In defense of social conservatives

For rank-and-file Republicans, our party's mission is to advance freedom through limited government, strong national security, personal responsibility and traditional family values. Although many Republicans generally adhere to all four of those elements, some do not; yet they remain allied because they are so strongly committed to many of those principles. Despite inner-party squabbles, most Republicans rationally accept that we must work together to form an electoral majority.

Recently, some have grumbled that social conservatives - pro-lifers, opponents of same-sex marriage and the "Religious Right" - are to blame for the party's recent setbacks and should be muzzled.

If the goal is winning elections, rather than purging membership rolls at the country club, throwing social conservatives under the bus is a catastrophically bad idea.

Roughly two-thirds of Republicans are pro-life; the balance are pro-choice. However, overwhelming majorities in both camps weigh other factors before casting their vote. According to Gallop, rigidly single-issue voters constitute just 22% of pro-life Republicans and 8% of pro-choicers.

Just four years ago, pollsters credited "values voters" with re-electing President Bush and expanding GOP majorities. This year, moderate "maverick" John McCain enjoyed strong support from evangelicals on Election Day, despite ranking as the least favorite primary candidate of pro-life Republicans.

Meanwhile, Republican moderates like Colin Powell, William Weld and Lincoln Chaffee endorsed the Democrat. Bob Schaffer experienced similar defections from social moderates who certainly would have disdained defectors had the shoe been on the other foot.

So why do some social moderates and libertarians find it so difficult to coexist with social conservatives?

Some believe social issues are a loser at ballot box, pointing to the 3-to-1 defeat of this year's "personhood" amendment. That's a poor example because Amendment 48 split the pro-life community between those who hope to end abortion in one fell swoop and those who think an incremental approach is more practical.

Gallup says the public "is split nearly down the middle" on abortion, but measures like a ban on late-term abortion enjoy overwhelming support.

The other galvanizing social issue, preserving the traditional definition of marriage, is the most successful citizen initiative since term limits and enjoys even stronger support among blacks and Hispanics than among whites.

Another reason social issues cause a rift is that many in both camps are very principled in their beliefs. Moderates and libertarians truly believe that abortion and marriage fall beyond the bounds of limited government. Social conservatives reason that life is the foremost of our inalienable rights and that traditional marriage laws merely preserve what governments have codified for centuries.

Fiscal conservatives must recognize that social conservatives are often their strongest allies in the battle for low taxes and limited government. In the last legislative session, pro-life Republicans scored an average 65% on the Colorado Union of Taxpayers scorecard, while pro-choice Republicans averaged 41%.

Most social conservatives don't care what goes on in someone else's bedroom but take to the ramparts when those matters move to a courthouse or seek taxpayer funding. In most cases, conservatives didn't seek out these battles until liberal activists and judges ignited them.

Social moderates who say they just want government to "stay out of it" will soon be tested. Will they vociferously oppose restrictions on religious speech, taxpayer funding of abortion, and federal legislation to pre-empt state laws on abortion and marriage?

Standing on principle is commendable, but beating each other over the head with our differences is a fool's sport. In the coming months, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will remind us all too clearly that the principles which unite us are far greater than those that divide us.

We need that reminder because, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, "We must all hang together or, assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

Anti-slavery then, pro-life now

(Denver Post, Dec. 7) What many call a concern for social issues, I call a passion for protection of the human person. With Democrats on a winning streak, some Republicans are asking why that passion is so strong in our party. Does it even belong in American politics? Thinking the question through, you’ll see that it does and it always has. Imagine you’re an Irish cop living in a Chicago slum. In the neighborhood you meet Barry and Shelley, a black couple who help the poor. You’re impressed with their efforts to bring the community better jobs, doctors, and schools. But one day you are ordered to raid their home and arrest them. Barry and Shelley are not criminals. They have harmed no one. But the year is 1858, and a man from Mississippi named Davis claims to own them as property. Federal law requires Illinois to enforce his claim. The black man “has no rights which the white man is bound to respect,” according to a US Supreme Court ruling in 1857.

You see your friends hauled away in chains. A month later you learn that Davis has sold the man into Alabama and taken the wife as his concubine. Their young daughters were put to work as field hands. The older one, defiant and desperate, dies after a whipping. Mississippi brings no charges.

After witnessing this, if a new political party called for changing the law so it would safeguard the life and liberty of all persons equally, wouldn’t you vote for them? If the same party insisted on strong marriage laws to protect women and children, wouldn’t you support that too?

I have just described the origins of the Republican Party in this country 150 years ago, during the crisis over human slavery in the South and plural marriage in Utah. Both injustices were condemned in the earliest GOP platforms on which Abraham Lincoln and his fellow partisans appealed to Americans’ moral conscience. A passion for protection of the human person is bred in our party’s DNA.

Bring the scenario forward to 1978. You’re an Italian nurse in Denver, mother of a pregnant 17-year-old. The whole family, even the expected child’s father, wants to see it born and either raised or offered for adoption. But your daughter wants the baby aborted.

Coloradans once made their own laws to balance this difficult issue where precious lives are at stake. Now they can’t. A US Supreme Court ruling in 1973 has barred state action, effectively saying that the child in the womb has no rights which adults are bound to respect.

Your long allegiance to the Democratic Party is no help; they favor court-sanctioned abortion on demand. If the Republicans called for letting elected legislators instead of robed judges seek a life-affirming compromise on the issue, wouldn’t you move their way? Millions would and did.

Forward again to 2008. You’re an African-American pastor in Los Angeles. You marched at Selma with Dr. King. You can’t wait to see Obama in the White House. California’s huge Democratic landslide will be partly your doing. But all your faith and common sense tell you marriage means one man and one woman, as voters affirmed by over 60% before the state’s highest court said otherwise last spring.

Now your congregation puts its weight behind Proposition 8, writing traditional marriage into the state constitution, even as most of them also vote for Barack. You’re not about to register Republican, but you’re quietly thankful that America still has one major party with a passion for protection of the human person, including the biological family.

Should the GOP abandon its defense of the unborn and the married moms and dads who await them? Not unless we’re ready to renounce our humanitarian patriarch and founder, Lincoln.

Thanksgiving honors founders' faith

For anyone born in the last 50 years, "separation of church and state" is inculcated secular orthodoxy. I well remember the family discussion during which my dad informed me that the phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution, and I recall spending the next two hours searching my history books in futility to prove him wrong. That government is insulated from faith is a notion that survives only in historical ignorance. Perhaps nothing disproves this fallacy more effectively than Thanksgiving Day, an official government holiday established for the purpose of acknowledging God's blessing of America.

Abraham Lincoln instituted a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, proclaiming:

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

"But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."

Lincoln deemed it "fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and once voice, by the whole American people."

Secularists, atheists and revisionists try to obscure these declarations of national faith, but Lincoln's sentiments echo those of our Founding Fathers.

The Continental Congress declared the first National Thanksgiving Proclamation on Nov. 1, 1777, so Americans could "express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor; and that together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join (in) the penitent confession of their manifold sins ... that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance."

When the "father of our country," George Washington, issued a similar decree in 1795, he declared it "our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God, and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we (have) experienced."

Despite our collective and individual shortcomings, Americans have prospered like no other people, but we are foolishly misguided if we believe that our freedom and longevity is the result of mere chance or that it can persevere without demanding sacrifice, humility and resolve from each of us.

Liberty, equality and freedom have certain biblical roots, and although our forefathers practiced divergent faiths and a few exhibited little faith at all, they were unified by an acknowledgement that only a faithful people is capable of self-governance.

In the 21st century, Americans continue to demonstrate a pervasive belief in God -- a faith that comforts and unifies us when tragedy and adversity remind us of our vulnerability.

Patrick Henry testified to Christianity's role in the birth of this nation and its capacity to co-exist with other faiths: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and free worship here."

Our ongoing struggles, though sometimes painful and heartbreaking, are not exceptional when compared to the suffering endured by those early colonists who dared to oppose the global superpower of that day.

On this Thanksgiving Day, we must remember the source of those patriots' strength and cultivate it for future generations.

A Republican unity recipe

Does the unbending commitment to moral issues by some in the GOP ordain a party fracture? So we're being told by centrist critics in the wake of election 2008. That logic is not only false, it's politically suicidal. Another version of this apocalyptic nonsense was heard after Colorado passed the Referendum C tax increase. My rebuttal back then, late 2005, was to argue that there are at least 20 (if not 120) deeply held beliefs to bind us together even if the specifics of tax policy happen to divide us. I wrote the following list of 21 items to prove it, placing taxes last.

Notice that abortion and marriage can also be placed very low on the list and still leave many compelling common causes for America's conservative party to agree on -- and win with. Republicans can and must continue to be the pro-life, pro-family, pro-religion party and the pro-freedom, pro-growth, pro-defense party. It's not either-or!

21 Things that Republicans Believe and Democrats Don't

Even when Republicans find ourselves divided over one issue, there are still many others that should unify us as a party – and stiffen our backbone against the opposition party. Here are 21 examples.

Look at all the good reasons we have to stick together. Most Republicans agree with each statement below. Most Democrats do not. They would either flatly disagree, or they’d be very uneasy with it.

Now consider this: unless the GOP remains a united, competitive force in the political arena, we leave our beliefs undefended for the liberals to roll forward in transforming this country into a very different place from what it is today. So the choice is ours: hang together or hang separately.

1. Our rights come from God, not government, and they belong to individuals, not groups.

2. God is real, according to the best evidence of human wisdom throughout the ages, and religious faith is generally beneficial for human well-being.

3. Our constitution is a permanent document that must be followed in its original written meaning unless formally amended – not a living document to be remolded by judges

4. America is and must remain one common culture, a melting pot enriched by many influences – not a multicultural salad bowl.

5. Federalism should continue as intended by America’s founders, with checks and balances between state power and federal power.

6. Private property is essential to a free society.

7. Free enterprise is the best system for creating opportunity and sharing wealth.

8. Courts and judges should interpret the law and the constitution as written – not seek to rewrite them. They should enforce personal responsibility and protect those who have been harmed – not conduct a lawsuit lottery.

9. Crime should be punished as a matter of personal responsibility, not excused as a matter of therapy.

10. Guns and other means of personal self-defense should be minimally regulated.

11. American military superiority is necessary in a dangerous world.

12. National security is better served by American sovereignty than it is by the United Nations.

13. Schools should respect parental choice and authority – challenge children with a high standard of truth and virtue – and be staffed by education professionals, not labor unions.

14. Colleges should not use tax dollars to teach our young people that Western civilization is worthless and America is a nation to be ashamed of.

15. Welfare should be a safety net for misfortune, not a hammock for dependency.

16. Health care policy should be based on personal choice, personal responsibility, and free markets.

17. Transportation policy should be based on individuals having freedom of mobility in their own cars.

18. Environmental policy should recognize humans as the highest species and economic growth as a positive good.

19. Abortion law should recognize there is not just one life but two lives in the balance when a woman seeks to end a pregnancy.

20. Marriage between one man and one woman warrants preference in law for its humanly natural, socially nourishing, and historically proven benefits.

21. Taxes are necessary as part of the price we pay for a civilized society, but taxes are also dangerous because the power to tax involves the power to destroy.

12 reasons I'm a Republican

Editor: Ron Phelps sent this to newspapers before the election. With the GOP's identity crisis, it's needed now more than ever. 1. I believe people should be guaranteed equal rights, not equal things.

2. I think making decisions locally is better than having Washington politicians or bureaucrats make them for me.

3. I think a free-enterprise system within a representative republic is a more effective way of running our country and meeting our needs than socialism.

4. I believe businesses in America should be allowed to make profits and I reject government redistribution of the profits of private enterprise. I reject socialism and the nationalization of private companies.

5. I believe that people misusing guns, and not the guns themselves are the issue. If someone with a weapon threatens my family or me, I have the right to, and will, shoot you.

6. I believe judges should not rewrite the Constitution to suit a fringe element, a minority that fails to get the support of voters.

7. I believe in private healthcare, not socialized medicine. I've lived and experienced the inefficiencies of government provided health care as a veteran.

8. I believe it's important to explore, develop, and use all possible sources of energy for our health, safety, and growth. I believe we should drill for oil here and now while we develop alternative sources of energy.

9. I believe marriage is a sacred union of a husband and wife for the purpose of bearing children, raising a family, and teaching them strong moral values. Our civilization is built on and will only survive on a foundation of strong families.

10. I believe that unborn children's lives are valuable, sacred, and should be defended. I reject abortion as a method of birth control.

11. I believe that early abortion should occur rarely and only be considered when the life of the mother is at risk.

12. I believe all who migrate to this country must do so within the established legal system. I believe that allowing, supporting, or offering sanctuary to anyone who illegally migrates to America is a crime.