Do You Know Where Your Party Stands?
By Dennis Smith
Ah, it’s that time of year again. The days are getting shorter, nights are getting cooler, leaves are turning various shades of autumn hues, yard and roadside signs punctuate the landscape and four out of five radio and television commercials is a campaign ad. It’s election season! Don’t ya just love it?
On the serious side, though, I do hope you take the elections seriously. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll begin to focus on where the candidates — and their party — stand on the issues that are important to you. Now is the best time for home school support groups or other like-minded groups to meet with area candidates to see where they stand on home education, parental choice in education, sanctity of life, gun laws, taxes and a host of other important issues. Politicians are much more willing to spend time with you when they are in vote gathering mode. But notice I said, “where the candidates and their party stand on the issues.” I know it’s noble to proudly declare that you don’t vote for the party, you vote for the individual. But in doing so, you may invoke the law of unintended consequences. What do I mean by that? It’s simple.
Politics is about power, and the party in the majority has the power. On both the federal and state level, both houses of the legislature are relatively evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But whichever party has the most seats in each house gets the majority of seats and the chairmanship of each committee, as well as the speaker’s position. That means the party in the majority sets the agenda. It is the chairman of each committee who determines which bills that are sent to his committee are brought up in committee. Hence, the chairman is going to advance those bills that promote his party’s agenda. And, since his party has the majority of seats in the committee, his party’s agenda will pass in committee and go on to the full House or Senate where this same majority will vote the bill into law. How does a vote for your candidate make a difference?
Let’s say you normally vote Republican because you are conservative on most issues. But this time around you’re going to vote for the Democrat on the ticket either because you know the candidate personally or because of their gender, race, ethnicity, or some other reason. If that person wins, the unintended consequence is that you’ve helped provide his or her party one more seat toward becoming the majority party. Like it or not, you don’t just vote for a candidate, you vote to put a party in the majority. While you may like the individual, he or she is inexorably linked to their party. They must vote the party line on most issues if they hope to gain any prominence and be successful in politics.
So, when you consider the candidates running for office this November, it’s not only important to know where the candidate stands on the issues, it’s equally important to know where his or her party stands on the issues. Where do the party’s stand on the big issues?
Speaking as a Republican, in general, we know that the Democrat party is liberal on most issues. That means they generally support higher taxes to pay for a large central government to oversee and dole out money to a myriad of social programs they feel should be supported by your tax dollars. They are pro-choice when it comes to abortion, but not pro-parental choice when the issue is education. They believe in liberty when it comes to issues like the availability of pornography in our school and public libraries, or the right of children to seek birth control material or an abortion without parental knowledge or consent. But they don’t believe in our right to pray, have Bible clubs, teach creationism, or mention God in other ways in our public school systems, or to keep and bear arms to protect our family or ourselves from harm.
Republicans, on the other hand, believe families are better off when they pay fewer taxes, there is less government and fewer social programs to siphon off a families’ hard earned money. They are generally more pro-life, pro-family and pro-parental choice in education. They believe parents, not the government and not the schools, should be the decision-makers in matters concerning their children. They believe that a primary purpose of government is to provide protection and security for its citizens from evildoers, both from inside and outside its borders. And most believe that Christians have the right to express their Christian faith, and the right of the individual to protect their family and themselves by the use of force, if necessary, because the government can’t be everywhere at once—at least not yet!
Does that sound a little too much like partisan politics? I suppose it is. But I make the distinction, not because I’m a staunch Republican, but because I’m a Christian. And as a Christian, I am probably more conservative than most Republicans. I fear for our state, our nation and our individual freedoms when liberals are in control! It is Christians who brought the freedom of belief, of thought and of expression to this country. It is liberals who, while preaching tolerance, attempt to remove our freedoms and extinguish our speech.
It troubles me when it seems as though many Christians and other conservatives don’t care enough about the political process to do all they can to protect our freedoms from those who would like to restrict or take them away altogether. They complain if their particular candidate didn’t make it past the primary. And to demonstrate their frustration, simply refuse to vote in the general election, thus giving a victory to an even worse choice than the candidate for whom they refused to vote! I’ll never understand that one.
I suspect my views will infuriate some and find a nod of agreement from others. What I hope you will understand is that the political process is a party process. When you vote, you vote for more than a candidate, you vote for the candidate’s party too.
I encourage you to exercise your right to vote in the upcoming election, and in every election thereafter. But as you cast your vote for your candidate, be sure you know where your candidates’ party stands.
Editorial by Dennis Smith,
Executive Director of INCH