Rush just did commentary on this. Danforth would have been embarrassed by our Founding Fathers.
I take comfort in knowing "moderates" like Danforth and liberals are frightened by those who have their beliefs and faith firmly rooted into the ground.
Banking on the continued appeal of a wishy-washy John Spong-esque Episcopalianism and decrepit, socially liberal Mainline Protestantism at this stage in history is foolish in the extreme. There's a reason Danforth's church is rotting from the inside, and there's a reason ministers like him are largely ignored.
Curious why Danforth does NOT switch parties. He has NO agreement with anything the Republican's stand for today. He is a DIEN. Democrat In Everything but Name. Just make the intellectually honest switch scumbag Jack. QUIT lying that you are a "Republican" you are not. Like Bob Barr your Republican loyalty was complete self serving based only on how you personally could profit from party support. You have never been on our side and we no longer care to carry your rabid stupidity.
what a load!
I remember Tip O'Neil and Reagan having toddies together after work.
I think the animosity that we see today began with the Bork hearings.
....nor the New either.
Note that the article say Carter's book has "750,000 copies in print" rather than "750,000 copies sold". Are there truckloads of the book sitting somewhere?
Danforth - Yale Law School and Divinity School in the 1960's.
John Danforth eulogized the late Senator John Chafee, Lincoln Chafee's father, at his funeral. The Danforths and Chafees are old friends.
"Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians," he wrote in the New York Times on Wednesday. The party "has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement." Though antiabortion, Danforth wrote that GOP principles, such as limited government, free markets and internationalism, have "become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives."
The former New Jersey governor, Christine Todd Whitman (last vestige of Rockefeller Republicanism), is warning that religious extremists have taken over the Republican Party.
Whitman: Bush on Iraq (a "go it alone" attitude has "done a great deal of damage to ourselves"), on the environment ("everything was seen through the prism of the reelection," she said, "and their base, pollsters were telling them, didn't care about the environment").
She said people who blow up abortion clinics and kill abortionists have "become more and more active in the party."
"I want to see Republicans win, up to a point"
Oct, 2005
Former Senator John Danforth gave a speech at the Bill Clinton Center in Arkansas lamenting the takeover of his party by religious extremists who don’t respect the boundary between Church and State.
Former Sen. John Danforth said Wednesday that the political influence of evangelical Christians is hurting the Republican Party and dividing the country. Danforth, a Missouri Republican and an Episcopal priest, commented after meeting with students at the Bill Clinton School of Public Service, a graduate branch of the University of Arkansas on the grounds of the Clinton presidential library. “I think that the Republican Party fairly recently has been taken over by the Christian conservatives, by the Christian right,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think that this is a permanent condition, but I think this has happened, and that it’s divisive for the country.” He also said the evangelical Christian influence would be bad for the party in the long run.
Carter believes that “total, unilateral, disarmament is the imperative of our time.” He also believes that spending on superfluous weaponry is a “theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”
Carter argues, as our allies and key members of our own intelligence agencies argued, that after the years of sanctions and inspections and our overwhelming military superiority, there was never any credible danger to the United States from Iraq. He writes that if Hussein had actually possessed arsenals of chemical, or biological weapons, military leaders would have prepared for that possibility to spare tens of thousands of troop casualties that might have resulted from such weapons.(Someone forgot to clue him in on our troops wearing chemical suits) There is no evidence, he says, that the military did that. Therefore, they could not have seriously believed that Hussein actually had such weapons.
In response to the gasoline shortage that occurred during his term of office, Carter had solar panels installed at the White House.
He argues against the fundamentalism, sometimes militant fundamentalism, and the lack of tolerance of both those in Christian churches, and radical Islam. Fundamentalism, he believes, divides rather than unites us. A premise of fundamentalism is “I am right and worthy, you are wrong and condemned.” It follows, then, that since you are less worthy than me, you matter less than I do. That kind of attitude can lead, ultimately, to genocide, just as it did in Germany when Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and others were “less worthy.” Fundamentalism, he says, embraces “rigidity, domination, and exclusion.” Characteristics he does not consider Christian.
He notes that In 2002 in America, 47% of women with unintended pregnancies resorted to abortion. The most prevailing common factor was poverty. There are fewer abortions in nations with access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care and enough income to meet basic needs.
According to Carter’s book, Approximately 60% of American teens have sex before 18. Statistics for Canada and industrialized European nations are about the same, but, because American teens are deprived of practical sex education, American girls are five times as likely as French girls to have a baby and seven times as likely to have an abortion. They are seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands, and five times as likely to have HIV/AIDS as those of the same age in Germany.
Carter points out that in the Bible, Jesus does speak out about both divorce and adultery, but he does not say one word about either homosexuality or abortion – the “sins” fundamentalists tend to focus on.
Carter decries the exclusiveness in today’s fundamentalist churches. Christ, he says, was inclusive. He dined with sinners. The only people He ever really railed against were the, self-righteous, the hypocrites, and those who loved money more than they did their fellow man.
bump
As if the problems in his own Denomination are not enough.
Sadly Danforth has jumped the shark.
He is exactly the type of past republican who should remain in the past.
We need to give a serious history lesson that McCarthy WAS CORRECT. In fact Jimmy Carter is a repulsive traitorous fool. He is a joke who should be exposed for the anti-american leftist idiot he is. If Carter were alive then he would have been exposed as a slime.
Danforth needs to shut up and go back into the hole he crawled out of. His politics of surrender need to remain on the ash heap of history.