Tuesday, February 21, 2012

You Know Who Was A Crazy Social Conservative? How About Ronald Reagan?!

Yep, that is correct my friends.
Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Ronaldus Maximus as Rush Limbaugh refers to the man that was our 40th president.
Ahh, but you would not know that Mr. Reagan was indeed a social conservative. I mean, he was the full-spectrum conservative before the term was cool.
Ronald Reagan was a fiscal conservative, national defense/foreign policy conservative and yes, a social conservative.
Today, many of the same members of the leftywhore media establishment that spent eight years trying desperately to bring down the Great Man are yearning for the Reagan Years.
And they are revising the history to make their case.
One of the charges is that Mr. Reagan did not do enough to advance the social conservative cause.
Maybe on the surface that is true. I suppose in hindsight Mr. Reagan could have done more.
Yet just discussing issues that no one else would was a start that in many ways continues with the actuality of changing people minds on given issues.
Take abortion.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the dreaded Roe v. Wade decision that took abortion laws away from the states and uniformally made allowing unfettered access to abortion the law of the land was seven years old. By all accounts, the people of the United States did not seem to think that it was a bad thing. After all, it is not that abortions were not done before the decision. But in most states it was illegal or so heavily regulated that it was hard for a woman to attain one.
Yet in the 1980 Republican party platform, it began an unended streak that the GOP is the party committed to ending abortion on demand. That the party would seek a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. And who wanted that part of the party manifesto?
That crazy so con, RWR, that's who.
And so funny how because of that, Mr. Reagan lost the election.
NO, hold the phone!
I'm sorry, despite that as the official policy of the GOP, Mr. Reagan won a 44-state landslide.
Another thing that the crazy so con, Reagan did would baffle most today.
In 1983, the economy barely showing signs of life, unemployment still high and the tax cuts that Mr. Reagan won in 1981 in jeopardy, Mr. Reagan submitted this essay on abortion that appeared in the Human Life Review. This amazing essay was written entirely by Mr. Reagan.
But please, rest assured that it was all lip-service according to leftywhore media clowns that covered Mr. Reagan back in the day.
In this article by Penny Starr she cites such luminaries as Walter Shapiro saying such things as this:

RAZ: "[Reagan] wasn't really a culture warrior, was he?"

SHAPIRO: "I mean, he -- it is telling that every year he addressed the National Right to Life anti-abortion march in Washington by telephone, even though they were half-a-mile from the White House, because he didn't want the visuals of being perceived as that much of a cultural warrior. And abortion was as legal when Ronald Reagan left office as it was when he came into office."


Yeah see, Mr. Reagan should have been front and center at the March For Life. Yessir.
No. Because Mr. Reagan did not want the issue to be about him but the focus of what people were there for. To end the abomination known as Roe v Wade.
That, my friends, is the sign of a smart, savvy politician.
And here is by just speaking on the issue the nation is moving in a direction that the majority of Americans want to see Roe v. Wade overturned.
Somewhere in the high 70 to low 80% of Americans in any given poll were for the Roe v. Wade decision during Mr. Reagan's two terms in office. Yes, it was still the law of the land before, during and when Mr. Reagan left Washington, D. C. in 1989.
Yet today support has dropped in poll after poll to the low to mid 50% range. Some polls have actually shown a majority want to see Roe v. Wade overturned entirely. And now many states are passing laws that do restrict unfettered access to abortion. One other aspect that has helped is technology. That technology kind of sort of makes it hard to say that a baby is just a blob. A fetus.
But that change would not have started if it were not for that crazy so con, Ronald Reagan.
Another aspect of the left infiltrating the GOP and trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States constitution met its end thanks to Mr. Reagan. Once the amendment failed to be ratified by two-thirds of the state legislatures by 1984, the GOP never mentioned support for the odeious amendment again. The Republican party as always been the party of women, yet with the help of the ever compliant leftywhore media, one would never know it.
Or how about this gem again from the 1980 GOP platform on families:

The family is the foundation of our social order. It is the school of democracy. Its daily lessons—cooperation, tolerance, mutual concern, responsibility, industry—are fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic. But the Democrats have shunted the family aside. They have given its power to the bureaucracy, its jurisdiction to the courts, and its resources to government grantors. For the first time in our history, there is real concern that the family may not survive.

Government may be strong enough to destroy families, but it can never replace them.

Unlike the Democrats, we do not advocate new federal bureaucracies with ominous power to shape a national family order. Rather, we insist that all that all domestic policies, from child care and schooling to Social Security and the tax code, must be formulated with the family in mind.


No "It Takes A Village" there!
And to further the point about families is this from the same document:

In view of the continuing efforts of the present (Carter) Administration to define and influence the family through such federally funded conferences as the White House Conference on Families, we express our support for legislation protecting and defending the traditional American family against the ongoing erosion of its base in our society.

Today, a Republican candidate for President, Rick Santorum, addresses many of these same issues and he is totally demonized. And told to keep quiet and get with it. All your traditional values talk is so old-fashioned.
Yet it did not stop one Ronald Reagan from speaking about these issues. And all he did was win the presidency in two landslide elections. And change the face of American politics long after he left the White House.
And one way Mr. Reagan changed things was the willingness to talk about some very uncomfortable social issues.
Ronald Reagan was the original crazy social conservative. Crazy like a fox!


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