A Christian party?

Way ahead of you, Rod. I've already nominated John Zmirak.

Are you open for Veep? I'm thinking a swimsuit competition might attract more attention than the tired nomination methods used by the Two Name Brand parties. You'd sure as hell beat Cheney! You might even have something over Condi and Hillary.

Food for thought. Food for thought.>

It's worth talking about for the nearly 100 million eligible voters who sit on their butts every election day. More than enough to kick off third, fourth and fifth parties if handled right, and with defections from the other two, definitely could give them a run for their money.>

A Christian party?

I need whatever drugs y'all are taking. Rod, help is available. All you have to do is ask.

Back in the real world, people who call themselves Christians today are more divided than unified. Uh, Protestantism, anyone?

Take whatever issue you want: abortion, birth-control, stem-cells, China, taxes - people who call themselves Christians are completely and hopelessly divided.

You would have to have 3 or more "Christian" parties. Get real!>

I think a lot of Christian voters could agree on limiting/banning 2nd and especially 3rd trimester abortions, fighting corporate corruption/greed, cleaning up the environment, helping the poor/widdows/orphans, and better labelling of food, movies, video games, tv, and better diplomacy.>

"With probably two seconds of thought you've already come up with two insuperable obstacles the Christian Party project would founder on. Why is this worth thinking about again? "

Sorry, this is not thought, it is mere emoting. With 2 seconds of thought, you might have realized that you don't build a party, any party, on the things that divide you - you build it on the things that unite persons. It is doubtful that there are 60 million Christians with like-enough values to find themselves in substantial agreement on a broad system of planks, but it is not at all doubtful that you could find 20 to 25 million. That many committed voters is a BIG swing vote, if their vote is clearly united on certain issues.

As for the "This would be mixing faith and politics to a very dangerous degree, I think. In some ways it gives you the same problems as having a state church" No, no, this is NOT like an official state-church. Since the party would be inter-denominational, it could not be "a" church, and it is precisely the tying of the state to the direct support of a specific institutional church that runs into problems. It is , contrarily, the refusal to mix politics and religious values that leads to such unprincipled Republicans getting so much power and abusing it. The remedy is to take their base support away and put it somewhere it can make itself heard.>

Pagans are even more fractious than Christians. You'd never get them to agree on a platform.

I like the None of the Above, or NOTA, idea. Force the major parties to actually earn their candidacies in the primaries (average turnout: 25% or so) by getting 50% of the registered voters, not just a majority of the actual vote. Make NOTA a permanent choice on any ballot, the people could actually have a say in who represents them in the general election... speaking of which, I don't have a good sense of how NOTA would work in a general election, but I can offer two pieces of evidence:

Why the electoral college is ridiculous.

One possible analysis of NOTA, from the 2000 presidential election.>

A third party could be useful. It would be Jeffersonian in nature, pro-life, advocate localism, family and property rights, real family farms, prudence in use of the military, secure borders, and an intolerance within these borders for Jihadist Islam (peaceful forms of Islam are fine). It would be based in the South and have strong Christian base, but not be a "religious" party.

It would draw votes away from the Republicans, mostly, but also draw in some remaining conservative Dems. But if you crash the Republican ship a couple of times, you will see them scrambling to imitate your views in order to harvest votes. A positive influence.

It doesn't matter a whit that Christians are split. Liberal Christians will, for the most part, continue to vote for the party of abortion. Although the potential is there to draw some of the more sane ones away. Many conservative Christians will never abandon the Republicans and that's okay.

It is long overdue and this adminstration illustrates more than most why we need one. The ideas that 1)we need to be on the "winning team" or 2)Christians need to avoid the taint of politics, has brought us to where we are today. There are plenty of non-voting, conservative Christians, as well as non-Christians who agree that this country has lost its way.

McCain-Feingold (the law Bush said was unconstitutional, then promptly signed) has made it harder for such a party to form, but not impossible. In trying to eliminate "big money" the reformers, not suprisingly, stuck it to the outsider, and made not a dent in the financial predations of people like George Sorros.

Nevertheless, hanging out in the Republican Party waiting for people like Tom Delay or Mark Foley to give some attention to the Founding Fathers is a lost cause. By that I mean we have lost. I'd rather lose fighting for something with at least a smidgen of integrity.>

The European Christian parties--unless they are aligned with neo-Nazis--would be viewed as fairly moderate to liberal in the eyes of most people in the U.S. The Evangelical religious conservatism we see in the U.S. is an anomoly when compared to our European (and Canadian and Australian) allies. The only place where far right Christian parties have much sway is in third world countries.

All of that said, I do think we need third and fourth parties in this country. Our national dialogue would be quite different, although my sense if the religious right would find itself even more marginalized.>

I believe we should answer curiouser just as soon as he points out where specifically the U.S. Constitution invokes the phrase "separation of church and state."

It seems to me that, although the Bill of Rights prevents Congress from constructing an American analogue to the Church of England, there is nothing (and there ought to be nothing) preventing individual citizens supporting, for instance, laws against smut because of their religious beliefs.

Those who believe otherwise support freedom of religion as long as that freedom is exercised wholly outside the public realm: religion is free so long as religion is irrelevant.>

I'm all for a third party. (Actually, I think it will come out of a split of the GOP -- along realpolitik vs. Bush Doctrine lines).

I think the only problem with a "Christian" party would be the label. If it were honest, it would be unable to adopt any platform planks that did not have an actual basis in "Christian" faith, because otherwise it would be misinterpreted by many (media included) as asserting that, e.g., Social Security reform is a "Christian" ideal. Sadly, however, a more likely result would be for the party to revel in that mislabeling -- misleading many to believe that certain political positions were part of the faith and for that reason alone ought to be adopted.

A non-labeled party that included (or at least did not exclude) a discussion of faith in the public square is attractive, tho.>

Curiouser: "Why should YOUR religious tenets trump mine before the law?....Why the entire nation should be forced to live by rules that govern members of those particular religions is beyond me....Won't (Can't?) ANYONE answer?"

Karen, Bubba and Anon seemed to have already done a good job of answering here, so just consider this piling on.

The People of the US have the power to govern themselves (themselves=the populace) through the passage of laws. Regarding the religiously-influenced passage of laws, the only bar to such laws is the Constitution itself. The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a State Church, which would be the forced creedal confession and monetary support of a specific Church.

There is nothing in the Constitution that permits a subset of the populace to be free of law due to the simple reason that they disagree with that law.

There is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the passing of laws enacting religious ends, so long as the populace are not legally required to confess a specific creed or provide monetary support to a Church.

Waving the threat of "theocracy" don't work no more.>

Don t be so pessimistic, it can and should happen...

I am not a Christian by any means, and I don t share the social beliefs of conservative Christian voters, but I would be willing to vote for Christian Party candidates until the party became a legitimate third party if that meant breaking the two party stranglehold. As the system is right now we are all getting screwed ( pardon my language). The multi dimensional spectrum that is made up of all of our political beliefs is terribly modeled by the current two party system. If civil engineers built structures in the same manner that our political system determines representative options we would all be dead.>

The "winner takes all" nature of our system pretty much precludes more than two parties. The last third party to succeed (and become one of the two parties that can last long) was the Republican Party 150 years ago. So the best thing for a movement to do is NOT to start a third party, but to try to take over one of the two established parties. This is what the evangelical right did starting ~30 years ago (after mostly sitting out politics before Roe). This is what the far left is doing now--Ralph Nader was vilified for running as a Green in 2000, but now only a half-decade later he would pretty much be a mainstream Democrat, so their success (in taking over the party, not yet at winning elections) has been pretty stunning.

The strange thing has been how conservatives (of all the various stripes) lost their patience once GWB was elected. After working for 30 years at changing the Republican party & the national landscape, many seem to be upset that they didn't overnight get to do whatever they want (and seemed to forget that, as has been noted above by many, there is no single "Christian" or "conservative" platform). They seem to have overlooked that being the majority component of the majority party does not equal being an absolute majority, and thought that the work was completed. It's not.>

"there is nothing (and there ought to be nothing) preventing individual citizens supporting, for instance, laws against smut because of their religious beliefs."

Ah, there's another of those 'loving' charitable, 'christian' comparisons - let's ALL conflate equality for gay and lesbian Americans with smut, shall we?

Curiouser,

You might want to do a little less ranting and a little more thoughtful reading. The post that you refer to did not conflate pornography with gay rights.>

Bill Gall asked: "We're in the world and not of it, remember?"

Seems like a lot of theocons don't 'remember'. Instead, they think they're supposed to be RUNNING the world.>

Bob, I can go either way on the size of districts, in theory. But in general, the larger the legislative body, the more inertia and the more bureaucracy you have, which are already severe problems. I was supposing that we could change the winner-take-all situation without trying to alter the current equation for how many reps there are.

Isn't it odd that there is not at least one house in Congress where the vote of the seated members is reflective of the numbers of people who actually put them there? If each rep stands for about 700,000 people, it seems undemocratic that each rep gets the same 1 full vote regardless of whether X gets 90% of 400,000 votes cast, or Y gets 51% of 200,000 votes cast?>

Ser Kenner, you don't mention one key concept: individual rights are paramount in our legislative philosophy.

That's a bald statement, and requires rather alot more explanation than I want to bore you with, so let me summarize and you can tell me if it looks familiar.

No system of civil rights works unless it finds the balance between complete denial of rights for some and complete protection of rights for some. In many cases, it means that the most people get some level of rights that is aiming for but falls short of complete and total.

So when you write My views trump yours..., you need to acknowledge that you don't get to actually implement your "views" without restraint, and often that restraint negates whatever majority you belong to.

I think it was de Toqueville (sp?) who called it tyranny of the majority. It provided the motivation for our bicameral Congress, it prompted our founders to avoid a true democracy and choose a republic instead, and the denial of it and protection from it is embodied by the Bill of Rights.>

Hmm. Pikkumatti, my intention with that post was to address the principle, not the application... so we really aren't in any conflict of ideas here.

Everything starts with individual rights. This was, IMO, the intention of the founders, in that if one works backwards from the ideal, one is more likely to end up close to it than if one starts with zero and tries to create it one small step at a time. The experience of the freed slaves after our Civil War is illustrative of that. It took nearly 100 years and the passage of additional laws to give blacks the same basic rights enjoyed by everyone else. It took nearly 150 years for women to be granted full citizenship.

In each case, a significant group of people were subject to the tyranny of the majority. The protections created by the founders failed to serve them. That is my main point.>

Yes we are, my friend, and even when I disagree with your goal I will support you in standing up to the majority.

It goes beyond the changing of minds. It's also about negating the majority when the delineated rights of the individual have been violated. I don't know about alot of others, but that's my motivation for opposing the Patriot Act, warrantless domestic spying, and presidential executive orders that are in clear violation of existing statutes.

It's a balancing act. It's one where we seem to fall down more often than not. The moment we surrender, the moment we stop standing up for our individual rights, is the moment the tyranny wins.>

"But the Civil War (and Civil Rights Era) and women suffrage eras are over."

We only wish that were true.

Inter-racial marriage has been legal since 1961, but it took Alabama until 1999 to change their laws because up until then, a 'majority' of the people were agin' it. (And even then more than 25% of the people still opposed it.)

Women STILL do not have the right to make independent legal decisions regarding their reproductive health.

Dream on pikumatti.>