Tag Archives: Conservative

News

Where does Republican candidate Rick Perry stand on social issues?

5 Comments
Texas Governor Rick Perry
Texas Governor Rick Perry

The first post from Life News.

Excerpt:

Upon entering politics, Perry has maintained a record of defending religious expression in the public sphere.

He supported and signed a Texas bill in 2007, the “Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act,” clarifying that students and school employees alike had the right to express religious views in public, and that religious groups had the same right of access to public facilities as secular groups.

[…]But one thing that distinguishes Perry from the typical right-wing politician is his unabashedly public prayer life: the governor has called on Texans to pray and even fast in response to state crises or disasters.When wildfires were raging during a drought in Texas this spring, Perry released an official proclamation over the Easter weekend asking people of all faiths to pray for rain for three days, and to pray for firemen and other officials in danger.

And:

Perry is increasingly famous for championing the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution, by which states are granted whatever powers are not explicitly reserved to the federal government.

Despite a conservative record on marriage – Perry supported Texas’s 2005 amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman – his 10th Amendment loyalties led to some confusion among pro-family advocates when he indicated that New York’s decision to legalize same-sex “marriage” in June was “their business, and that’s fine with me.”

Perry later clarified that he was not defending same-sex “marriage,” but the principle allowing states to decide without intrusion by the federal government. He added that he supported a federal marriage amendment, which would mean an agreement by 3/4 of the states, to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman nationwide.

The Texas governor also defended Texas’s sodomy law, which the US Supreme Court struck down in 2002 in Lawrence v. Texas

I still think Bachmann is better, but Perry has socially conservative accomplishments. In my opinion, this makes him better than Romney, who has nothing to show that he is a social conservative, and much to show that he is a social liberal.

Here’s more about Perry in a second post from Life News.

Excerpt:

As governor, Rick Perry signed Texas’s informed consent law, the Woman’s Right to Know Act in 2003, and legislation giving unborn children at any point in gestation separate victim status in a crime (the Prenatal Protection Act 2003). He also signed a parental consent law in 2005, and made Texas the 10th U.S. state to fund abortion alternatives beginning in 2005.

Perry also signed into law a 2005 measure banning abortion after 26 weeks gestation. The law allows exceptions in the cases where the mother faces substantial risk of death, “imminent, severe, irreversible brain damage or paralysis,” or if her unborn child has “severe, irreversible brain impairment.”

During the most recent legislative session, Perry declared a new sonogram bill an “emergency” priority, allowing the legislature to swiftly enact the law that requires abortionists to provide women an ultrasound of their unborn child and an opportunity to hear the fetal heartbeat before making a decision on abortion.

[…]Perry adheres to a strong 10th amendment, or states rights philosophy, especially on abortion. The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution iterates that either the states or the people retain governmental powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution.

Perry has made the case that the states would be in a better position to defend the unborn than the federal government, which has been a prime donor to the abortion industry at home, through subsidizing Planned Parenthood, or funding abortion groups overseas.

The U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the power of the states to restrict or regulate abortion with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, making abortion a constitutional right, and therefore a federal issue. This has prevented states from passing pro-life laws that would greatly restrict or ban abortion.

Perry, however, has said that while he believes abortion is a matter for the states, he would support a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Such an amendment would be consistent with his states-based approach, because it would require the common consent of three-quarters of the States and supermajorities in both chambers of Congress.

There’s more in those two articles.

Again, he’s more moderate than I would like, but also more electable. He sounds like he would strike a middle ground between my views and Mitt Romney’s views. He’ll have more broad appeal with Democrats and independents. He’s not conservative enough for me on social issues, but he’s conservative enough to move the ball forward on social issues from where things stand today. I still prefer Michele Bachmann to anyone else by far, but a Perry/Bachmann or Perry/Pawlenty ticket makes sense to me, if it comes to that, with the remaining Minnesota candidate running for the Senate seat in 2012 against that miserable Amy Klobuchar.

I notice that the Club for Growth has a white paper on Michele Bachmann’s record views, but none for Rick Perry, yet. Bachmann gets an excellent review from Club for Growth, naturally. And she’s tied for first place on social issues with Rick Santorum, in my opinion.

Videos

Conservative Michael Gove defeats Labour’s Harriet Harman in debate

Leave a comment

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

It’s a knock-out! She tries to defend the rioters as victims, and justifies their rioting.

Here is my previous post on Harriet Harman and the riots. She is opposed to marriage, fathers, shared-parenting and law and order. She just doesn’t like men parenting their own children. She wants to treat everyone as victims, and coddle them when they act irresponsibly. She favors subsidizing women who have children out of wedlock with taxpayer money.

And here’s another article from Life Site News about the riots.

Excerpt:

In fact, all of these are valid observations, but some factors are more fundamental than others. Social order in some communities – and unfortunately more often in the most vulnerable communities – is breaking down. And it is being driven by an unprecedented breakdown of the family, which in turn is causing a vicious cycle of poverty, lack of education, lawlessness and further erosion of the basic values people need to keep society in order.

It is difficult to say this without being accused of targeting single mothers or attacking absent fathers. I know many single mothers who are doing an amazing job, in difficult circumstances, and who have raised the best of kids. And there certainly are other pressing issues which need to be tackled, such as the fact that there are huge inequalities of income and opportunity in British society.

But some facts are so startling, and some effects so obvious, that even the most liberal newspaper of the British press, the Guardian, is now acknowledging that lack of family structure is creating a huge problem. On Wednesday, the paper interviewed a youth worker from Tottenham who has spent 30 years working with disadvantaged communities. He said that parental authority had now been eroded to the point where the parents of rioting children would be afraid to discipline them.

His views were echoed by the local MP David Lammy who commented, “There is none of the basic starting presumption of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence. The parents are not married and the child has come, frankly, out of casual sex; the father is not present, and is not expected to be. There are not the networks of extended families to make up for it. We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men’s lives.”

There are 3.5 million children from broken homes in Britain. Their growing numbers, and the effect on of family breakdown on children, caused a leading family law court judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, to recently describe the scale of the problem as “social anarchy” and to urge the government to work to promote marriage.

The decline of marriage has left a significant proportion of children with a confused understanding of stability and of boundaries. And the lack of a male role model means that young men in particular seek out the toughest in the gang for an authority figure rather than their father. That means just one bad apple can influence a whole community of young teens.

I was recently talking with someone online who was a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. I think that view is mistaken. It turns out that government will expand to deal with the problems caused by people being irresponsible and reckless in their private lives. That will have an impact on tax rates and the free market, but it will also impact the very liberty that the social liberals want to protect. The more government grows to restrain these riots, the less liberty we will have. Being too permissive on social issues is bad for liberty, in the long run.

News

Women becoming less committed to Christian orthodoxy

12 Comments

From the Christian Post, survey findings from George Barna.

Excerpt:

Pollster and researcher George Barna released a report on religious changes in America this week revealing some surprising results. Barna concludes that women have experienced a significant spiritual change in the past two decades.

Women today are attending church and Sunday school less, reading the Bible less, and consider their faith less important in their lives, according to the new survey.

The Barna report also shows that over the last two decades women have become less likely to hold traditional views of God as the all-knowing creator and ruler of the universe. Women today are less likely to see the devil as a real person, considering him more a “symbol of evil.”

“Women used to put men to shame in terms of their orthodoxy of belief and the breadth and consistency of their religious behavior. No more; the religious gender gap has substantially closed,” said George Barna in his report.

“We can posit that while tens of millions of Americans seem to be wrestling with their faith – what to believe and how to experience and express it – women have been more radically redefining their faith than men in the past two decades.”

Does anyone have a hypothesis to explain this? Is it because Christianity is no longer viewed by the majority of people as “nice”? Are women dropping out because of the social pressure to not make truth claims or moral judgments?