I did not say that those were views common among Tea Party activists and supporters. Indeed, the Tea Party movement is interesting in part because it seems to attract fiscal conservative libertarian types. I said that many self-identified conservatives are reactionaries and Christian fundamentalists and that many of those people deem a conservative party to be one in which their reactionary, Christian Fundamentalists views prevail. That is a party that cannot win national office in the country. Those are views contrary to the Constitution which separates Church from State (though not morality from government, which the Left would have us believe) and are as incompatible with a free society in which the individual liberties of the Constitution are preeminent as would a Muslim fundamentalist platform. I am a practicing Christian and bear no ill will to other Christians or desire to bar them from living according to their beliefs. But when they demand that because of their beliefs the 14th Amendment shouldn't apply to gays, they are no better than the Left trying to annul or get around the Second Amendment. The State regulates marriage, therefore any and all equitable parties must be afforded the opportunity, as required by the 14 Amendment, to undertake State regulated marriage. Churches cannot be forced to perform gay marriage ceremonies either. The State sanctions all kinds of killing. I believe abortion is wrong and a sin, but given that the State already sanctions other forms of killing, that abortions will take place whether legal or otherwise, and that there is national consensus on Roe VS Wade, the fixation that many Republican law makers have with regulating the uterus in immense detail (but not passing a law that bans abortion plain and simple) is as Incompatible with our civil society as would be a Muslim fundamentalist effort to impose mandatory female genital mutilation.
In my opinion, a conservative has to stand by the whole Constitution, all the time, including the bits we may not like. Freedom means that other people we don't like will do things we don't like. The biggest threat to this nation is not late term abortions any more than it is "30 caliber magazineclips". It is the unrelenting growth of government, the crippling yet growing national debt, and the unwillingness of the current regime to adhere to the supreme law of the land, the Constitution.
So, I would encourage those who believe that their creed should form the basis of government, rather than the Constitution, to form their Party of Christ and then America's secular conservatives, who include large numbers of people who vote for the Left because the idea of voting for candidates that claim to believe the Creationist view of world history is intellectually insulting, can get on with fixing things while the religious right and socialist left argue fringe issues.
I am a conservative and I believe that we have to stop using government to force everybody to live the way we think they should, just as the Left has to stop using it to make everybody live the way they want them to.
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