Laudable Statement By A Republican Presidential Candidate

I’ve consumed quite a few kilobytes railing against the theocrats in the Republican Party.  It seems that not all of the candidates are fundamentalists intent upon imposing their religious lifestyles on others (or pandering to those who do).

“The Family Leader” is an Iowa organization that has asked all Republican candidates to sign “The Marriage Vow,” a narrow-minded, bigoted piece of theo-crap.  If you’ve guessed that Mama Michele has signed it, you’re correct.  Rick Santorum has committed, too.  Others will follow.

One candidate, however, is holding his ground.  Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson will not.  Here’s his excellent statement:

Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives

The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues – such a discussion is simply wrongheaded.

We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the ‘public’s pocket book.

This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

While the Family Leader pledge covers just about every other so-called virtue they can think of, the one that is conspicuously missing is tolerance. In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions, and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.

The Republican Party cannot afford to have a Presidential candidate who condones intolerance, bigotry and the denial of liberty to the citizens of this country. If we nominate such a candidate, we will never capture the White House in 2012.

If candidates who sign this pledge somehow think they are scoring some points with some core constituency of the Republican Party, they are doing so at the peril of writing off the vast majority of Americans who want no part of this ‘pledge’ and its offensive language.

Wow!  If this were the tack of leading Republicans, it would be a reason for all of us to respect, if not agree with, their agenda.  Alas, he is a voice in the wilderness.  No one will ever hear about him and he won’t be invited, so to speak, to the Party’s party.

One thing that Johnson did not address in this odious piece of fish-wrapping is a paragraph that was in its earlier draft.  It was in the version that Bachmann signed and to which Santorum assented.  Try not to fall out of your chairs while reading this:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

For the first time in a long time, I have no words.