I will thank you to take your defense of the evil leftist homosexual agenda somewhere else. We do not want or appreciate it on FR.
I invite you to read my original post and I hope you will see that I resolutely oppose the radical homosexual agenda. I always have.
I am a conservative - economically and socially. My concern is that we not devolve into hatred in place of argument. Perhaps it's my deep religious faith speaking, but some of the comments on this thread appeared to me to cross the line. I think we're better people than that.
Anyway: I've been here 10 years. Your site, your call. I respect you and appreciate what you've done for the cause of liberty in America.
Respectfully,
Andy
Hey Jim,
Your stance is absolutely sensible, because we have all seen how the Left have been chip-chip-chipping away at conservative values pretty much since the Berlin Wall fell. It’s important that we push back.
The leftists foolishly thought they’d be able to “turn” the right wingers into leftists through reasoned debate and sufficient browbeating, which is where the criticism of FR often comes that this is a “closed shop” and their discussion boards aren’t - but more and more, now, I’m seeing people who were dyed-in-the-wool leftists a few years ago, taking conservative arguments on board in the first instance, and a few months later making those same arguments themselves. All because they’ve opened themselves up for us to chip away at them.
Where I now live, in rural Yorkshire, you can really see the difference conservatives have made in the past few years by getting out of our bunkers and confronting the leftists head-on in the territories they regard as their own:
1. The Labour MP was shown the door in the summer and we elected a conservative from the village, to replace him
2. The school is now C of E funded with a conservative headmistress, pupil numbers are on the increase, SATs results are up
3. Since the summer my wife has been running a Sunday school, with 20 kids attending to date. This has been so successful that the church now runs a monthly service where the children are involved in choosing the hymns and doing the readings, and the church is completely packed out on those days. Ten years ago, apparently, you could count the number of regular churchgoers under retirement age, on the fingers of one hand.
4. We’ve had at least twenty business startups in the village in the past three years and over 100 people gone self-employed. Most recently, we’ve built our own independent, community-run broadband enterprise (with private money), and we’re separately piloting a wireless mesh allowing people to access local government, education and health services.
5. The village white elephant - a fire station built in the mid 80s solely to ensure that “scab” houses could be doused down (yes, you’d have your house razed to the ground for supporting Thatcher, THAT’S how Marxist it used to be round here!) - has been transformed into a community center offering retraining courses with private funding.
6. Since we’ve achieved more than the leftists ever did, the top hate figure in the pub these days, isn’t Thatcher anymore... it’s the communist union autocrat Arthur Scargill who called the miners out, and his Labour Party buddies who lied to the miners again and again, saying “the Tories hate you, but we are here to help”.
By American standards I expect this is all baby steps and we’ve got an awful long way to go, but considering the position we started from, things are definitely moving in the right direction.
If somewhere as historically pro-union, pro-state and pro-handouts as this can have a conservative reawakening, then it can happen anywhere. It just takes time, patience, ACTIVISM, and above all, the bottle to seek out and demolish the left wing arguments instead of just sitting in a conservative bunker preaching to the already converted.
If we let them bring their arguments to our table, it’ll break the momentum of the grass roots efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, and that’s why you don’t want to do that here.