[extropy-chat] No Joy in Mudville

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 pgptag at gmail.com
Fri Nov 5 18:43:38 UTC 2004


Thanks for this explanation Andrew, and I will just hope that "The
libertarian faction has long kept the religious faction in check with
respect to the separation of church and state" will continue.
G.

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 01:08:01 -0800, J. Andrew Rogers
<andrew at ceruleansystems.com> wrote:
> 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.



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list