Barry Goldwater: A Real Republican

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both...I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? ... And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." Barry Goldwater, US Senate Speech (16 September 1981)

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• I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.
  • Said in July 1981 in response to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell's opposition to the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, of which Falwell had said, "Every good Christian should be concerned." as quoted in Ed Magnuson, "The Brethren's First Sister," Time Magazine,(20 July, 1981)
  • According to John Dean, Goldwater actually suggested that good Christians ought to kick Falwell in the "nuts", but the news media "changed the anatomical reference."
    • Dean, John (2008). Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. Penguin Group. "I know because I was there when he said it."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater

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Alan here... 

The current composition of The Republican Party is not even "Republican In Name Only."

Contemporary Republicans are theocrats whose refusal to compromise is antagonistic to Democracy. 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/05/its-even-worse-than-it-looks-parts-1-2.html

Consider Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union Address (December 3, 1861): "In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism. It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life. Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."  

The entire Address is available at - http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/73.html#ixzz17XlRsbev

I cannot conjure a single Republican with the "courage" to circulate Lincoln's view of capital-and-labor.

They won't communicate Abe's view even to ridicule it. 

The line is drawn. Those who consider Talk Radio an unimpeded conduit of God's Truth have no choice but to see Lincoln's economic philosophy as too dangerous to voice.

For them, Lincoln represents an "existential" threat, like biblical "literalists" finding an "error" in Scripture.

If intransigent "conservatives" took Lincoln to heart, their "Republican" world view would disintegrate.

Barry Goldwater - and Ronald Reagan - present identical "existential" threats. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/09/what-would-reagan-really-do.html