Connecting With S.C. Voters, Candidates Try BBQ
January 14, 2012
Listen to the Story
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/14/145221280/connecting-with-s-c-voters-candidates-try-bbq
The South Carolina primary is one week from Saturday. On Friday night, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum hit an upstate barbecue, vying to emerge as the candidate the state's conservative Republicans can rally behind. NPR's Debbie Elliott was there and has this report.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/14/145221280/connecting-with-s-c-voters-candidates-try-bbq
Article Six of the United States Constitution establishes the Constitution and the laws and treaties of the United States made in accordance with it as the supreme law of the land, forbids a religious test as a requirement for holding a governmental position and holds the United States under the Constitution responsible for debts incurred by the United States under the Articles of Confederation.
TextAll Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
OathsDuring the 1960 presidential campaign, the issue of whether the nation would for the first time elect a Catholic to the highest office in the land raised the specter of an implicit, but no less effective, religious test. John F. Kennedy, in his Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on 12 September 1960, addressed the question directly, saying,
[N]either do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test, even by indirection. For if they disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it. . . . [C]ontrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President.I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.
I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views – in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come – and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely possible – when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise.
But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith; nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I'd tried my best and was fairly judged.
But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.See also: Qur'an oath controversy of the 110th United States Congress
Proverbs 6:16-19
16 These six things the LORD hates,
Yes, seven are an abomination to Him:
17 A proud look,
A lying tongue,
Hands that shed innocent blood,
18 A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that are swift in running to evil,
19 A false witness who speaks lies,
And one who sows discord among brethren.
NEWT WANTS YOU
Peter J. Boyer writes in Newsweek, December 19, 2011, that the freshmen Republicans of 1995, like the Tea Party class of last year, were true believers in the revolution they'd been recruited into by Gingrich. They'd come to overturn not just Democrats, but Washington itself. The hard-core zealots among them insisted upon a permanent revolution, but Gingrich seemed more interested in a permanent Republican majority, which was not the same thing. To some of the dissidents, such as Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma obstetrician who'd made a term-limit pledge, it began to seem that Gingrich had too easily accustomed himself to his new power. In closed-door meetings of the conference, Gingrich spoke condescendingly to his recalcitrant members about how governing really worked. He barked loudly when they didn't fall in line, and once threatened to send the sergeant at arms to collect them if they failed to appear at a meeting he'd called. Rifts grew, and a coup was attempted before Gingrich had completed his second term as speaker.
When, at the end of the 1998 session, Gingrich urged passage of a 4,000-page omnibus spending bill that no member had read, the dissidents rebelled. A peeved Gingrich, in what turned out to be his last speech from the House floor, sarcastically chastised what he called "the perfectionist caucus" of his party. It is difficult to imagine John Boehner, who was there that day, publicly rebuking his Tea Party caucus. But that moment helps to explain why Coburn, now in the Senate, says that he will not support Gingrich's presidential bid. Joe Scarborough, the former Florida congressman who was also part of Gingrich's 1994 Republican revolution, succinctly captured this Beltway antipathy on his Morning Joe broadcast last week. "He is not a nice human being," Scarborough said of his former speaker. "He is a bad person."
But the conservative base is plainly thrilled by Gingrich's forceful oratory. In Gingrich, conservative voters see a guy who's as alarmed as they are about the state of the nation (alarm is Gingrich's natural state), and who has already delivered a historic victory--one that produced a balanced budget and reformed welfare. His command on the debate stage has had a dwarfing effect on the other contenders.
To many of Gingrich's critics, Callista is exhibit A in the charge of hypocrisy against Gingrich, who was having an affair while presiding over the House during its impeachment of Clinton. Gingrich's defense is that he was not after Clinton because of his dalliance with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, but because he lied about it under oath. "I was very careful" to make the distinction, he says, offering as evidence a conversation he had at the time of the impeachment with -Erskine Bowles, Clinton's chief of staff.
"Erskine came to see me at one point, and he said, 'Look, virtually every guy I know has had an affair,'?" Gingrich recalls, adding, "Obviously, knowing what you now know about my life, I wasn't going to start getting into that." Gingrich said that he told Bowles that he himself had been in Clinton's shoes, when his own divorce lawyer had hinted that he should lie under oath during discovery, and he refused. "I said, 'This isn't about Bill Clinton groping some girl. This is about the president of the United States, who is a lawyer, sitting in front of a federal judge, lying under oath, in a case in which it is a felony.' And he looked at me and he said, 'Well, there is that.'?"
(As it happened, Gingrich would be faced with the issue himself again a year later during his divorce proceedings against Marianne, when Callista was obliged to testify about their affair--and admitted it under oath).
It is Gingrich's calculation that people will forgive (or, at least, forget) his personal sins from a decade and more ago, and there is evidence--starting with his standing in the polls--to suggest he may be right. Don Rogers, a Tea Party sympathizer and social conservative who attended a recent Gingrich appearance in Greenville, S.C. (Bob Jones country), says he is less concerned about Gingrich's personal life than he is with the way Gingrich might govern. "He's still an enigma," Rogers says.
"You cannot penetrate to know the real Newt--I've been trying to do that for a long time. He was the conservative voice for most people for a long time; he did things historically that had never been done before. But he also does things like sitting down on the couch with Nancy Pelosi." This was a reference to Gingrich's appearance alongside Pelosi in a television promotion for an environmental organization founded by Al Gore, a move Gingrich calls "the dumbest mistake of my career."
THE CHOSEN ONE ~ ‘K STREET BAG MAN’ IS ANOINTED
Santorum Strikes A Chord With Evangelicals
15, 2012
More than 150 conservative Christian leaders spent the weekend in Texas meeting about the presidential race and the possibility of coalescing around one Republican candidate. In the end, they rallied for Rick Santorum. Host Rachel Martin talks to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council about the decision. http://www.npr.org/2012/01/15/145259546/santorum-strikes-a-chord-with-evangelicals
Jim Wallis in God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (2005) writes that the Left always seems to lose because by declining to discuss overtly “religious” topics—Democrats allow Republicans to define the terms of the debate. The “religious issues” in an election get reduced to the Ten Commandments in public courthouses, gay-marriage amendments, prayer in schools, and, of course abortion.
These issues are important. But faith informs policy in other areas as well. What about the biblical imperatives for social justice, the God who lifts up the poor, the Jesus who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers”?
How a candidate deals with poverty is a religious issue, [as with] the Bush administration’s failure to support poor working families should be named as a religious failure. Neglect of the environment is a religious issue. Fighting pre-emptive and unilateral wars based on false claims is a religious issue (fact not changed by the defeat and capture of Saddam Hussein).
The United States has a long history of religious faith supporting and literally driving progressive causes and movements. From the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage to civil rights, religion has led the way for social change.
The separation of church and state does not require banning moral and religious values from the public square. In fact, American’s social fabric depends on such values and vision to shape our politics—a dependence the founders recognized.
It is indeed possible (and Necessary) to express one’s faith and convictions about public policy while still respecting the pluralism of American democracy. Rather than suggesting that we not talk about “God,” Democrats should be arguing—on moral and even religious grounds—that all Americans should have economic security, health care, and educational opportunity and that their faith results in a compassionate concern for those on the margins.
Democrats should be saying that just foreign and military policy will not only work better, but also be more consistent with both our democratic and spiritual values. And they must offer a moral alternative to a national security policy based primarily on fear, and say what most Americans intuitively know: that defeating terrorism is both practically and spiritually connected to the deeper work of addressing global poverty and resolving the conflicts that sow the bitter seeds of despair and violence.
Many of these policy choices can be informed and shaped by the faith of candidates and citizens—without transgressing the important boundaries of church and state. (58-9)
God is always personal, but never private. The Democrats are wrong to restrict religion to the private sphere—just as Republicans are wrong to define it solely in terms of individual moral choices and sexual ethics. Allowing the Right to decide what "is a religious issue" has become both a moral and political tragedy.
Not everyone in America has the same religious values, of course. And many moral lessons are open to interpretation. But by withdrawing into secularism, the Democrats deprive Americans of an important debate. (60-1)
Race ~ Driver of American Right-wing Faith
Rick Santorum won in Iowa by Playing the Race Card, and continues to do so in South Carolina, and it is very effective. Edward P. Morgan in What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (2010) posits that race is the great American dilemma. He posits that probably the single most promising aspect of Barack Obama’s campaign was his address on race in Philadelphia, in which he tried to open some windows of potential understanding between the “two sides” of the nation’s racially divided perceptions.
Yet beyond the evocative symbolism of election night 2008, there is little evidence of public discourse in which cultural and experiential differences are shared in a mutually enlightening way—at least in the media.
What has occurred instead, however, is yet another round of Rightist-generated ad hominem attacks against Obama, some veiled challenges to his American citizenship, others blatant attacks call him a “socialist” or likening him to Stalin and Hitler. The vitriol is reminiscent of the Right’s attacks on Bill Clinton as somehow the manifestation of everything wrong in the 1960s—nicely encapsulated in Newt Gingrich’s critique of the Clinton administration’s alleged “Great Society, counter-culture, McGovernick” tendencies. (305)
How a candidate deals with poverty is a religious issue, [as with] the Bush administration’s failure to support poor working families should be named as a religious failure. Neglect of the environment is a religious issue. Fighting pre-emptive and unilateral wars based on false claims is a religious issue (fact not changed by the defeat and capture of Saddam Hussein).
The United States has a long history of religious faith supporting and literally driving progressive causes and movements. From the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage to civil rights, religion has led the way for social change.
The separation of church and state does not require banning moral and religious values from the public square. In fact, American’s social fabric depends on such values and vision to shape our politics—a dependence the founders recognized.
It is indeed possible (and Necessary) to express one’s faith and convictions about public policy while still respecting the pluralism of American democracy. Rather than suggesting that we not talk about “God,” Democrats should be arguing—on moral and even religious grounds—that all Americans should have economic security, health care, and educational opportunity and that their faith results in a compassionate concern for those on the margins.
Democrats should be saying that just foreign and military policy will not only work better, but also be more consistent with both our democratic and spiritual values. And they must offer a moral alternative to a national security policy based primarily on fear, and say what most Americans intuitively know: that defeating terrorism is both practically and spiritually connected to the deeper work of addressing global poverty and resolving the conflicts that sow the bitter seeds of despair and violence.
Many of these policy choices can be informed and shaped by the faith of candidates and citizens—without transgressing the important boundaries of church and state. (58-9)
God is always personal, but never private. The Democrats are wrong to restrict religion to the private sphere—just as Republicans are wrong to define it solely in terms of individual moral choices and sexual ethics. Allowing the Right to decide what "is a religious issue" has become both a moral and political tragedy.
Not everyone in America has the same religious values, of course. And many moral lessons are open to interpretation. But by withdrawing into secularism, the Democrats deprive Americans of an important debate. (60-1)
Race ~ Driver of American Right-wing Faith
Rick Santorum won in Iowa by Playing the Race Card, and continues to do so in South Carolina, and it is very effective. Edward P. Morgan in What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (2010) posits that race is the great American dilemma. He posits that probably the single most promising aspect of Barack Obama’s campaign was his address on race in Philadelphia, in which he tried to open some windows of potential understanding between the “two sides” of the nation’s racially divided perceptions.
Yet beyond the evocative symbolism of election night 2008, there is little evidence of public discourse in which cultural and experiential differences are shared in a mutually enlightening way—at least in the media.
What has occurred instead, however, is yet another round of Rightist-generated ad hominem attacks against Obama, some veiled challenges to his American citizenship, others blatant attacks call him a “socialist” or likening him to Stalin and Hitler. The vitriol is reminiscent of the Right’s attacks on Bill Clinton as somehow the manifestation of everything wrong in the 1960s—nicely encapsulated in Newt Gingrich’s critique of the Clinton administration’s alleged “Great Society, counter-culture, McGovernick” tendencies. (305)
It is indeed possible (and Necessary) to express one’s faith and convictions about public policy while still respecting the pluralism of American democracy. Rather than suggesting that we not talk about “God,” Democrats should be arguing—on moral and even religious grounds—that all Americans should have economic security, health care, and educational opportunity and that their faith results in a compassionate concern for those on the margins.
Democrats should be saying that just foreign and military policy will not only work better, but also be more consistent with both our democratic and spiritual values. And they must offer a moral alternative to a national security policy based primarily on fear, and say what most Americans intuitively know: that defeating terrorism is both practically and spiritually connected to the deeper work of addressing global poverty and resolving the conflicts that sow the bitter seeds of despair and violence.
Many of these policy choices can be informed and shaped by the faith of candidates and citizens—without transgressing the important boundaries of church and state. (58-9)
God is always personal, but never private. The Democrats are wrong to restrict religion to the private sphere—just as Republicans are wrong to define it solely in terms of individual moral choices and sexual ethics. Allowing the Right to decide what "is a religious issue" has become both a moral and political tragedy.
Not everyone in America has the same religious values, of course. And many moral lessons are open to interpretation. But by withdrawing into secularism, the Democrats deprive Americans of an important debate. (60-1)
Race ~ Driver of American Right-wing Faith
Not everyone in America has the same religious values, of course. And many moral lessons are open to interpretation. But by withdrawing into secularism, the Democrats deprive Americans of an important debate. (60-1)
Race ~ Driver of American Right-wing Faith
Rick Santorum won in Iowa by Playing the Race Card, and continues to do so in South Carolina, and it is very effective. Edward P. Morgan in What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (2010) posits that race is the great American dilemma. He posits that probably the single most promising aspect of Barack Obama’s campaign was his address on race in Philadelphia, in which he tried to open some windows of potential understanding between the “two sides” of the nation’s racially divided perceptions.
Yet beyond the evocative symbolism of election night 2008, there is little evidence of public discourse in which cultural and experiential differences are shared in a mutually enlightening way—at least in the media.
What has occurred instead, however, is yet another round of Rightist-generated ad hominem attacks against Obama, some veiled challenges to his American citizenship, others blatant attacks call him a “socialist” or likening him to Stalin and Hitler. The vitriol is reminiscent of the Right’s attacks on Bill Clinton as somehow the manifestation of everything wrong in the 1960s—nicely encapsulated in Newt Gingrich’s critique of the Clinton administration’s alleged “Great Society, counter-culture, McGovernick” tendencies. (305)
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