‘Pro-Family’ Issues to Gain Spotlight

Roll Call ^ | 5/15/06 | Ben Pershing

[HastertFan]

Mindful that social conservatives must come to the polls in force this November if Republicans hope to keep control of the House, the chamber’s GOP leadership has begun crafting a “pro-family agenda” that will be unveiled later this year.

GOP leaders released a long-term agenda last week that listed dozens of legislative items, but very few that are usually associated with the social conservative movement. But the House is planning to vote this year on a gay marriage amendment, and there are more such issues in the pipeline.

“We’re looking at a number of items including addressing the sanctity of marriage and human cloning,” said a Republican leadership aide. “A more comprehensive agenda should be released later this year.”

With a new lineup in place and their political base showing signs of restlessness, House Republican leaders have also begun stepping up their personal outreach to social conservative groups.

The top three GOP leaders — Speaker Dennis Hastert (Ill.), Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) — met last Tuesday with representatives of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family to discuss the House agenda and to introduce Boehner to Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family’s chairman.

“The Speaker and Republican leaders had a great discussion about the upcoming pro-family agenda and support from conservatives to help us move it through Congress,”

[HastertFan]

Nice to see House Republicans focusing on the family.

[frogjerk]

Nice to see House Republicans focusing on the family.

While that should be applauded and it should always be a big focus of any election, I hope they are not banking on the fact that this will get them through the 2006 election. I don't think voters want a rehash of the last election's issues.

[yellowdoghunter]

I always feel better when I hear that Dr. Dobson is involved in the meetings, etc....

I am glad to see that at least some Republicans understand who put them in office.

[mikeus_maximus]

They can keep their election season "agenda". They've been in power for 12 years and have owned both houses of Congress and the White House for 5+.

"We don't get fooled again...."

[George W. Bush]

I keep waiting to find anyone on the Religious Right who making these great demands on the GOP. Dobson has been pretty flaccid since his role in the Harriet fiasco.

I think they're trying to give us more meaningless family-values stuff when what the base is clamoring for is a closed border and expulsion of illegals and stiff employer sanctions.

We'll have to see if Hastert's plan works but it seems his previous attempts to sway the debate have been ineffective. I guess we'll know by the weekend if Hastert and Bush can sell their agenda.

[conserv13]

Yeah, they'll focus on it long enough to get elected, then forget about it again. Sorry, but social conservatives are to the Republicans what Blacks are to the Democrats.

I don't care because I'm not socially conservative.

[topher]

Good for them, and about time!

[Siena Dreaming]

I like the GOP's outspokenness on the sanctity of marriage issue.

They've even got Howard Dean now saying he's against gay marriage which is like a miracle.

I'm eager to see what the GOP comes up with next on the issue. Dobson's participation can't hurt.

[A. Pole]

Mindful that social conservatives must come to the polls in force this November if Republicans hope to keep control of the House, the chamber’s GOP leadership has begun crafting a "pro-family agenda" that will be unveiled later this year.

It is so nice to be remembered in time of elections. It would be even nicer to be remembered AFTER the elections.

[A. Pole]

It is so nice to be remembered in time of elections. It would be even nicer to be remembered AFTER the elections.

I might just stay home.

[gidget7]

Nice to see them focusing, absolutely, but if this agenda doesn't come out until shortly before the Nov. elections, a lot of conservatives will view this new focus as more talk, without action.

There is plenty of time to see action before the election. My fear is that without it, the focus will not be believed, may be viewed as more campaign promises only.

[linda_22003]

"My fear is that without it, the focus will not be believed, may be viewed as more campaign promises only."

It's worked every other time; think that on try #9 or so, the voters are starting to suspect....?

[308MBR]

They had better get this crowd for sure, and it had better be huge. I'm afraid a very significant number of fiscal and small government people will be staying home.

[familyop]

Do I see anything about getting rid of the roots of family destruction there? No. Let me know when our Republican congressmen and their constituents want to admit their past voting sins and repeal the feminist family busters. Without the false accusation and illegitimacy support laws, the next step of feminism/bisexualism--the "gay marriage" thing--wouldn't exist.

The Free Congress Commentary

The Next Conservatism #40: Why Sex is Better than Gender

By Stephen Baskerville

May 12, 2006

A problematic question for the next conservatism is the politics of "gender" (formerly known as sex). It is also urgent.

A critical change in the Left over the last few decades has been the shift from the economic to the social and increasingly the sexual. What was once a semi-socialistic attack on property and enterprise has become a social and sexual attack on the family, marriage and masculinity.

The consequences are incalculable. No ideology in human history has been potentially so invasive of the private sphere of life as Feminism. Communists had little respect for privacy. Feminists have made it their main target.

Like other radical movements, only more so, Feminism’s danger comes not so much from the assault on freedom (which traditional tyrannies also threaten) but specifically from the attack on private life, especially family life (which traditional dictatorships usually leave alone). "Radical Feminism is totalitarian because it denies the individual a private space; every private thought and action is public and, therefore, political," writes Former Judge and Solicitor General Robert H. Bork. "The party or the movement claims the right to control every aspect of life."

The Left’s brilliant move has been to clothe its attack on the family as a defense of "women and children." Marian Wright Edelman openly acknowledges she founded the Children’s Defense Fund to push a Leftist agenda: "I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change." This climaxed in the Clinton Administration, in which radical policy innovations were invariably justified as "for the children." Using children to leverage an expansion of state power by eliminating family privacy is succinctly conveyed in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aphorism, "There is no such thing as other people’s children."

This nationalization of the family under the guise of protecting it leaves pro-family politicians in a difficult position. One way out is to join in the demonization of those who literally embody the Feminists’ hated "patriarchy" - fathers. Relabeled "deadbeat dads," "batterers" and "pedophiles," fathers are now railroaded into jail through methods one recent scholar, writing in the RUTGERS LAW REVIEW, calls a "due process fiasco" and Bryce Christensen says is leading to a "police state."

Knee-jerk calls to "get tough" on criminals have unintended consequences when the penal apparatus has been commandeered by ideologues who redefine criminality to include an assortment of gender offenses that bear little relation to what most Americans understand as crime.

The evolution of the Justice Department’s Office of Victims of Crime illustrates the deception. Proceeding from President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 Task Force on Victims of Crime, this agency has since been hijacked by Feminists, and most of the "crimes" have been redefined in Feminist terms. By definition, the "victims" are all women, the "perpetrators" are all men and the "crimes" are mostly political: sexual harassment, date "rape" (which is seldom rape), domestic "violence" (that is not violent), child abuse (that may be ordinary parental discipline), "stalking" (fathers trying to see their children), and so forth.

Far from softening the hard edges of male-dominated power politics, Feminism has inserted calculations of power into the most private corners of life and subjected family life to bureaucratic control. This is what makes the dream of a more "caring" public sphere through Feminism not only naïve but dangerously utopian. For as Feminists correctly pointed out, the feminine functions were traditionally private; politicizing the feminine has therefore meant politicizing private life. This is why the "totalitarian" potential which Bork senses is already being realized.

"All politics is on one level sexual politics," writes George Gilder. At least sexual politics is the logical culmination of all radical politics, which is the politics that has defined modern history. More than any other threat, Feminism demands that the next conservatism examine conservatives’ own reflexes and habits in a world in which radical assumptions have permeated well beyond the ranks of Leftist ideologues. It demands that a new conservative agenda challenges not just this doctrine or that, but the very concept of a politics defined by ideologies, activists, organizations, opinion-mongers, and a professional political class for whom politics is all-consuming (even when we agree with them). The next conservatism must try to recover a civic life of citizens, householders, parents, churches and synagogues, local communities, and values that transcend political calculation. Czech - dissident and later President Vaclav Havel called this "apolitical politics”: a world where, contrary to Feminists and Communists and all ideologues, the personal is not political.


Stephen Baskerville is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. The views expressed are his own.


For other commentaries in this series, go to http://www.freecongress.org/commentaries/2006/index.asp.

[DBeers]

Yeah, they'll focus on it long enough to get elected, then forget about it again.

The Supreme Court Justices will have a much much longer moral conservative legacy...

Sign me as a moral conservative happy camper that sees much much upside in spite of any elections...

:-)

[DBeers]

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“We’re looking at a number of items including addressing the sanctity of marriage and human cloning,” said a Republican leadership aide. “A more comprehensive agenda should be released later this year.”

[DBeers]

Its fairly obvious they are only doing this so they will be re-elected in 06..

Nothing wrong with that. Far better than the dummie strategy of supporting every delusional cause and thereby preventing election and guaranteeing political irrelevancy...

[DBeers]

It's worked every other time; think that on try #9 or so, the voters are starting to suspect....?

Roberts and Alito tend to reinforce my delusional feelings that winning elections means winning the spoils that go to the victors. It is only the dummies who "spin" losing as some type of victory...