Wait, GOP has a gay presidential candidate?

Openly gay candidate Fred Karger will not be on the stage next Monday night when CNN broadcasts the first major debate of the 2012 presidential campaign.

via Gay presidential candidate left out, again | Keen News Service.

Those Republicans. So narrow minded.

…ironically, GOProud, a gay conservative group, has being speaking out in support of allowing Johnson into the debate while saying nothing about Karger, who served as an adviser to President Reagan.

Hold it! A gay conservative group is not speaking out about this? It’s getting more confusing.

A CNN poll conducted last month did include Karger, but zero percent of 473 Republicans or Republican-leaning voters surveyed chose him. Fox News included Karger in April, but only one percent of 322 Republican registered voters supported him.

I suppose you need some kind of criteria or else the stage might get a little crowded. As it was, they barely had time to answer all the questions. Limit of 1 minute per question and 30 seconds for followups? Puhleeze.

Anyway back to the item at hand. I thought those Republicans were homophobes. Have the Democrats ever had a gay candidate?

Mitch Daniels’ truce

This is what I really wanted to talk about when I wrote this post.

At first, I thought about being snarky. I could have taken this quote from Neil Pickett, a Daniels booster who said,

“If Republicans want a social conservative agenda to dominate their choice for president, then Mitch Daniels is not their candidate.”

and replied, “Hey, social conservatives don’t want to dominate the agenda; just throw us the meaningless platform platitudes you usually do.”

But I won’t. Cuz this is serious stuff.

As I’ve noted, unlike some of my fellow conservatives, I’m not one to throw someone under the bus because I disagree with them on a few things. I’d rather see something accomplished than nothing.

But there was no surprise when Mitch Daniels spoke of a truce on social issues and folks started taking sides.

It all started with a profile on Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, in The Weekly Standard. Tucked way toward the end of that feature was this:

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state.

And the phrase “truce on the so-called social issue” caused a small stir and showed how fragile the coalition is between social and fiscal conservatives. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council wrote (via Reid Wilson at Hotline OnCall),

“Not only is he noncommittal about his role as a pro-life leader, but the Governor wouldn’t even agree to a modest step like banning taxpayer-funded promotion of abortion overseas. I support the Governor 100% on the call for fiscal responsibility, but nothing is more fiscally responsible than ending the taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion promotion.”

Mike Huckabee posted a couple of time about it. First in a post called The Heartbreaking Truce,

Let me be clear though, the issue of life and traditional marriage are not bargaining chips nor are they political issues. They are moral issues. I didn’t get involved in politics just to lower taxes and cut spending though I believe in both and have done it as a Governor. But I want to stay true to the basic premises of our civilization.

Then a couple of days later, he made this excellent point,

Poverty and crime are the direct results of broken families and broken values of responsibility, work, marriage, and respect of others. Prisons are overflowing and government “relief” programs get traction often because of the breakdown of our social structure. If we don’t respect the value of each individual life whether in the womb or the classroom or the living room, we devalue property and intangible qualities of life. It gets expensive. [Emphasis his]

Mr. Huckabee would probably be bolstered by this recent research found on Heritage.org,

A wedding ring, it turns out, is the ultimate anti-poverty weapon. That conclusion from The Heritage Foundation is both encouragement and warning this Father’s Day.

Research shows that a child raised in a home where Dad is married to Mom is much less likely to live in poverty, get arrested as a juvenile. be suspended or expelled from school, be treated for emotional or behavioral problems or drop out before completing high school.

Interesting.

But I think, social conservatives are too harsh on Mr. Daniels. As Dan Riehl pointed out at Riehl World View, truce is different than surrender. He thinks Daniels is saying to focus on one area not to neglect the other.

At The American Spectator blog, Joseph Lawler asked, “What exactly did Bush do on the social issues that President Daniels would have to forgo?”

I think the answer is evident. Erick Erickson at Red State had a different criticism for Daniels,

“Daniels, without prompting, chose to pick an unneeded fight with social conservatives. That is not leadership.”

But if you read The Weekly Standard article, Daniels is kinda like that.

And read it all, because I kinda like the guy. Wish more politicians were like him.

From the “What was he thinking?” files

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, reviving a controversy that had been dormant for eight years, has declared that April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia, a move that angered civil rights leaders Tuesday but that political observers said would strengthen his position with his conservative base.

via McDonnell’s Confederate History Month proclamation irks civil rights leaders.

Who in the world thought this was a good idea?

If you want to declare something, how about “Civil War History Month?”

So much for an up and coming Republican.

How many times can they shoot themselves in the foot?

Sigh.

That’s about all I can do after reading the story in today’s Waukesha Freeman that Paul Bucher filed for divorce from Jessica McBride (Yeah, Bice has something, too). And it’s not a sigh of exasperation, but one of sadness.

It was inevitable, I suppose, once word got out that Ms. McBride had an affair with Milwaukee police chief, Edward Flynn. Mr. Bucher doesn’t appear to be the kind of guy who would tolerate that, even though reports are he and McBride had an affair while he was still married. But then again what man would tolerate it?

I like Ms. McBride. I feel I could call her Jessica, even though we never really met, and she wouldn’t mind. Although a little strident in her opinions (and as anyone who has ever read me and talked to me know, strident I am not), she had good thoughts aplenty. Perhaps, like Ann Coulter, couching her good thoughts in sometimes over-the-top rhetoric hides from the world opinions that should be heard.

And she liked me; at least, she used to like me–haven’t heard anything recent, but one post recommended me to take Laurel Walker’s place in the Journal Sentinel Waukesha section. I was honored to be so highly thought of.

And I like Mr. Bucher. I liked the way he stuck to his guns, even when he disagreed with his wife or the conservative wing of the southeastern Wisconsin blogosphere. I voted for him in the AG primary. Why not?

The last thing I want to do is engage in anything that comes close to schadenfreude, but maybe I already have. My hope is that maybe in the cacophony of faux outrage from the left (she has always been a lightning rod for the left in south east Wisconsin, probably because of her strong opinions) and silence or counter outrage on the right, my small voice will still be heard.

I ache for them both and I pray for them both. Divorce is messy, even if we think it’s unavoidable. And there’s a child involved which never makes it easier.

Marriage is sacred and marriage is work. Defending marriage is more than keeping homosexuals from marrying. It’s staying committed to what you’ve vowed (in most cases before God) to do. “As long as we both shall live,” are not just some beautiful words; they’re a commitment to each other. That commitment was broken and now both McBride and Bucher as well as their little girl, will pay the price for that.

At the same time, and at the risk of sounding like a raving lunatic, as a Christian, I believe as well as good, personified by God, there is evil, personified by Satan, Lucifer, the Devil or whatever you want to call him. He is not as powerful as God, but he certainly has power and does not us to live as we should. He certainly doesn’t want folks to stand up for godly values (such as marriage, pro-life, fill in your value) and will fight against it.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have a choice. But it does mean we have to be wary. Satan will make it harder, but we must depend on God more to resist temptation.

Most of these people who appear to be strong for family values are Republicans so the Left points with glee whenever one falls.

Perhaps some of that is our fault by being just a little too, for lack of a better phrase, “holier-than-thou” when we talk about family values issues. Maybe a little more understanding, a little more latitude, a little more grace would go further. But that doesn’t sell newspapers and it doesn’t get folks elected.

Jessica McBride, John Edwards, or pick your own. I’m acquainted enough with my own frailties to know, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” One stumble, one lax moment and it could be me.

Maybe that’s why I don’t gleefully jump on the bandwagons. It just leaves me sad.

[This is cross-posted at Fairly Conservative. Thanks to Cindy for trusting me to allow me to post it there before she even read it.]

“The Abortionist” a review

I figured the least I could do for my friend Michael would be to buy and read his book, “The Abortionist.”

It was well worth it.

The story is about Elliot Stearns, a former policeman who took up writing after a bullet left him paralyzed from the waist down. As a free lance writer and crime columnist Elliot writes on his blog From Where I Sit and for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Michael explains all this on his blog.

In the book, a psychopath is killing women using techniques an abortion provider would use. Elliot along with his friends on the police force are attempting to find the very clever killer.

Things are complicated by the fact that Elliot has again come in contact with his ex-fiance, Caroline. Things come to a head when their relationship brings danger to Caroline.

I liked the book. It was a mystery, albeit with few possible suspects. The story moved along and there were enough surprises to keep you guessing.

Knowing I am a Christian, Michael asked me if the fact that the killer seemed to have religious reasons for doing his killing bothered me. It does, but that was mitigated by several things. One, so many killers in books, movies and TV are portrayed as “religious nuts” that one becomes used to the whole thing. Two, sadly, we hear too often on the news that someone very much like “The Abortionist” has done some gruesome killing using religion as justification. Three, Michael dealt very well with the subject in the Epilogue by saying that the guy wanted to kill and wrapped in religiosity to justify his evil, much like suicide bombers wrapping themselves in a few words from the Koran and missing the message of the rest of the book.

For my like-minded readers (evangelical Christians), the murders were recounted with perhaps too much gruesome detail. There are a couple of sex scenes and one or two of the victims were described as being unclothed. There is swearing throughout the book.

Technically, a couple of minor spelling and grammatical lapses were noticed.

None of these, however, took away from the story line and the underlying debate about abortion. Caughill has done a good job of being fair to both sides of the abortion debate and looking at the human drama underneath. This he has wrapped up in a gripping story that is worth the read.

Don’t get bogged down in trying to analyze the beliefs of the various characters. Enjoy the story. The Abortionist is worth your time.

Rebel flag to rise again at I-75

From Tampa Bay Online.com

With NFL officials from New York and football teams from Pittsburgh and Phoenix about to march on Tampa, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have vowed this:

The 1,800-square-foot confederate battle flag shall rise again.

The flag flies near the intersection of I-4 and I-75 just east of Tampa. It’s part of a memorial to Confederate veterans.

Many in the South look at the Confederate battle flag as merely harking back to a period of history, of their ancestry. Many also see it as freedom of expression.

African-Americans see it as a symbol of slavery.

Most of the time, however, the Stars and Bars comes out in response to some racial issue, usually when the perception is that African-Americans are being favored to whites. It was extensively used in the South to terrorize African-Americans and those who sought to aid them.