natural father, he filed an amended petition, this time with his wife, and won.
Dawn Hubbard, once in the hands of the state, had to rely on Social Security for financial support. At first, her checks were sent to the Peroutkas' home, and Streng, in late June 1992, sent Diane Peroutka a letter asking for them. Diane Peroutka responded in writing that the money was used to pay bills, especially attorneys fees, "which have escalated far beyond the income I received for Dawn. . . . This expense was accrued because of the lies and problems caused by Dawn, and her Social Security check must pay for this."
In the summer of that year, the case record reflects that Diane Peroutka, with her husband's help and guidance, launched a letter-writing campaign. She sent approximately 1,000 letters to anyone who may have heard about Dawn Hubbard's sexual abuse allegations--the Peroutkas' friends and neighbors, for instance, as well as parents and neighbors of Dawn's schoolmates--alerting them to her daughter's mental and emotional condition and implying that her daughter might pose a threat to the community. That fall, when Dawn was hospitalized for a severe eating disorder, neither of her parents visited her.
The following spring, as she was being treated by Johns Hopkins Medical psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, Dawn Hubbard began to doubt the veracity of her memories of sexual abuse. By the fall of 1993, she was convinced they weren't real, but the result of a phenomenon known as false-memory syndrome. When Dawn attempted to deliver a letter to that effect to her parents, Diane Peroutka had her arrested for trespassing; Diane Peroutka had tried to do the same to to a visiting Holly Hubbard in June 1993, but the police wouldn't charge Holly. Shortly thereafter, Dawn appeared on the Phil Donohue Show with representatives from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and recanted her sexual abuse allegations to a national television audience. Still, the Peroutkas have rebuffed Dawn and Holly Hubbard's subsequent attempts at reconciliation.
The family crisis, while quieted since the libel suit ended in 1997, is still unresolved. Dawn Hubbard, now 28 with bachelor's and master's degrees from Bucknell University, works as a guidance counselor for female minors in the Pennsylvania correctional system. She explained when contacted recently that she and her sister, now a waitress living in Connecticut who is preparing for her August wedding, remain estranged from the Peroutkas.
Holly Hubbard submitted affidavits in Peroutka v. Streng that reflect the emotional toll exacted by her experiences with Michael Peroutka, who she believed controlled Diane Peroutka's actions toward her daughters and forced his wife to end relationships with her family and friends from before their marriage. In the sworn statements, Holly recalled "several occasions when my stepfather would mash my face into the floor, sit on me to restrain me, push me against a wall, and pull my hair while demanding that I call myself a 'slut.'" "I believe," Holly continued, "that when my mother put me in foster care and refused to visit me or talk to me, it was because of pressure from my stepfather."
In the past, Michael Peroutka has sidestepped any personal responsibility for the couple's handling of Diane's stepdaughters, whom he never legally adopted. "Certainly I discussed it with my wife, but it wasn't my decision to make," he explained in a 1996 deposition. "They were her daughters."
A decidedly different take on Michael Peroutka's role in his stepdaughters' treatment was expressed by McHugh, the psychiatrist who helped Dawn Hubbard determine that her memories were false and the only doctor with whom the Peroutkas agreed to consult with during Dawn's care at Hopkins. In a 1996 affidavit, McHugh stated that in his opinion Diane Peroutka "has been subjected to excessive emotional pressure by her husband to act in ways she otherwise would not act . . . contrary to her own best interests and those of her daughters."
In a 1993 telephone conversation with the Hubbard sisters' attorney, Anna Davis, case records show, McHugh was even more condemning, saying he was "disgusted by the Peroutkas' behavior," particularly that of Michael Peroutka, whom he described as "brutish." "The truth will come out," McHugh is recorded as saying. "It always does."
In an e-mail response to written questions provided by City Paper, Peroutka maintains that the family turmoil as Dawn and Holly Hubbard were forced out of the house "was exasperated by the prejudicial attitude and professional incompetence of certain employees of our local social services department. I joined my wife in filing a lawsuit for defamation against one of the social workers that we believed acted with intent to harm our reputations and our family relationships. All of this was long ago.
"I fully support and appreciate my wife's decisions and actions during that most difficult time, and ever since. Her desire to protect and defend our family, and to restore her troubled children, is fully shared by me. We have both, long ago, forgiven her daughters and others who, we believed, sought to harm them and us, and we pray and hope for their restoration."
The traditional family values, limited-government platform of Michael Peroutka and the Constitution Party appears to clash headlong with the reality that he stood by, and possibly encouraged, his wife as she forced her daughters out of their home and transferred parental responsibilities for them to Maryland's social services bureaucracy--an entity whose very existence is questionable under Constitution Party doctrine about the role of government. "Parents have the fundamental right and responsibility to nurture, educate, and discipline their children," the party's platform states. "Assumption of any of these responsibilities by any governmental agency usurps the role of the parents."
Meanwhile, the libel case record of Peroutka's alleged abusive behavior toward his wife and stepdaughters seems to flout the Constitution Party's platform on "Character and Moral Conduct," which states that "our party leaders and public officials must display exemplary qualities of . . . moral uprightness . . . self-restraint . . . kindness, and compassion. If they cannot be trusted in private life, neither can they be trusted in public life."
"I don't believe that my personal views diverge from the Constitution Party's platform or mission," reads Peroutka's e-mailed response to a question about these apparent inconsistencies. "As a believer in the Lordship of Christ I know that there is a fixed and eternal standard of right and wrong and that I am a fallible, fallen creature who falls short every day. Alone, I am not capable of 'reconciling' any chapter, or moment of my life. I believe that it is through the saving work of Christ that we are reconciled to Him and each other."
Peroutka's potential image problems as a candidate for the nation's top elected office don't end with his home life, though. There's also the matter of his legally questionable political donations over the past few years.
The issue first surfaced on Oct. 6, 2003, when the public interest group Common Cause Maryland issued a report on political donors from Anne Arundel County who illegally exceeded the state limits on political contributions: no more than $4,000 to any one campaign committee and no more than $10,000 overall from any given contributor during a four-year reporting cycle. Peroutka was one of four individuals, and his firm one of 10 businesses, that had given more than the limits, Common Cause reported.
Shortly after Common Cause released its report, State Prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli's office opened a criminal investigation. The prosecutor opted not to bring charges against Michael Peroutka or its firm. "They brought themselves into compliance," senior assistant state prosecutor Steven Trostle explained to City Paper, adding that on Dec. 8 he sent them letters closing the case and "warning them" that more violations would be treated more seriously.
In order to come into compliance, Peroutka and his firm relied on the good graces of the Maryland Constitution Party, which on Nov. 17, according to state campaign finance records, returned $3,230 of the $3,500 Michael Peroutka had given the party, and $2,200 of the $2,500 Peroutka and Peroutka had contributed. These transactions brought the total amount Peroutka and his firm had contributed to all state campaign committees to below the $10,000 limit. Though several other campaign committees--those of state senators Alex Mooney (R-3rd District) and Andrew Harris (R-7) and state delegates Emmett Burns (D-10) and Carmen Armedori (R-5A)--had also received substantial financial support from Peroutka and his law firm, only the Maryland Constitution Party returned contributions to make things right again under the law for them.
Montanarelli may have more in store for Michael Peroutka on the campaign finance front. On Aug. 22, 2002, Michael and Diane Peroutka's three children, then between the ages of 11 and 15, donated $4,000 each to the campaign of state Sen. Nancy Jacobs (R-34), one of the state GOP's staunchest conservatives, who at the time was facing a tough race in her Harford County district. "It's never come up before," Montanarelli said recently of the scenario. "But I have a problem with that one. You can't evade the donation limits by having children making donations. It would probably be a violation, and we could probably prove that it came from their parent or parents."
Asked by e-mail whether the money his children donated was theirs, whether or not he gave the money to them, and whether or not he prompted them to make the donations, Michael Peroutka responded, "I am confident that my children followed the law."
Public records reveal another foible of a sort that has proved thorny for politicians in the past. In December 1991, Michael Peroutka was caught driving with an illegally high concentration of alcohol in his system. The result: probation before judgment and a month of restricted driving privileges. When asked if the episode was in any way inconsistent with the Constitution Party's platform, which calls for its leaders to practice "temperance," Peroutka gave the same answer as that regarding his relationship with his stepdaughters--that he is "fallible," and that reconciliation of his personal behavior with party doctrine can only be accomplished "through the saving work of Christ."
The evolution of Michael Peroutka from a dozen years ago, when he was struggling with his stepdaughters and living in a townhouse, into a prominent arch-conservative politician with a house on a half-acre in Millersville's Brittingham development, a property assessed at $580,000, is a hard subject to nail down. But the changes have been marked.
Perhaps the most fundamental change in Peroutka is the fact that he is no longer with the Roman Catholic Church. The Peroutka v. Streng libel case records indicate that Catholicism was once a central part of his life. Many of Dawn Hubbard's conflicts with her stepfather had been over religion, her 1996 deposition revealed, including a "confrontational problem" over her resistance to becoming a confirmed Catholic, a church ceremony to which she ultimately submitted after Peroutka "chastised" her. Since then, though, he joined the Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church, which worships at a Seventh-day Adventist facility in Pasadena.
Like many fundamentalist churches, the Free Evangelical Church of America, of which Cornerstone is a part, is known for its strict prohibitive stances on abortion and homosexuality and for its very literal reading of the Bible. And Cornerstone's ties to politics are strong. The state Constitution Party's Web site promotes Cornerstone as a "Constitutionally aware church" and provides a link to the church's Web site. Cornerstone's pastor, David Whitney, ran unsuccessfully in 2002 for Republican State Central Committee in Maryland's 30th District and is also a donor to the state Constitution Party. Prior to running for public office, he had become locally renowned for helping to organize anti-abortion protests, replete with a woman in a Grim Reaper costume and poster-sized pictures of aborted fetuses, in front of a clinic on Ritchie Highway in Severna Park that provides abortion services.
Whitney also edits and writes for the monthly newsletter of the Peroutkas' Institute on the Constitution, for which he penned a lengthy treatise titled "The Most Misused and Abused Amendment of the Constitution," denouncing the U.S. government's application of the 14th Amendment, which ended slavery and codified the principles of due process and equal protection under the law.
Alongside Peroutka's evolving beliefs has come greater wealth. Peroutka and Peroutka's Anne Arundel County personal property tax payments, records of which are available on the state's online database, indicates that the law firm has been growing fast. In 1995, Peroutka and Peroutka owed $6,300 in such taxes, which are levied on a business' furniture, equipment, inventory, and the like. By 2003, the amount had increased to $180,000.
Another indication of Peroutka's improved cash flow is the amount he has invested in politics. Since 1999, Peroutka has given nearly $80,000 to Maryland and federal campaign committees. Much of it--nearly $55,000--went to federal Constitution Party accounts, with the rest allotted to various local and national politicians from both the Republican and Constitution parties. In addition, during the same time frame Peroutka and Peroutka gave $15,000, and Stephen Peroutka gave $50,000, to Maryland and federal campaign committees, $36,000 of it to the Constitution Party National Committee. Diane Peroutka, too, chipped in just over $5,000, $2,500 of it to the anti-gay-rights activist group Take Back Maryland. In all, the three Peroutkas and the firm have given about $150,000 to political campaigns since 1999. And that amount doesn't include the $12,000 the three Peroutka children gave to Nancy Jacobs' re-election effort in 2002. Nor does it take into account the $87,000 the Peroutka brothers and their firm spent underwriting a 2002 television and print advertising campaign urging Maryland voters to "vote pro-life."
To put these sums in perspective, the Peroutkas are nowhere near Peter Angelos' league--the Orioles owner and super-lawyer has made just over $3 million in federal-level donations since 1997--but surpass Baltimore bakery magnate and real-estate developer John Paterakis, who has given just shy of $35,000 to federal campaign accounts since 1997.
Asked about the origins of his wealth and consequent ability to make large political donations, Peroutka writes, "I am thankful to God from whom all blessings flow."
Peroutka's earliest political investment speaks volumes of where he was heading: into a tightly knit world of right-wing political activity on the outer edge of the Republican Party and, ultimately, a very small circle of rainmaking Constitution Party backers.
On the federal level, Peroutka's first recorded donation was on Oct. 15, 1999, when $250 sent from his Ritchie Highway office--it was entered in the ledger-books as having come from "Peroutka P.A."--arrived in Katy, Texas, where it landed in the short-lived and little-used bank account of the Draft Steve Stockman for Congress Committee. "I vaguely remember this donation," Peroutka explains in his e-mail, "but do not remember what prompted it."
Stockman, an accountant and former one-term Republican congressman who lost a bid for re-election in 1996, was known for his defense of the militia movement and his adamant pro-gun stance. In the fall of 1999, after having lost a bid for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission a year earlier, Stockman was working as a highly paid consultant, earning $250,000 in fees advising the congressional campaign of Texas Republican Mark Brewer, who lost the following spring's primary. But Peroutka and a small group of like-minded Stockman supporters were hoping to draw Stockman back into running for federal office again.
Other than Peroutka, 15 individuals from around the country donated $7,000 in itemized contributions (an equal amount was collected in small, unitemized amounts) to the draft-Stockman campaign based in Katy, which raised funds only for a single month in the fall of 1999. (A defining moment for Katy, population 10,000, came the following summer, when seven local men held a cross-burning on the property of one of the town's few black families, and were subsequently convicted of federal hate crimes.) Among Peroutka's co-donors to the low-profile campaign were three individuals whose backgrounds place them on the extreme edge of conservative politics--a place where Peroutka, nearly five years later, is now established as a leader and benefactor.
Joining Peroutka in the draft-Stockman campaign was James R. Lightner, a wealthy Dallas businessman who in the spring of 2000 joined an elite club of about 100 people who contributed to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's flash-in-the-pan stab at an open congressional seat in Louisiana. Another name on the list of contributors was Chris Cupit, a right-wing political functionary from Louisiana who gained notoriety as a partner in GOP Marketplace, a Virginia-based consulting firm that was caught undermining Democrats' get-out-the-vote efforts in New Hampshire on Election Day 2002 by subcontracting with an Idaho phone-calling firm to jam the Democrats' phone-bank lines with continuous hang-ups. Also on the list was Robert G. Wheaton of San Antonio, who in 1995 was elected to the seven-member Committee of Safety of the Southern Region of the Texas Constitutional Militia, one of Texas' two main militia organizations. (According to the Austin-based pro-militia Constitution Society, the Texas Constitutional Militia 's Committee of Safety is "no longer operative.")
Lightner and Cupit are both active in GOP causes, and Wheaton is a regular contributor to the Libertarian Party. But all three, by virtue of their political activities, are iconoclasts outside the political mainstream, a fact that seems to drive their zeal--and open their wallets--for fundamental cultural change. The Constitution Party has been calling for such change since its founding in 1992, when it picked up what was left of the George Wallace movement--the American Independent Party and its various offshoots--to form what was originally known as the U.S. Taxpayers Party. And Peroutka, with his deep pockets and apparently growing doctrinal zeal, fits in quite well.
Now that he's the party's presumed presidential hope, Peroutka has started to answer candidate questionnaires, such as the one at vote-smart.org, that give an idea of his stands on the issues, such as:
· Eliminate all taxes except tariffs on imports, which should be slightly increased.
· Eliminate all federal government funding for everything except defense, whose budget should be maintained at current levels--except for one item, a national missile defense, whose funding should be greatly increased.
· Except under special circumstances, expel all illegal aliens and place a moratorium on immigration.
· End all government aid to foreign interests, be it other countries or international organizations.
Getting in a position to make such fundamental changes to the federal government requires money. The Constitution Party National Committee's cash on hand, as most recently reported on Jan. 31, is a little more than $8,200--barely enough to throw a decent bull roast--while Peroutka 2004, the presidential campaign committee, has nearly $22,000 on hand. The fact that either outfit has any cash at all, though, is thanks mostly to a small group of big donors, including Peroutka himself, who has chipped in nearly $57,000 to the national committee since 2000, and has lent $40,000 to his own presidential campaign committee. Only two other individuals have given more than $50,000 to the party's federal accounts: the chairman of the Constitution Party National Committee, Jim Clymer, and a retiree from Dallas, Julie Lauer-Leonardi, who's the party's most prodigious benefactor, having given more than $80,000.
Lauer-Leonardi and Lightner are among dozens of conservative activists who sit on the leadership council of the Conservative Caucus, a 30-year-old Vienna, Va.-based political organization whose founder and chairman is Howard Phillips, a former Nixon administration official who has been the Constitution Party's presidential candidate in the last three elections, and who helped found it in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party. (The party changed to its current name when it was trying in 1999 to woo Patrick Buchanan to be its presidential candidate.) Phillips is backing Peroutka and gave a rousing pro-Peroutka speech at the candidate's announcement ceremony at Michael's Eighth Avenue.
Lauer-Leonardi may be the biggest individual donor to the Constitution Party, but Peroutka, if you add to his contributions those made by his brother and wife, comes out on top: All together, they've given more than $95,000 to the party. As Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News and a close observer of U.S. third-party politics, says, "Peroutka really wants to be the party's candidate for president."
Only 307 Marylanders were registered as Constitution Party voters in March 2003, the last time the state board of elections did a head count before the party lost its status as a recognized party here because it didn't garner enough votes in the 2002 state elections. Howard Phillips garnered sparse support from Maryland voters in his three presidential bids: 919 in 2000, 3,402 in 1996, and 22 in 1992. Nonetheless, Maryland has a special place in the Constitution Party's heart. After all, the Free State backed the Constitution Party's ancestor, George Wallace, in the 1964 presidential primary, and handed him nearly 180,000 votes in the 1968 general election.
A number of key Constitution Party players are based in or around Maryland. Clymer, the party's chairman, is a lawyer in nearby Lancaster County, Pa. Phillips' Conservative Caucus is based in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Radio commentator and Constitution Party donor Albion Knight only had a short commute from his Gaithersburg home to give his homily at the Peroutka announcement. And Peroutka 2004's $800-a-week communications director, John Lofton, a fixture of hard-right journalism since the rise of Ronald Reagan, lives in Laurel. The Save-a-Patriot Foundation, an anti-government, anti-tax organization based in Hagerstown, is scheduled to have Peroutka address one of its weekly Saturday-night gatherings in April. Two Maryland pastors--Cornerstone's David Whitney and Michael Chastain of Christ Presbyterian Church in Elkton, who gave the prayer at Peroutka's announcement--have emerged as important religious voices for the Constitution Party's doctrines.
And, of course, Peroutka is a native Marylander, born in Baltimore in 1953. He and his brother Stephen Peroutka gave their first big donations to the Constitution Party National Committee--a combined sum of $30,000--between June and August of 2000. The Peroutka brothers' Institute on the Constitution has caught on, and its Web site is a commonly encountered link on far-right political and religious Web sites. Michael and Stephen Peroutka both take their messages to the airwaves on local Christian radio stations.
More than 300 people came to Peroutka's Feb. 21 event in Glen Burnie--a much better turnout than the 50 or so people who attended Ralph Nader's August 2000 announcement in Annapolis that he would be the Green Party's presidential candidate that year. Onstage at Michael's Eighth Avenue, Michael Peroutka mentioned another manifestation of the party's local influence when he thanked "members of the General Assembly here present" for coming to the event. Freshman state Del. Donald H. Dwyer Jr. (R-31) was there, but City Paper was unable to spot any other elected officials celebrating Peroutka's announcement. Spear Lancaster said later that state Republicans whose campaigns Peroutka has supported financially "don't want to be seen at another party's event." In his e-mail, Peroutka said that he had "sent notes to a few of my friends in the General Assembly and wanted to make sure I welcomed any who might have come. So I used the plural. I cannot remember seeing other Delegates except for my good friend Don Dwyer."
Dwyer has teamed up with Peroutka, who put $4,000 in the delegate's campaign kitty last May, in other ways recently. As reported by Dwyer in a Feb. 16 letter posted on the Institute on the Constitution's Web site, the two joined other conservative luminaries--Howard Phillips, Alan Keyes, and Phyllis Schlafley among them--on a two-day visit in February to impeached Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Judge Roy Moore, who lost his job last fall after refusing to remove a sculpture of the Ten Commandments from his courthouse. And Dwyer told The Sun in a Feb. 3 article that he decided to run for delegate in 2002, his first bid for public office, after attending an Institute on the Constitution seminar. Ever since he arrived in Annapolis in 2003, he's been rustling feathers--even yanking them on occasion by, for instance, suing the leader of the Anne Arundel legislative delegation over rule changes and questioning the patriotism of fellow lawmakers.
Peroutka's budding influence in Annapolis and among some Christian Right Marylanders, along with his fund-raising ties to national far-right leaders, suggests he's got some traction as a political player. Still, it almost goes without saying that he can forget about the White House.
"I don't remember them, offhand," University of Maryland political science professor Paul Herrnson jokes when asked what role the Constitution Party could play this election season. "Hold on, let me look them up in one of my books."
His point, he says with a touch of hyperbole, is that "no one's ever heard of them or cares about them, and that's the problem with third-party politics in general."
Others, such as Bob Moser, senior writer for civil-rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, who covered a Constitution Party gathering last April in Clackamas, Ore., think the party has legs, even if they're spindly. "They've been reasonably successful--they're still around," Moser argues, distinguishing them from Ross Perot's Reform Party, which has disintegrated since it nominated Buchanan for president in 2000. "A lot of the Perot people and Buchanan people have landed in the Constitution Party."
But Moser says he isn't impressed with Peroutka. The party, he explains, has in the past tried to draw big-name candidates--Marylander Alan Keyes, for instance, who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, or Buchanan--but has always ended up with Howard Phillips at the top of the ticket. And Peroutka, despite his wealth and organizational capabilities, is not a big name either.
"If they nominate somebody like Peroutka, they're not going to get any votes," Moser says. "But if they nominate Judge Moore," whose name has been bandied about for the nomination, and who Peroutka has said he would step aside for, "they'd get some votes. Moore could draw as many votes this time as Nader."
As it is, Moser says, the party is so far "the only catch basin for disaffected conservatives" in the 2004 presidential elections. How many of those will bother to vote for the Constitution Party candidate is hard to ascertain, but he contends there is a "large element of really conservative Christians who might support the Constitution Party, but who cling to not getting involved in politics, as well as the militia and anti-government people who are not going to participate in the system in any way."
"I can't really confirm or deny the extent to which some people may 'drop out' due to disillusionment" with the system, Peroutka responds in his e-mail. But he believes that public interest in the Constitution Party's ideas "is increasing as folks recognize that we have abandoned the worldview of our founders, disregarded the plain meaning of the Constitution, and drastically centralized power in Washington to the detriment of the common good."
The Constitution Party, "like all organizations that stand for something, will not attract those who stand against that same something," he continues. While Christian at its core, and thus not likely to attract non-Christian voters, "the Constitution Party welcomes those who support its platform and its mission to restore Constitutional government."
What's more, the party's religious base is not at all unique in politics, Peroutka contends. "The ideology of all parties and organizations and individuals is inherently tied to religion," he states, because "we act out what we believe."
If that's the case--that "we act out what we believe"--then Peroutka's actions toward Dawn and Holly Hubbard suggest his beliefs may be out of whack with the Constitution Party's stated platform. How that affects the party faithful's support for his candidacy remains to be seen.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/marylandstatecases/cosa/1997/1871s96.pdf
That is so right on.. i can't believe people here actually bash this guy. Again, it boils down to nothing but childish, mesmerized idolatry for their own 'hero'.. and such stark defensiveness whenever the man they view as their 'king' is ever dare questioned. The contempt they have for this God-fearing Constitutionalist really speaks volumes. pretty pathetic if you ask me.
And then ask him how he believes that he would get such an appointment through the Senate.
That should lead to an interesting spate of sputtering.
Speaking as a born again Christian, I find the railing against the establishment clause in the 1st amendment a frightening thing.
Speaking as a born again Christian, where in our constitution is military service disallowed on account of gender or sexual proclivities?
Do not fall into the trap of cherry picking which parts of the Constitution you wish to follow and which parts you would ignore. I do not advocate that practice when reading and practicing the Bible; it also seems like a pretty bad idea when reading the Constitution and applying it to government.
Snore.
I'm not surprised.
Looking at the CP's specific positions, makes the statement that they "respect the constitution" a fallacious conclusion identical to your FR handle...
WAKE UP!!
How can you sleep like that when there are armed men beating down the doors of every American citizen, dragging us out of our houses, and putting us into concentration camps!
THIS IS HUGH! THIS IS SERIES!
Don't make me have to come over there ...
Well I have been looking up the CP and I find that they are part of the Christian Reconstruction / Theonomy movement and well they are further out there than they think.
They do it because they're professional Republicans.
Politica is about principles and policies, not personalities. But the professional Republicans don't seem to understand that.
We're not "professional Republicans" we're realists. Peroutka will barely break 1% of the popular vote total.
That becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it?
The circular logic of professional Republicans: Well, this conservative guy will barely get 1 percent, so I won't vote for him, as a result of which he will barely get one percent.
If everyone who is more in agreement with the Constitution Party than any other party would vote for it, then it would do a lot better.
But then we might begin building a credible opposition, rather than a pale imitation of one.
The Republican Party was a good thing once. It was formed to replace the Whigs because the Whigs refused to take a stand on the critical issues of the day.
Well, the Republicans did such a good job of replacing the Whigs that they have become the Whigs.
Now, there are Republicans and Republican candidates that I like and support. I have voted for more of them than you would suspect. But when all we get is Big Government, then it's time to recognize that the conservative movement is not getting anything from the GOP.
In which case, it's time to build ourselves a new vehicle.
I admit my denseness here, please explain.
This is the guy that said the President should issue Executive Orders to overturn Supreme Court decisions. Respects the Constitution? Don't make me laugh.
Peroutka finds the Supreme Court to be irrelevant. He has basically stated he would run a dictatorship by Executive Order.
I guess if you are referring to the Constitution of North Korea or Cuba he's sticking by Constitutional principle, as you have argued.
And from this point on, not another word about the threat of terrorism to Americans and how to deal with it. Terrorism will not go away by ignoring it. John Kerry would probably get my vote before Peroutka. I voted for Howard Philips in 2000. I agree with most of the Constitution Party platform. But America would be turned into nuclear toast if the Constitution Party foreign policy became American foreign policy. No use fighting over nuclear toast.
your nicname is 'no compromise' and yet youre voting for Bush, who Michael Savage admtis is more liberal than Rockefeller? Bwahahahaha!
No compromise on what, exactly? on voting outside the 'almighty' GOP?
Have you ever heard of FTAA? LOST? UNESCO? Amnesty proposal which caused a direct increase in illegals swarming through? (35% conservative estimate according to border patrol) No child left behind? Campaign 'finance reform', the dems dream come true?
appointing and honoring open homos and their 'male wives' to head foreign embassys? Vowing to vote with feinstein and Clinton on the gun ban? Biggest increase in NEA funding in years? Oy Vey.. if you think that's a ''no-compromise conservative', we are in big trouble. big trouble.
I understand why people will vote for bush (they're scared of kerry).. But to ignore, dismiss , excuse, and justify every leftist thing he does, is just ridiculous. that is what i see people doing here every day. How are you going to hold him accountable if you lick boots like that!!? Good grief! Like i said, you wanna vote for him, fine- but at least be ****somewhat**** HONEST about his ABYSMAL record!?? sheesh!
Now, that is just silly. You clearly either misunderstand whta he says or you are simply part of the Republican propaganda machine to destroy any conservatives who pop up.
I agree with you. The FTAA is an abomination.
So Michael Savage says Bush isn't a conservative. I agree that Bush isn't conservative on controlling government spending and eliminating unconstitutional programs and departments. I'm also angry at Bush's illogical award system to illegal aliens. But Bush killed the Kyoto treaty. He cut taxes twice. He put rogue regimes on notice and successfully liberated two despotic regimes. And he signed two pieces of pro-life legislation.
I do too, but the one thing I hate about the CP (as well as the LP) is how they put up these hail-mary bids for the presidency rather than working on getting Congressional candidates elected. Congress is full of socialists from both political parties. I'd rather have the CP work in Congress so they can check Bush's uncontrolled gov't spending and illegal alien schemes.
You are one of few who understand.
Some Reconstruction-Theonomy Links:
http://www.chalcedon.edu/ Chalcedon
http://www.americanvision.org/ American Vision
http://www.NatReformAssn.org/ National Reform Association
But voting third-party at this time is an exercise in futility.
Are you still singing that same tired, old song? You really need a new repertoire.
Most pubbies can't stand the idea of someone who is A) actually conservative and B) a real constitutional constructionist running for president. They would rather continue to pretend that Dubyah isn't a big-government global socialist who has no more regard for the US Constitution than any Democrat you care to name and less than some.
I see. So your solution is just to give up and learn to love totalitarian socialism. Conservatism is too hard and doing the right thing just doesn't sit well with Americans. We should just continue to let the Republicans and Democrats confiscate our wealth for redistribution and then send our sons and daughters to die in the desert to protect their perquisites. And not only should we permit it, we should learn to love it.
Great. Exactly why do you spend time posting here?
What the hell does that have to do with Peroutka???
Everything, and if you can't figure that out, you have proven my point.
What I "can't figure out" is why you would ever consider supporting someone who doesn't believe that a) defending the US is consitutional or that b) we should defend the US.
Besides the fact that this guy's a fraud. Have you checked out his bio?
Some people will apparently support anyone who yammers on about the constitution, whether they know anything about it or not.
You seem to have a lot of trouble reading and comprehending English. Is it your first language? Locate and point out the places in his platform where Peroutka asserts that defending the US is unconstitutional. He does, quite clearly state, "'Nation building' is not a permissible function of the United States Government under Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution." I agree completely. Please indicate how George Bush's wonderful little foray into Iraq has improved the security or defense of the US in any way, shape, or form.
Besides the fact that this guy's a fraud. Have you checked out his bio?
Bomb-throwing isn't an admirable debate tactic. Remember how much you hated when Vernon did it? What part of Peroutka's bio indicates that he is a fraud?
Some people will apparently support anyone who yammers on about the constitution, whether they know anything about it or not.
And some people will strain and strain at the gnat of conservatism while swallowing the whole camel fed them by Bush and his cronies in the GOP. So what's your point?
Let's see, running around protesting the nanny state, saying "the government has no children" -- even though he kicked his own children out of his family and forced them to become wards of the state? I mean, how much more of a fraud can you get???
Please indicate how George Bush's wonderful little foray into Iraq
Look Kucinich, if you want to believe the Iraq War hasn't made the US and the whole world safer, that it was unconstitutional, that we should stick our heads in the sand and the terrorists will just pat us on the butt and leave us be, that US soldiers are terrorists (as Peroutka says), you can believe that, but you're a total fool.
But of course we knew that already :)
He got roughed up pretty good on Medved's show today.
He was on Medved this afternoon. I wasn't impressed.
"I am Michael A. Peroutka and I am running for President on the Constitution Party ticket. I am 100% pro-life, all nine months, no exceptions. In fact, I am so pro-life, that if elected I promise that abortion will end my first day in office."
And just how, Constitutionally, would he end abortion on his first day in office?
"If elected President, however, I would move immediately to end our involvement in Iraq."
And leave the region in total chaos or simply surrender to France?
"The scandal over the failure of the Bush Administration to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq is growing fatter and deeper every day."
Michael Moore writing his speeches now?
I would have posted more but his website locked up. Go figure.
It's too bad you can't seem to grow up enough to avoid the ad hominem, but that's you, isn't it Johnny? No substance but lots of attitude. Oh well, better a fool than a brain-dead GOP droid groupie.
As for your assertions on Peroutka's personal life, be careful. You wouldn't want this same examination of your beloved Dubyah's pre-political life. Your boy spent over twenty years of his life wandering around in a clueless, alcoholic haze. Rip jobs like this are a dime-a-dozen in politics. Your impassioned cries of fraud are hyperbolic and hypocritical.
Bush's war is grossly unconstitutional, as was the Korean "police action," the Vietnam "conflict," and the first Iraq "operation." What part of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution are you having trouble with? As for the world's safety, I could care less. The world's safety is not our responsibility. Our actions in Iraq have not enhanced our own safety or security one iota and I defy you to demonstrate otherwise.
Of course all you empty-headed GOP robots have bought into the elite's lies for so long, you will be completely unable to think independently long enough to comprehend any of this, so I'm probably wasting my time. Besides, you're JohnnyZ, you can't possibly be wrong, can you?
And you wonder why no one takes you seriously. Good grief, what stupidity!
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