Today the new American crusade officially began in the form of a supposedly all-important first vote made by only 100,000 people in a state whose population is almost purely Caucasian. This minute percentage of the population is voting for a Republican candidate for president who will turn the country around and roll back the clock in our centuries-long attempt to truly idolize the most important aspect of our country’s world-renowned stance as the land of opportunity and freedom. And that is the freedom we give to all of our citizens no matter what race, gender or religion; the freedom to a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But this freedom is being strangled by the highly conservative rhetoric of these candidates and their promises to pursue their paths of social injustice that they believe they should impose upon every citizen. They believe that everyone should follow their system of beliefs no matter what the consequence. Women will not allowed to have control over their own bodies, even if they are raped and impregnated by either a complete stranger or a family member; they would be legally bound to bring children to term because the law will state that the fertilized egg in a woman’s own uterus is a person starting at the moment of its conception. People will be incapable of marrying the one they love because that person is of the same sex. All of this because these Republican presidential hopefuls feel that it is their divine right as the potential future leader of the world’s strongest country to turn us into the Christian equivalent of Saudi Arabia.
The social views of the candidates have ranged from moderately conservative (Jon Huntsman) to religiously dogmatic (Rick Santorum and Michele Bachman). But in the bid for the vote of only 3 percent of the total population of the state of Iowa, the candidates with more moderate views on the most heated topics of abortion and same-sex marriage have moved farther to the right just so they can get votes. They are willing to vow that they will constitutionally deny same-sex couples the right to marry, ban abortion no matter what the circumstance, including rape and incest, and create a supposed constitutional “personhood amendment.”
Mitt Romney recently claimed that President Obama was keeping the nation "from being one nation under God." Newt Gingrich has been quoted comparing being gay to choosing to be celibate. Rick Santorum has not shied away from his strong religious-conservative stance on everything anti-gay and anti-abortion, recently claiming that Obama should be pro-life because he is black and stating that in addition to a federal ban on same-sex marriage, he would invalidate any now-legal same-sex marriages under another constitutional ban. He even went so far as to blame the Obama administration of refusing to end what he calls "sexual promiscuity" while setting aside “Christian values” to promote the idea that all beliefs are equal. If I didn’t know the First Amendment, I might just consider Santorum a religious bigot.
The fact that all of the Republican presidential candidates would purposefully ignore the First Amendment by constitutionally instilling their religious beliefs onto every citizen of the country has become everyday news. What continues to amaze me though is the candidates’ persistence in stating ambitions that they are either legally incapable of pursuing or are outright stupid.
Last month Gingrich continued to state that, if elected, he would abolish the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been labeled by almost all of the candidates as a “liberal” court and by some, including Gingrich, as an “anti-American” court. The 9th Circuit Court covers the west coast states and also includes Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, The Northern Mariana Islands and Guam. The candidates’ various attacks against the 9th Circuit Court stem from the fact that the majority of the court’s rulings tend to lean to the left of the political spectrum. Gingrich has called the judges who believe that the phrase "One nation, under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the separation of church and state are "radically Anti-American"
Despite how irate conservatives may become when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is mentioned in conversation, there is no legal way to abolish the court without reengineering the entire judicial system. You can’t just say, “You judges are too liberal and ‘anti-American,’ so we’re just going to remove you from your seat as a federal judge and your court will now have no power whatsoever.” Not to mention that the 9th Circuit is so large that it includes four separate courts in three different states.
For a bit of history, the pledge we say today is not the original one that was written in 1892 by the Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy and formally adopted by Congress in 1924. The words “under God” were not even in the Pledge until it was rewritten for the fourth time in 1954. Previous rewrites include the addition of the words “of the United States,” in reference to the flag, in 1923, and the words “of America” after the previously stated addition.
And when it comes to plain stupid ambitions, Rick Santorum has taken the prize for worst foreign policy. While most of the candidates have stated that Obama has been too lax on his foreign policy, with Romney and Gingrich claiming Obama has been following a policy of appeasement, Rick Santorum recently stated that if elected he would bomb Iranian nuclear facilities if they were not opened to international arms inspectors. Even Israel, one of Iran’s most hated enemies, has refrained from attacking Iran, believing that any preemptive attacks would be catastrophic to any potential rapprochement between Iran and the rest of the world.
Tonight’s vote in Iowa is the first stepping stone on a path to a conceivable collapse of a growing social transformation that this country hasn’t seen since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s. The past few years have seen unprecedented changes in the minds of everyday people, despite differences in race, religion and sociopolitical views, to name a few. With the election of the first African-American president, the growing list of states legally granting same-sex couples the right to marry, and the continuing fight for a woman’s right to have an abortion if so desired, the American people are pushing the country into a new age of freedom, ambition and the ability for every citizen to live a life of liberty and happiness.
The Republican Party continues to drift farther to the right and farther from the mainstream social belief system that they all claim to be fighting for. While national polls have shown that more than half of the country supports legalizing same-sex marriage, the candidates still claim that the country does not want to legalize same-sex marriage. The Republican Party needs to take into account that all of their false opinions and open lies can be fought with irrefutable facts.
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