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."

How to annoy an atheist

It's amazingly easily. Just say you want to, and he'll do the rest. Really, some of these no-godders are caricatures of themselves. This week, in possession of some tickets I couldn't use, I fired off a note to a couple of hundred people in our Backbone Americans group on Facebook. The subject line was "Annoy an atheist, attend the Christmas parade." The tone was jocular and ironic, with no edge to it, and concluding with the historical-cultural truism, "Christ is born in Bethlehem. Deal with it, everyone!" (See full text below.)

Well, Facebook worked again, in terms of both useful networking and screwball connections. I not only heard back from some of my favorite young families, one of whom was able to attend the parade. I also smoked out a couple of humorless atheists who apparently can't deal with the Bethlehem thing.

A guy in Arizona wrote me directly: "The Christmas thing is a divide-and-conquer. I don't want anything to do with it. Freedom doesn't use religion as a weapon. I have unjoined your group." In a comment posted on the Backbone Americans page, he added: "I'm a free man in a free country and I don't need your permission or your approval to observe the holiday season differently than you do, and I don't care to debate about it either."

Touchy, touchy. Checking out this fellow's Facebook profile (he and I weren't linked as "friends" and obviously shouldn't be), I found that his political identification is "Individualist Anarchism," and under religious affiliation he asserts, "Organized religion is dangerous." At least to your own blood pressure, amigo.

Also finding the holiday season stressful is another Facebooker in Denver, again someone who had joined Backbone Americans without our knowing each other personally at all, who wrote on the groups page, "Is this a Ted Haggard fan club in disguise?" Huh? Who said anything about Ted Haggard?

On the web profile, this cheerful soul tagged himself politically as a libertarian and religiously (oops, I guess that's an oxymoron) as an atheist. One assumes he wouldn't have joined the Backbone Americans group to start with if he had noticed our dedication to America's founding principles -- which extend atheists toleration but not a veto power over theists' free expression.

When I wrote the original message, I expected the non-believers to send either no reply at all, or good-natured banter and shrugs of the sort I got from Ross Kaminsky, who styled himself "your favorite atheist, whom you can't annoy with a Christmas parade because I think people can believe anything they want as long as they don't try to make me submit to their beliefs."

We need to prescribe some of Rossputin's happy pills for my other overwrought correspondents. Until then, I will try to remember not to incite a panicked rush to the exits by yelling "Christmas" in a crowded Ayn Rand seminar.

Here's the offending Facebook note that started this whole tempest in a Wassail bowl:

Denver area, first come... two adult & one child reserved seats for the renowned Channel 9 Parade of Lights, 8pm Friday. Excellent view of the "Merry Christmas" banner that Hickenlooper tried to 86. See the shocking Nativity float and jolly elf Santa himself at parade climax. We can't use these tickets, let me know if you can.

Outside Denver, start a thread on the Backbone Americans page with what you are doing - or your wildest fantasy - to annoy the atheist grinches in your town.

"Christ is born in Bethlehem." Deal with it, everyone!

Glass way more than half full

This Thanksgiving season, no one has more reason to be grateful than us. Though the media, politicians, Hollywood and a growing number of cap-in-hand special interest groups would like you to believe otherwise, Americans enjoy an unrivaled degree of prosperity. Even the 12.5 percent of Americans identified by the census bureau as poor are well off by world standards. Forty-three percent of all poor families own their own homes. The average poor American enjoys more living space than the average Londoner or Parisian. Three quarters of poor families own a car. Ninety-seven percent have a color television (more than half of the families have two or more televisions). A majority have cable TV, a VCR or DVD player, a microwave oven, and air conditioning.

These government statistics, compiled by the Heritage Foundation, paint a different picture of the downtrodden than does the nightly news, but the facts do not tell the whole story. Without a comparison of how other people live around the world, Americans have no real sense of just how grateful they should be.

Unfortunately, Americans don’t get out much. Roughly a quarter of US citizens hold passports. I’m probably safe in assuming that more of my countrymen watch American Idol than BBC World News. American myopia creates a skewed perception of reality. America’s poor families have homes, cars and televisions. The poor in most of the world have little or nothing. Completely destitute in America means finding a shelter where you can have a warm bed, a meal and the help you need to get back on your feet. In Haiti, the poor are baking dirt into cookies to fill their stomachs.

In America, if you lose your job there are “help wanted” signs up and down the street. The jobs may not be optimal but they’ll do until something better comes along. I’ve certainly done my time behind a register and sweeping a broom and I’ll do it again if I have to.

No such option exists for people in Zimbabwe where the unemployment level is 80 percent. There are no jobs. Government corruption and control of the market have reduced this once prosperous nation to abject ruin. Zimbabwe is far from the only country to strangle its economy with government regulation. The world average for unemployment is 30 percent. In the U.S. it is less than 5 percent.

America’s clean air and water may look dirty if you don’t know better. In Cairo, every breath I took was like sucking off a tail pipe. I found myself smoking Egyptian cigarettes just to get the taste of the air out of my mouth. Cairo took 2nd place in the Progressive Policy Institute’s Smokiest Cities contest with 159 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air. By comparison, Los Angeles, America’s most polluted city has 36 micrograms of particulate matter.

Breathing in the Egyptian capital was tough but drinking the tap water was out of the question. I drank bottled water and ate oranges, a fruit hermitically sealed by its own peal. Cairo was a great place to visit and I’ll go again, once my lungs have healed.

Should I need any medical help along the way, I’ll get it here, thank you. Americans have access to the best health care in the world. In developing countries, people die for want of penicillin or routine vaccinations. In socialized European nations and our neighbor to the north, citizens can get decent care if they have the time to wait for it.

According to the Frasier Institute, a Canadian think tank, Canadians wait on average nine weeks between getting a referral from a general practitioner and actually seeing the specialist. They then wait another nine weeks to get treatment. A cancer radiation referral takes five weeks, orthopedic surgery nine months.

My point here isn’t to browbeat readers into gratitude but to give a needed perspective. Ignorance is not bliss. An ungrateful heart is an unhappy one. It leaves people vulnerable to being misled by honey-tongued politicians promising to make them richer, healthier, and happier. In the places where the government tries to give people these things, it inevitably makes them poorer, sicker and less free to seek their own happiness.

This Thursday I gave thanks to God for the many blessings in my life including my beloved country. I joined with those who, in the words of George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, “unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection...for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed...”

Krista Kafer is a Denver-based education consultant, frequent cohost on Backbone Radio, and regular columnist for Face the State.com, from which this is reprinted by permission.

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.

Want to fireproof your marriage?

In the new movie "Fireproof," Caleb is a fire captain and Katherine is PR director for a hospital. Their marriage is crashing after seven years. Whose fault is it? Probably more his than hers, but it's not clear. He has an anger problem and a pornography problem. She's aloof, too perfect, and has a wandering eye at work. But when Kat asks for a divorce, it's Caleb who digs in to fight for their marriage, with encouragement from his dad, a new Christian. "The Love Dare," a 40-day rescue plan, is what slowly turns him, and the relationship, around.

Through plot twists we learn that the rescue plan has been found to work as well for a woman on the brink as for a man, and for couples a generation older than the young Holts. Caleb's lieutenant, a black guy named Michael, turns out to have it together a lot better both spiritually and maritally than his boss.

While the movie makes a direct but non-pushy evangelistic appeal, this isn't church or a revival meeting -- it's terrific entertainment. What could be a heavy couple of hours is deftly lightened by Kat and Caleb's funny coworkers at the hospital and the firehouse, as well as by the deadpan neighbor who is always outdoors at the wrong time.

"Fireproof" was shot on a shoestring budget and with few professional actors. It's the third feature film from Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, which previously shook up the cinema world with "Facing the Giants." At their website, FireproofMyMarriage.com, the "Love Dare" book is also for sale.

Donna and I loved this movie because, like most couples, we've had to learn a lot of lessons about marriage the hard way. We're encouraging all our friends to see it and talk it up. Its theater run won't be very wide or long, given the bias of Hollywood and big distributors toward a totally different ethic and message. Catch it while you can, or if necessary, get the DVD later on. This one's worth owning and seeing again!