![Ep. 13 Plan For Republicans, Part VI: Never Lose the Moral High Ground [audio and text]](https://www.feet2thefire.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/537px-Mexican_Slingshot-537x377.jpg)
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If you listen to the consultants and political class, we should give up half our party platform without ever even putting up a fight. But there’s just too much at stake for us Americans to surrender our moral conscience.
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Well, if I haven’t alienated any liberals or moderate Republicans yet with my show content, this would certainly be the one to do it. Not that it’s my goal to alienate. It’s just, well, reality is tough for people to swallow sometimes. But regardless, truth must be spoken with no shame, and that’s what we do here at FTTF. No pulling punches. And honestly, what I’ve come to realize through personal experience, is that where people have the courage, or really the humility, to listen to and accept the facts of the matter, the confident, bold, unhindered, rational pronouncement of raw, unvarnished truth can become very appealing. So the goal actually is to engage minds and change minds, make people think honestly, discern the truth and be humble enough to respond to it.
Welcome back, everyone, after hopefully a restful and pie-filled Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend, to Feet to the Fire, the new voice of Conservative dissent! This is our concluding topic for our series Plan For Republicans, in which we’ve been holding the newly elected 2015 Republican majority’s feet to the fire to stick to conservative positions. And a quick summation of what we’ve looked at already in previous episodes. We said this as far as a General Principle for Republican strategy:
Do NOT compromise with Obama, the Democrats, the Liberals on anything.
And then we isolated two specific policy positions. The first was this:
Unfortunately, Obama already blew amnesty wide open by giving it unilaterally to 5 million illegals about a week and a half ago. But even so, Republicans should fight to block and/or reverse that action, and they can still advocate for a secured southern border.
But now, issue Number 3. The 3rd and final no compromise, no budging, have to stick to it, conservative policy position that Republicans need to maintain. Now, granted there are more than 3 important issues we face. More like 3 thousand that we have to take a strong conservative stance on. However, strategically, isolating 3 areas will help focus political efforts and will also help to prevent the casual, unnoticed loss of ground that could happen if we don’t stay on the offensive and make these issues front and center. That’s how liberals often work, they just do things while we are sleeping, while we are quietly minding our own business, enjoying our lives with our families, or while we are too busy working and being productive to notice their sinister activity. Remember, that’s how they did ObamaCare. Christmas Eve, right?! How despicable. So here we go, issue number 3. And it’s kind of a broad position. Republicans need to:
Stay conservative on all of the MORAL/VALUES issues; specifically, they need to remain vigilantly PRO-LIFE and PRO-MARRIAGE.
This is how the political debate has unfolded in America, or how politicians unfortunately like to divide it nowadays, almost into two categories:
-the economic/fiscal policy issues, which would be stuff like taxation, health care, even immigration; and then
-social/moral policy issues or values issues; and examples would be what I just mentioned, things like abortion, marriage, religion in the public arena, legalized marijuana, capital punishment, things like that.
And by the way, when I say “social issues,” that’s different from the word socialism, which is an economic model. I don’t want to confuse you. They have nothing to do with each other, there’s no relation there. Social issues just means policy affecting society at large with regard to core values and ethics.
Now, if you’re cringing, thinking, “No! That’s political disaster!” Or if you are just confused thinking, “Well, that’s unexpected, kind of weird, kind of out of nowhere, out of left field,” just hear me out and let me explain. Whenever we get the majority, we have to fight for the issues that are most important to us and most vital to national interests. And we constantly see this sickening, repetitive habit with Republicans, particularly the Establishment phonies, that in order to advance politically we have to moderate these, what they’d consider, less crucial issues, or perhaps better said, more volatile issues. They think, we should moderate on these social issues as compared to say economic or fiscal policy, which everyone cares about and can agree on, in order not to lose the support of certain constituent voters or specific demographics, like the women’s vote or the Hispanic vote. But as I’ve made the case many times previously, that’s not how principled leadership works. You don’t do what seems right for consolidating more support; you do what’s right because it’s right regardless of the degree or extent of opposition or the projected political cost.
In the cases of so-called moral issues of the day, particularly abortion and homosexual marriage, the tendency will be for the Establishment Republicans, since they have political capital as the majority party in Washington now; the tendency will be to become tight-lipped and dead silent on these issues so as not to offend and in their minds potentially jeopardize their newly, hard-earned victory. It’s like some delusional form of self-preservation. Like a scared animal in the wild. And that’s not because the majority of the Republicans are pro-choice or anti-traditional marriage. That’s not the case at all. Sure, there are some useless moderates who really aren’t conservative at all, who have already compromised their integrity by rejecting the just cause of the unborn and the nuclear family in America. But many Republicans are still conservative; they just get cowed into silence. And so they figure not saying anything at all and yet still holding their conservative positions, silently maintains their personal integrity and at the same time keeps them out of trouble. Well, unfortunately, that sounds safe, but playing it safe is not exercising leadership nor is it projecting strong character.
And since this will be the default modus operandi for a lot these knuckleheads, I’m holding their feet to the fire to say No Way! Now more than ever, when you’ve got the political clout and mandate from the nation, use it! Get courageous, stay strong, move right, and come out swinging on these values issues. Cowards get tight-lipped. Leaders stand up in the middle of the arena and demand justice. And that, my friends, is exactly what the Republicans need to do. So essentially, I’m not bringing up this third topic of the moral issues because of some particular recent development in politics or a personal obsession but precisely because the Republicans probably WON’T be bringing up these issues or would tend to think, better not. And if these issues come up, the Establishment textbook response is this: moderate, ignore it, change the topic, dismiss it as unimportant, denial, run away! And all this is exactly the WRONG direction to go when you’ve the got the political power that’s now been dumped into our laps. They think, “Let’s just get a single, maybe a guy on first base and hopefully win back the White House in 2016.” But the conservative says, “We won! Go for a Grand Slam. Then win the White House in 2016, and let’s turn this country around.” Because the great deception for Republicans and a lot of people in this country is this: no matter how many political victories the Republicans win and no matter how much conservative fiscal policy is implemented, if we lose on the moral issues of the day, we lose, period. We lose the country, conservatism loses, and there’s no getting the country back. Because you can’t have conservative fiscal policy and yet liberal moral or social policy; it doesn’t work.
That’s what our side doesn’t get! You can’t have partial victory on SOME of the less controversial political issues and then lose the other ones, which just so happen to be just as important. And that’s what I want to discuss now. Why are the moral issues, the social issues, just as vital to our national interest and the preservation of our way of life as the fiscal and economic policies of conservatism? And the language itself tends to confuse the discussion. Even saying social versus fiscal feeds a misconception, sustains this erroneous presumption that there are distinct and independent spheres of conservative thought or opinion. There aren’t! You can’t compartmentalize a conservative worldview and pick and choose parts you like, parts you don’t like. There aren’t actually two categories of political thought: moral/social versus fiscal/economic. The fact of the matter is, the real truth is, all issues are moral and ethical issues. All issues emanate from a particulate worldview, essentially from your religious worldview, or lack thereof. And all issues affect our social fabric as a people. Some issues have to do with property rights (economics), others have to do with family rights or marital rights or the right to life. But all of the traditional positions on these issues, not some, ALL, constitute a conservative political philosophy that must be upheld in its entirety, by the political right, the Republican party, in this country. This is our platform, and social issues are a part of it, and a defeat in one area will mean sure defeat everywhere else. And unfortunately, this “separated policies” mindset or model is a mirage. It’s a fabrication of the political right in this country for the express purpose of trying to appease certain voting blocks that we are worried about offending. “Okay, let’s say we’re fiscally conservative but diminish or hide our pro-life stance so we can still get the women’s vote. We’ll pretend to be, or worse actually become, socially moderate or even socially liberal Republicans.” Listen, liberals are liberals, men or women, and no amount of issue modification or political nuance is going to win them over.
And that’s why you never hear of liberals having split philosophies. They are always unabashedly liberal! Most liberals espouse and proudly flaunt their radically liberal opinions on any and every issue, from excessive taxation to abortion advocacy. So at least they have this going for them, consistency in their radical views and loyally, honestly adhering to them. You just don’t hear of many fiscally liberal and yet socially conservative Democrats for the most part. Because if they are liberal progressives economically, you can be sure they’re generally devoid of a moral compass in the other areas of politics as well, like abortion and marriage. Maybe in bygone generations, you could say you knew of a Kennedy Democrat or a Reagan Democrat. Maybe’s there a few left still. But for the most part, the Democrat Party in recent years has become so radicalized that they have a monolithic, uniform consistent liberal position on every issue. They’re heavily dogmatic and so heavily progressive on every policy point. Meanwhile, us Republicans are running around afraid to dig our heels in, and we end up moderating on so-called faith-based or social issues and subsequently undercutting our whole platform. And that’s because again, conservatism can’t stand when you pick and choose only certain aspects to uphold and another half to undermine. You see, the philosophy behind conservatism is this: unchanging, transcendent moral order, a transcendent ethical code, God-generated, immutable moral order. And that’s not something that can be cherry-picked or moderated. It’s take it or leave it. You’re either conservative all the way, or not at all.
And the only large cohort that may claim moral conservatism on the values issues and yet economic liberalism is a minority of very confused, ill-informed Christians. There’s a group of Christians out there who have this deranged view that socialist, progressive economic policy is somehow biblical even though they hold to all the other conservative positions like pro-life and pro-marriage. They foolishly believe that welfare economics is somehow compatible with conservative social policy. But they are certainly a minority. And this show in a small way is devoted to trying to win the minds and hearts of these very confused, unfortunately ignorant, albeit well-intentioned Christians, who erroneously perceive the charity of Scriptures to be a political mandate for radical, government-directed egalitarianism. And that without question is terrible biblical exposition for sure.
By the way, I often use that word, egalitarianism. That’s a fancy French word that means equality by means of wealth redistribution; in other words, attempting to equalize society by stealing wealth from one group, the achievers/producers/hard workers, and redistributing their wealth to the masses, a dependent class, through a centralized bureaucracy. In other words, socialism. It’s a fancy, glossed-over way to describe socialism because in the mind of Leftists, a French word that means “equality” seems so much more appealing. Regardless, French or English, it’s a garbage economic model, wicked, and foreign to our notions of liberty in America.
But back to our main topic: So why bring up the so-called social issues of abortion and marriage? Why are they just as important as conservative fiscal policy? That’s a question that needs a bit of an explanation. And I’ll leave that to our next show. But for now, suffice it to say, Republicans better stop dissecting their platform and giving up half the battle. And check out the next episode for a more detailed answer.
But until then, let Justice roll down like waters America, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream! Don’t believe the hype out there! The values issues are just as important as the economic issues in politics, and they need to stay front and center, not dismissed because Republicans are scared of losing voters. My pastor hit it on the head this week in his Sunday sermon from 1 Samuel 17. David did what was right in standing up to Goliath, even when all the rest of the army of Israel was shaking in their boots. So let’s face the opposition and not moderate our views, knowing that in the end, as David said, the battle is the Lord’s! Stay conservative, and stay vigilant. But please, no slingshots. Just speak up for what’s right, and hold their feet to the fire…
{increase volume, sweet bluegrass music with backbeat that screams freedom, that says heroes blaze a trail in a different direction…}
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