NEW PARTY!!! WHAT WILL WE STAND FOR???

Firstly, it is the most devisive part of the platform.

Secondly, making gay marriage and abortion illegal is not the best way to change culture...if government should be doing that at all.

To build a majority of small government, pro-business, hawkish conservatives: cast the social conservative agenda overboard.

Or retrench...and watch the Libertarian Party grow.

Thanks for your comment Joel. Its good to know someone is reading. To ask social conservatives to take those items out of the platform is to ask us to be 2/3 of ourselves. We don't want to be Libertarians, nor do we ask you to become us. People are created mind body and spirit. To honor only the mind (economics and business) and the body (defense and safety) is to deny who we are. Then we have to ask, what are we defending?

We are so strong on the gay marriage issue because marriage is a sacrament ordained of God. It is not just a legal contract. If we give this "right", at what point can we tell our children that this is not an acceptable life style and at what point can we avoid gay indoctrination in our schools.

A father in a Northeast state was jailed because he refused to leave a principal's office until that official would promise to notify parents when homosexual materials were going to be presented to his 5 year old. he was told that since gay marriage had been OK'd this material was deemed acceptable by the school board and parents had no right to object.

Regarding abortion, if a line is not drawn, at what point to we begin again to have a culture of life instead of a culture of death. Life is not ours to dispose of, and for it to be legal to do so in the country of which we are citizens is simply not acceptable. I wish I had not been an ignorant 20 something when Roe v Wade was first passed.

Someone once said - just because something is popular, it doesn't make it right...and just because something is right does not mean it will be popular.

We have no desire to be popular. We have a desire to live honorably in the presence of God, Jehovah or Allah. We believe these values are the underpinnings of society and the home and cannot be discarded.

It's philosophically inconsistent with less government and government staying out of your business.

You don't want government to tell you whom to hire...but you do want government to tell you whom to marry.

PS The answer to the GOP identity crisis question "who are we" is simple "you are the losers."

The subject of who to marry is only having to be looked at because the Judeo-Christian norms that his country was founded on are being tossed out as of no value. For over 200 years there was no need for legislation because the unspoken definition of marriage in this country and every marriage licesnse form in this country had a place for one man and one woman. Now that a small minority of people in this country are violently pushing for something that is not acceptable to the majority of citizens, legislation does need to be considered in order to protect what has always been "understood".

I would rather be right in the eyes of the one I will be answeriing to for all eternity and stand alone in that knowledge than to be drowning in error in a crowd.

Our founding fathers were about putting religious differences behind them (literally an ocean away). The religious right has found a way to reinject religion into government.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who would vote for a conservative, if you drop the religiosity.

Did Jesus change society through legislation?

I don't think you even CAN change culture that way...look at drugs just as a random example.

I've never understood how someone who is against abortion as a form of murder can then say it can be allowed in the case of rape or incest.

Can anyone here help me out?

An excellent example of the hypocrisy of the debate.

I suspect that the answer to your question has everything to do with "making the sinner pay" for what they did.

Otherwise, they would have to explain why God doesn't love those children who result from rape or incest.

So how bout that?

Does God not love all of His children or what?

the precurser to those exceptions, it was not to say those were Ok..

It is because we know that those that support abortion will never allow it to be outlawed completely and was offered as the form of compromise that you seem to think we are incapable of. Is it OK to lose those lives? NO. Is it more acceptaab;e to lose millions of lives.

By the way have I insulted you in anyway or talked to the other writers as if you were not involved in the conversation? There is no reason fir the hypocrisy labels.

I called the debate hypocritical...not you.

But I WOULD challenge whether the notion that throwing a minority of the children you are trying to save to the wolves as a compromise jives with what you believe.

Moreover, if it were simply a matter of maximizing the number of lives saved:

then pass out condoms to teens!

Because the majority of abortions are from unwanted teenage pregnancy.

Or is preaching abstinence more important than saving the lives of the unborn.

The whole abortion debate is rank with hypocrisy.