Posted on 04/01/2006 7:02:16 PM PST by Nicholas Conradin
That is not quite correct. The Republican president, James Garfield, was a Christian Church minister.
At the risk of actually getting some significant empirical data that verifies the author's premise, before knee-jerking negative response that is comforting to one's ideological orientation, posters here might consider reading the book.
At the risk of actually getting some significant empirical data that verifies the author's premise, before knee-jerking negative response that is comforting to one's ideological orientation, posters here might consider reading the book.
I see no evidence of the GOP being guided by a theoconservative agenda.
It isn't. The trick -- if you want to call it that -- is allowing some people to believe that it is.
This guy is recycling the old myths about Christians hating the environment, etc.
They just don't get it. Evangelicals are split on many issues, from the environment to labor relations to social entitlements, we run the gamut of beliefs.
One thing drove the white evangelical Christians into the arms of the Republican Party: the Sexual Revolution, and specifically abortion.
And if the Democrats don't watch it, they're going to lose black evangelicals over the issue of gay marriage.
Let the liberals flap their jaws about Christians wanting to kill the environment, enslave women, or whatever. They're in denial. It's abortion, stupid. 35,000,000 dead babies trump just about every other concern.
Well said. This is tripe.
You make a HUGE basic error. Those who tell us what we can and cannot do are the misnamed "liberals." A "conservative" won't mind much if you tell an off-color joke, light up a smoke, or enjoy a nice juicy steak. A "liberal," however, will complain to management. Far too many people don't realize conservatives are now the classic liberals (please note tagline).
I know he was a professor, but I would have sworn he was a minister too. Was it just his father?
Either way, the guy did have the "God Complex" that they claim Bush does.
I know he was a professor,but I would have sworn I read he was a minister as well.
Anyhow, it's actually secondary to the point. There isn't much debate that he had the same "God Complex" that they accuse Bush of having. He told a man once that "No power on earth" could have stopped him from becoming President because God wanted it, and to him, that essentially meant whatever he wanted to do was what God wanted him to do.
Yes, I have noticed how muted, say, Howard Dean and Teddy Kennedy are. I've wondered why they shut up and now I know.
No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science.
Aside from the ignorance reflected by this description of evangelicals (the vast majority of whom see science as a continuing revelation of the magnificence of God's creation and many of whom are engineers and scientists), what is remarkable about this statement is that it is almost ahistorical. Read almost anything written by important public figures in the 19th and early 20th century (the US was a world power then). The worldview was emphatically biblical.
Then, the notion that women should abort their children with the same seriousness as doing the laundry was unthinkable, the idea that divorce was something to encourage to help women's 'personal growth' and that homosexuals should be a privileged (and hugely public) political class were so far out that there is no record I am aware of that anyone advocated these ideas.
What is odd-man-out historically is present times and our enforced secularism the left brought into the public square since the socialist takeover in the 30's and 40's (together with the new left's goofy ideas about people of color, imperialism pc and so on). We live in a time in which the historically abnormal is regarded as the historic norm and in which decadence is celebrated as virtue.
The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.
Right. W has recently jailed hundreds of scientists for disagreeing with him.
Phillips has gone completely over to the dark side. His idea of a Republican majority was based on the party headed by Richard Nixon--who brought us the Endangered Species Act, wage and price controls, and the EPA--socialism lite.
Reagan changed all that and built a completely different majority based on a different coalition and it seems that Phillips has never forgiven him. Our current national party is trying to go back to the Nixon's Socialism Lite (and the Dems are pushing the hard stuff) but the base has changed. And Phillips naturally resents that pushback against the obviously great ideas embodied in Socialism Lite. And, horror of horrors, some of the pushback is based on religious principles.
The idea that W or most evangelical are looking to bring about Armageddon by the war in Iraq is so silly that it needs no refutation--it is just one of the left's talking points de jour, dutifully repeated by Mr. Phillips.
Ironically, the folks who push your point-of-view usually also point to the founding American constitutional republic as the model we should be emulating as it was, undoubtedly, more economically libertarian than the current system. But the nation was, by your standards, a 'daddy' state well into the 20th century--the moral regulation was performed by the states under the Constitution--not the feds--but it was pervasive.
The modern concept of social libertarianism really only got its start in the 50's with the Kinseys diddling children and anything else that moved (all for, ahem, research) and then kicked-off in a big way with the hippies of the 60's and their embrace of drugs and rejection of silly stuff like sex should be between a man and his wife.
We now have a mommy state (from FDR and LBJ) in which any mention that maybe, perhaps, someone's moral behavior is less than admirable (no matter how decadent by historic standards) is met with hysterical screams that we are creating a police state (from the hippies and the new left and from a bunch of lazy yuppies who don't want to consider the consequences of making life convenient and titillating). Unless you think our founding fathers created and lived in a police state, this reaction is just nonsense, but it's one of the most important reactions our society has to overcome to preserve itself.
I do agree with you that some social conservatives ignore (or just don't understand ) the constitional niceties that reserve regulation of most moral issues to the States--so you get requests for federal intervention on issues the feds should have nothing to to with. I'm a Christian social conservative and a constitutional republic advocate. So I end up arguing with those folks whenever they go there. But I think the States should be regulating abortion and should not be enshrining homosexuals as a special political class or releasing heroin, cocaine and meth for sale in convenience stores. So there, I suspect we differ.
"The Pappy State"! Replaces Big Brother and the Nanny State.
Good one, Mr. Jeeves.
Heh. Well, most don't even read the article as you well know. But it should be sufficient to ask posters to read the piece and comment thoughtfully.
Writers like this man, Noam Chomsky, and that fellow who wrote the book that Osama touted, the one that pointed to the USA's militarism as the source of all evil. They are all brilliant, spectacularly well-read, many facts at their disposal, able to put things together in a cogent way. Insightful? Yes, there is insight to be had from all three analysts. But there is one problem: they are kooks.
Great observation. You are correct.
But is he wrong? If so, how?
Phillips has been a Lib for 15 years now. A Paddy from da Bronx whom time has passed by.
He's not recycling the myth of hate...he's stating they've come to love & embrace....
Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research.He sounds like AlGore. BARF!!!
The No-Nothings of the late 18th Century mid-America and the virulent anti-intellectuals of 15th Century Europe are back and can widely disseminate their hard core ignorance on the internet and talk radio.
I've heard some of the exotic end-times stuff on the radio. So? There is a current of that. It ranges all over the place and sometimes isn't pretty. However, widespread hard-core ignorance? No way. To get to that conclusion, I suppose you have to (absurdly) conflate "fundamentalism" with cultural advocacy impulses like the pushes to restrict abortion, avert a radical state-mandated (judicially mandated) culture-altering redefinition of marriage, and develop ethical guidelines around stem-cell research that draw on moral reasoning.
In my opinion, you have to be a close-minded hard-core secularist not to see the seriousness of the positions I just listed.
Funny, if you re-read the editorials from 1861-1865, it's pretty clear the Republicans then thought they were a religious party, and the Dems the party of slavery, polygamy, and alcohol.
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