I voted for Ford in the general election in 1976, but I voted for Reagan in the Republican primary (the very first vote I ever cast!). You might be interested to learn that in the 1980 Republican primary, I actually voted for Philip Crane! But yes, I voted for Reagan in November.
What do old-style Euro-Catholic conservatives see in the Jacobin sympathizing Jefferson, and why do you have so little regard for the anti-Jacobin, anti-Illuminist New England clergy? And btw, the purpose of the Alien and Sedition Acts was to protect our country from infiltration by foreign revolutionaries (much like later conservative, anti-Communist legislation).
BTW, when I was in the JBS (1977-81) I noticed that the Society held to Jefferson's interpretation of the Constitution but that all its literature and publications endorsed the Federalists as the conservatives of their era. When I asked my coordinator how they could do this he said I thought too much.
The Alien and Sedition acts were meant to calcify the hold on America of the soon to be dead hand of the Federalist past. It was also the Whig descendants of the Federalists who spawned the anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner, xenophobic Know Nothings of the 1850s. See Millard Fillmore.
As to Jefferson:
1. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence as a young man and it is IMNSHO, the greatest document of the Revolutionary Era and probably in American history.
2. Whatever his own bizarre beliefs, he wanted his authorship of the Virginia statute guaranteeing religious rights to be on his tombstone as one of the three achievements in which he took greatest pride. You and I certainly have different religious beliefs as I am a Roman Catholic and you are not but each of us has freedom of worship thanks to men like Jefferson. As late as the eve of 1818's Connecticut constitution, it was a crime to celebrate Mass in Connecticut or to attend one. The Bill of Rights applied only to the Fedgov at that time. The Baptist Congregation at Danbury complained in 1811 in a letter to Jefferson that Connecticut only allowed Congregationalists to vote or hold land and Jefferson, in his reply, observed that the purpose of the First Amendment religion clause was to ensure freedom of worship and autonomy of religious institutions to guarantee that churches be free to hold government morally accountable without fear. This was not the reply of a man who favored a nude prostitute dancing as "the Goddess of Reason" on the altar of Paris's Cathedral of Notre Dame.
David McCullough's masterful biography of Federalist John Adams made him a vastly more appealing character than most had imagined. However, the historian has John Adams, while ambassador to Paris, attending Mass and writing to Abigail of the experience, saying that it was a good thing that the American people had not witnessed the majesty of that Mass or the reformed churches would be finished. I like to think that G-d forgave Adams his understandable Unitarian resistance to my faith which was not that of Adams.
In response to another post, as I have always told you, you cannot alienate me by sincerely holding faith views which differ from mine or political views that differ from mine for that matter. The circumstances of my life do not allow me to engage in the conversation with you as deeply as you would prefer but that does not mean that we cannot or do not share mutual respect.
Thanks for various expressions of respect on this thread.
Did you know that Robert Welch and his wife became Catholics and died Catholic???? Your local coordinator was admitting too much, illustrating the difference in the quality of thought between Belmont and many local poohbahs. I was never a member but occasionally a fellow traveler, subject by subject.
The faithlessness of today's New England is largely a product of the dual degeneration of the old Puritans. One group became self-worshipping "transcendentalists" and then Unitarian Universalists. The other became today's Congregationalists among whom the old Puritan faith is hard to find although a few congregations persist. Of course, in my own Church, Bernard Cardinal Law's colossally pathetic and probably criminal tenure at Boston has matched just about anything the descendants of the Puritans have been able to do to discredit faith in God