Richmond Times-Dispatch: True Conservatives Support Environmental Protection

At both the state and federal levels Republicans are pushing an effort to eliminate regulations that protect workers and consumers and which rein in rapacious corporations that would poison the environment in their quest for a quick buck.  It's part and parcel with the GOP effort to create a new Gilded Age where the extremely wealthy live like royalty of old and the rest of slide toward poverty if not total serfdom.  Thus, my shock and surprise to see the Richmond Times-Dispatch, generally one of the most reactionary of the larger newspapers in Virginia publishing an editorial stating that "true conservatives: support environmental protection.  Here are column excerpts:

Barack Obama recently became the first president to venture beyond the Arctic Circle. During his trip, he drew attention to the consequences of climate change for Alaska’s remote villages, often inhabited by Native Americans whose way of life is threatened by global warming. He also announced he was changing the name of North America’s tallest peak from Mount McKinley to Denali, the mountain’s original name, which reflects its sacred status. Alaska Republicans cheered the move. Republicans in President McKinley’s home state of Ohio did not. The Times-Dispatch agrees with Obama and the Alaskans.


A Democratic president’s trip reminds Republicans of their historic ties to environmentalism. Theodore Roosevelt’s embrace of conservation planted the seeds for the environmental movement. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. New York Sen. James Buckley showed that certain “green” policies were compatible with conservative principles. Officials in Virginia and its neighbors have developed a heightened appreciation of the need for government intervention to save the Chesapeake. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has done excellent work to promote bipartisan efforts in the bay.

Environmentalism does not rank high on the GOP’s contemporary national agenda, however. A faction among conservatives refuses, with sectarian zealotry, to concede the reality of climate change and the strong possibility than humanity has contributed to warming. A carbon tax deserves conservative support; cap-and-trade deserves serious debate. The Endangered Species Act has fallen under siege, too. Ideologues want to undermine its effectiveness and to limit its scope. This dismays.

Conservatives inside the church and outside it question (to put it politely) Pope Francis’ teachings on the environment. Although imperfect in all its prescriptions, the pope’s encyclical letter, “On Care for Our Common Home,” takes a broad view of humanity’s gifts and obligations that conservatives ought to find congenial. Francis rejects the materialism that mocks religion. It is time for conservatives to listen to what their better angels have to say about the environment. Obama went north to Alaska; conservatives can apply much of his message to regions south of the Last Frontier.

The sad truth is that the Republican Party is no longer a party of conservatives.  It has become, instead a party of extremism and zealotry where science, knowledge and the founding principle of the separation of church and state has been ripped to shreds.
 

Ronald Reagan Adviser: Barack Obama is a Conservative

While the Christofascists/Tea Party base of the Republican Party continues to suffer from a virulent form of swamp fever that makes rational though impossible and makes those afflicted unable to grasp objective reality, there remain a few sane Republicans - they are a dying species - who remain in touch with reality and can see for themselves that the policies favored by Barack Obama are actual conservative policies.  Or at least they were before the Christofascists/Tea Party crowd infected the GOP with the equivalent of mad cow disease.  Among those still able to see reality is former Reagan administration domestic policy aide Bruce Bartlett, who maintains that Barack Obama is in reality a conservative.  A piece in Salon looks at Bartlett's comments.  Here are highlights:

President Barack Obama “has governed as a moderate conservative,” former Reagan administration domestic policy aide Bruce Bartlett writes in a new essay for the eclectic American Conservative magazine.

Bartlett, an economic policy expert who left the Republican Party amid disgust with President George W. Bush’s fiscal policies and backed Obama in 2008, contends that a look at Obama’s track record reveals a president who’s basically a liberal Republican of yore. From the beginning of his administration, Bartlett argues, Obama has charted a center-right course on both foreign and domestic policy issues.

Populating his administration with hawks like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama has presided over new military engagements abroad while overseeing a draconian crackdown on national security leaks at home, Bartlett notes.

Meanwhile, Obama has pursued “very conservative” fiscal policies, Bartlett writes, signing a stimulus package that was far smaller than what experts and advisers like Christina Romer found would be necessary to really prime the nation’s economic pump. Moreover, Obama has conducted himself like a deficit hawk, “proposing much deeper cuts in spending and the deficit than did the Republicans during the 2011 budget negotiations,” when a deal eluded the two parties. And don’t buy into the the GOP “harping” that Obama hates business, Bartlett cautions. The president, he says, “has bent over backward to protect corporate profits.”

What about the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement? That, too, is evidence of Obama’s conservatism, Bartlett writes. Observing that Obamacare’s market-based approach drew on a model put forth by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and by Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney . . 

While Bartlett doesn’t see viscerally anti-Obama conservatives as likely to acknowledge the president’s conservatism, he concludes that philosopher and activist Cornel West “nailed it” when he recently declared  to Salon that Obama has given the country “a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.”

Read Barlett’s full essay here.  It would be nice if the GOP could return to what it once was.  Sadly, unless and until the Christofascists/Tea Party elements are driven from the GOP base, it is foolish to think that the party can regain sanity or be reformed from within.

Quote of the Day: British Prime Minister David Cameron on the Commencement of Same Sex Marriages

Prime Minister David Cameron

Tonight same sex marriage became legal in England and Wales and couples flocked to tie the knot.  Not surprisingly Catholic prelates and far right elements in the Church of England are whining and carrying on as if the world is ending.  Perhaps it is - or at least their world of hate and discrimination that for far too long they were able to inflict on others.  Prime Minister David Cameron had forward looking words for the arrival of equality and a legal structure where individuals will no longer be inferior because of their sexuality.  Cameron's words are the antithesis of what the Christofascists preach, although I would argue that they are very much in keeping with the teachings of Christ.  Teachings more or less totally ignored by today's "godly folk" who reject the Gospel message in favor of the worst aspects of the Old Testament.  Pink News has details on Cameron's remarks. Here are highlights

Writing exclusively for PinkNews, Prime Minister David Cameron celebrates the introduction of same-sex marriage today, comparing same-sex marriages to his own, and noting the work still to be done for equality.

This weekend is an important moment for our country. For the first time, the couples getting married won’t just include men and women – but men and men; and women and women. After all the campaigning – not least by readers of PinkNews – we will at last have equal marriage in our country. Put simply, in Britain it will no longer matter whether you are straight or gay – the State will recognise your relationship as equal.

This is something that has been very important to me. I have been so lucky to find the most incredible lifelong partner in Sam and our marriage has been a very special part of the commitment we have made to each other. Of course any marriage takes work, requires patience and understanding, give and take – but what it gives back in terms of love, support, stability and happiness is immeasurable. That is not something that the State should ever deny someone on the basis of their sexuality. When people’s love is divided by law, it is the law that needs to change.

The introduction of same-sex civil marriage says something about the sort of country we are. It says we are a country that will continue to honour its proud traditions of respect, tolerance and equal worth. It also sends a powerful message to young people growing up who are uncertain about their sexuality. It clearly says ‘you are equal’ whether straight or gay. That is so important in trying to create an environment where people are no longer bullied because of their sexuality – and where they can realise their potential, whether as a great mathematician like Alan Turing, a star of stage and screen like Sir Ian McKellen or a wonderful journalist and presenter like Clare Balding.

[W]e should be proud to live in a country judged to be the best place to live in Europe if you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. But we should equally be far from complacent about the challenges that remain – and I am just as committed as ever to working with you to challenge attitudes and stamp-out homophobic bullying and hate crimes.

We are a nation that is growing stronger economically because of our long term economic plan. But I hope we can also be a country that is growing stronger socially because we value love and commitment equally. Let us raise a toast to that – and all those getting married this weekend.

 It is worth remembering that David Cameron is the leader of the Tory Party - the UK's conservative party and that it was the Tories who pushed through marriage equality.  Given that marriage and supporting stable relationships are indeed a conservative value, it was appropriate that Cameron and the Tories championed same sex marriage - as any true conservatives should.  The reality is that here in America the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party.  Instead it is a sectarian party push to impose Christofascist beliefs on all citizens. 

Quote of the Day: Jon Huntsman - Conservatives Should Lead the Push for Gay Marriage

This blog and other outlets have argued that gay marriage is a conservative institution and that true conservatives - as opposed to religious extremists and the political whores that pander to them - should support gay marriage because it encourages stable committed relationships.  Outside of gay activists and some converts such as attorney Ted Olson, too many politicians are afraid to state this truth out of fear of the wrath of the animus filled gay haters of the Christian Right.  One who is not plagued by such fears is former Utah Governor and former GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman who as Andrew Sullivan reports has made the following remarks:

While serving as governor of Utah, I pushed for civil unions and expanded reciprocal benefits for gay citizens. I did so not because of political pressure—indeed, at the time 70 percent of Utahns were opposed—but because as governor my role was to work for everybody, even those who didn’t have access to a powerful lobby. Civil unions, I believed, were a practical step that would bring all citizens more fully into the fabric of a state they already were—and always had been—a part of.

That was four years ago. Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry. I’ve been married for 29 years. My marriage has been the greatest joy of my life. There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love.

I continue to believe that if the GOP had been smart (and not dominated by Christofascists) it would have nominated Huntsman rather than Mitt Romney.  Huntsman is someone I likely could have supported.  Moreover, he might have beat Obama.  Unfortunately, today's GOP is not focused on winning elections but instead on enforcing extremer religious dogma.