Quotes of the day

whose personal conduct many conservative Christians applaud.

Don’t think so. How does being a bullying, serial liar, and supporter of infanticide qualify as personal conduct any conservative Christians applaud?

BTW, Gateway Pundit already noted today that one of those quoted by Politico, Richard Cizik, voted for Obama in the primaries.

INC on March 12, 2010 at 10:53 PM

Interesting to see all this spate of articles on the Tea Parties coming out now–trying to cause problems, especially when it appears being pro-life is the last principle left standing against ObamaCare.

INC on March 12, 2010 at 11:09 PM

MB4 on March 12, 2010 at 11:28 PM

You may be interested in these:

Fool’s Goldwater

Quick quiz: Who said, “Is this the time in our nation’s history for our federal government to ban Almighty God from our classrooms?” Or, “You will search in vain for any reference to God or religion in the Democratic platform”? Who lamented that “we permit the world’s greatest collection of smut to be freely available anywhere”? Who warned that, “We as a nation are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people”?

…Meanwhile, as Andrew Busch details in “The Goldwater Myth,” the Goldwater of 1964 was the founding father of today’s social conservatism. Virtually all of the leaders of the “New Right” — including Phyllis Schlafly — were veterans of the Goldwater movement. L. Brent Bozell, the ghostwriter of Goldwater’s 1960 classic The Conscience of a Conservative — in which they wrote “The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline” — was a pioneering “theocratic” intellectual.

Theodore White, that great (liberal) chronicler of American politics, wrote in his 1964 classic The Making of the President that Goldwater’s “greatest contribution to American politics” was the legitimization of what Goldwater called “the moral issue”: “This will be his great credit in historical terms: that finally he introduced the condition and quality of American morality and life as a subject of political debate.”

Jonah explains:

As he got older, “Mr. Conservative” became more libertarian on some social issues (largely due to his wife’s influence and his understandable personal distaste for some Christian Right leaders). But even so, Goldwater only abandoned his support for a constitutional ban on abortion in his final term in the Senate and didn’t change his opposition to gay rights until long after he retired.

INC on March 12, 2010 at 11:37 PM

The Goldwater Myth

Goldwater articulated a view of the American Founding and America’s purpose, as well as the nature of man, that was fundamentally moral, even religious, in character. In the introduction to his bestselling The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), Goldwater argued, “The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline.” Conservative principles “are derived from the truths that God has revealed about his creation.” In the first chapter, he (and his ghostwriter, L. Brent Bozell) wrote:

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy…. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul.

The 1964 Republican platform, the handiwork of committed Goldwaterites, declared:

Much of today’s moral decline and drift—much of the prevailing preoccupation with physical and material comforts of life—much of today’s crass political appeals to the appetites of the citizenry—can be traced to a leadership grown demagogic and materialistic through indifference to national ideals founded in devoutly held religious faith. The Republican Party seeks not to renounce this heritage of faith and high purpose; rather, we are determined to reaffirm and reapply it.

In his speech accepting the 1964 presidential nomination, Goldwater extolled “freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” He warned that

those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for Divine Will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.

INC on March 13, 2010 at 12:01 AM