[extropy-chat] No Joy in Mudville

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Nov 5, 2004, at 12:06 AM, Olga Bourlin wrote:
> Let's just start with ... er, Republicans (all generally speaking here)
> support a woman's right to choose?


Yes.  It has been dropped as a real platform for a reason -- there was 
no consensus within the party.  I do not personally know any 
Republicans that are not pro-choice, and I know quite a few 
Republicans.


> Republicans led the marches for civil
> rights, gay rights and women's rights?


You may want to read some history.  The Democrats were on the wrong 
side of a great many civil rights issues.  They've only claimed many of 
them after the fact.  The Deep South has been pretty much 100% Democrat 
for more than a century up until the last few years and one of its core 
constituencies.  Any faults regarding civil rights you see evident in 
or would paint on the Southern culture throughout history you'll have 
to paint on the Democratic party.  Which includes race, gender, and 
sexual orientation discrimination.


> Republicans want to support stem
> cell research?   Republicans want the separation of church and state?


Yes, and yes.  Your analysis has been shallow.

The Republicans are a coalition of two major factions, a libertarian 
faction and a religious conservative faction.  They have competing 
motivations but they've learned to get along.  They originally formed a 
coalition to deal with the Democratic party back when they were a 
juggernaut for most of the 20th century.

The religious conservative faction objects to stem cell research on 
moral grounds.  The libertarian faction likes the research but objects 
to the Federal government funding it, particularly since there is no 
real shortage of private funding for it.  The obvious policy compromise 
is to reduce or eliminate Federal funding of the research.  The 
libertarian faction has long kept the religious faction in check with 
respect to the separation of church and state.  I am not a Republican 
but I am an atheist, and I've never felt threatened by the bogeyman of 
the "religious right" in a legal sense.  The Republican party has no 
designs toward establishing a state religion nor would the libertarian 
faction allow anything vaguely resembling that.  And if the militant 
atheists in some Democrat factions would stop going out of their way to 
antagonize the religious Republicans (and yes, this does happen), this 
would largely dissipate as an issue.

You need to learn to look at Republican policy from this perspective.  
Little gets done that does not pass the filter of both the libertarians 
and religious conservatives.  This means that compromises usually only 
include things that both factions can agree on from an ideological 
standpoint.  A few bones get thrown and occasionally there are very 
heated discussions within the party, but nothing really gets out of 
control.


There are many, many pro-choice, atheist, gay-friendly Republicans, 
primarily because the Republicans only rarely step on the toes of these 
quasi-libertarian folks and vice-versa.  Why do you think it is that 
drug legalization has occurred primarily in western Republican states 
rather than Democrat ones?  The different factions have different 
proportional strengths in different parts of the country.  Your view of 
Republicans is a highly biased caricature.


> And - horror of horrors - do you *really* want to see what a 
> conservative
> Supreme Court?


Right now, I would settle for a non-activist court.  The liberal courts 
have an egregious record in this regard (in evidence in the circuit 
courts and some State supreme courts), and to a greater extent than 
conservative courts generally.  This is something I follow pretty 
closely, and the track records are not even close to similar in this 
respect.  Knowing nothing else, I would choose a conservative court 
over a liberal court, only because conservative courts have a better 
track record of interpreting various constitutions in a reasonable and 
consistent fashion.  That would be playing the odds.

The push for more conservative courts and constitutional amendments 
rather than legislation is a backlash against what is rightly perceived 
as excessive and extra-constitutional legislation from liberal activist 
courts.  I only hope that the conservative courts do not escalate the 
situation by responding in kind.

cheers,

j. andrew rogers