From: RCB 
Subject: SNET: Fwd: A Statement of Personal Beliefs
Date: 5 Sep 2000 15:36:36 -0400
To: SNET 

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A Statement of Personal Beliefs
by Patrick J. Buchanan

While the Reform Party Platform is silent on what have come to be called the
social, cultural and moral issues, I do not believe presidential candidates
can remain silent. For most Americans today believe their country, in moral
terms, is headed in the wrong direction; and these issues define who we are,
what we believe, and what we stand for as a people. Moreover, social and
moral decline and cultural decadence go hand in hand with the death of
republics and the end of empires.

In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt declared: "Our concerns, thank God, are only with
material things." America's concerns today are less with the material than
the moral. Though we are the envy of mankind in medicine, science,
technology, prosperity, and power, how we are using our unprecedented
freedom does not command the respect of millions of our own people, or much
of the world.

In three decades, almost forty million unborn children have been aborted in
America, scores of thousands by the horrifying procedure of "partial birth
abortion," in which a baby is stabbed to death in the final moment before it
sees the light of day. Incredibly, a U.S. Supreme Court has given its
blessing to this act of barbarism. When one reflects that German doctors
were executed after World War II for having participated in Hitler's
euthanasia program, what does this say about us as a nation?

The family, the institution ordained by God for the procreation of children
and human happiness, bedrock institution of any good society, is under
assault and crumbling. Rampant homosexuality, a sign of cultural decadence
and moral decline from Rome to Weimar, is celebrated, as our First Lady
parades up Fifth Avenue to share her "pride" in a lifestyle ruinous to body
and soul alike.

Our popular culture once supported the values of faith, family and country,
and related the stories of America's history and heroes. Today, that popular
culture is as polluted as was Love Canal. Movies, plays, books, TV,
magazines, museums, all feature the vulgar, the profane, the blasphemous,
the salacious. No one can escape it. Societies abroad that once looked to
America as a moral teacher now try to shelter their young from our X-rated
exports.

In order to love one's country, said Burke, one's country ought to be
lovely. Wealth, power and prosperity we have in abundance, but is America
still the lovely country our parents gave to us? America's heroes whom
schoolchildren were taught to revere -- Columbus, Washington, Jefferson,
Jackson, Lee, Lincoln -- are maligned as hypocrites or exemplars of an
execrable time. Schools are renamed, flags dishonored, statues vandalized.
It was Ronald Reagan who said: "If we forget what we did, we won't know who
we are....I am warning of the eradication of...the American memory, that
could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."

The God to whom American leaders once offered prayers of gratitude for His
blessings on our country has been purged from our public schools. And even
the most jaded must see something amiss in a nation where steel, auto, and
textile plants close down, while porn sites on the Internet explode,
gambling houses rake in record profits, and abortions replace tonsil
removals as America's most common medical procedure.

No one political leader can reverse these indicators of social decline. But
a President can put himself in the vanguard of those who wish to make
America God's Country again; to do so, however, he will have to stand up to
an establishment which considers much of the above to be milestones of
progress.

The Democratic Party does not even perceive a moral crisis, while the
Republicans slip silently out of the Camp of Life to seek a separate peace
with the Log Cabin Club. A party with its ear to the ground and its eyes
fixed on the polls -- with its motto "Above all, avoid controversy" -- will
never take a stand in the cultural and moral struggle of our time. So, let
me tell you where I stand, and what I will do.

1. Only pro-life conservatives and Constitutionalists will be nominated to
the Supreme Court. The revolution imposed by the Warren Court and its
successors will be rolled back by Congress and the President, as it should
in a democratic republic. The court's power will be circumscribed, as
provided for in Article III, and by amendment. We will use the powers in the
Constitution to restore the people's Constitution. Term limits will be
imposed on all federal judges, and the era of judicial dictatorship will
end.

2. Taxpayer funding of abortions and fetal tissue research will be ended and
Mr. Clinton's anti-life executive orders overturned. Planned Parenthood and
UNFPA will not receive another dime from the Treasury. Americans who believe
that abortion stops a beating heart should not be forced to pay for acts
they consider shameful and abhorrent.

3. Government has shown itself more proficient in breaking up families than
in building them. Hence, all proposals for changing U.S. social policy
should carry a family impact statement. All tax reform plans will be vetted
to guarantee that they solidify families and give mothers the option of
spending their children's infant years with them in the home.

4. Every American, whatever his or her sexual orientation, is entitled to
the same constitutional rights. Hatred of, or derision for, men and women
for an orientation they did not choose is wrong. Violence against these
individuals must be condemned and punished; and everyone's contributions to
our country and society appreciated.

However, that does not mean that public homosexuals merit designation as a
protected class under civil rights laws. Nor can a good society enshrine in
law the falsehood that a homosexual union is the moral equivalent of
traditional marriage. All men are sinners and all need to be tolerant of the
failings of others; but there must zero tolerance of falsehoods in the moral
realm, just as there is in the scientific realm.

In a Buchanan administration, homosexuality will again be incompatible with
military service; and the armed forces will cease to be used as laboratories
for experiments in living by the Clinton School of Social Research.

5. War is a horrible but sometimes necessary evil, its purpose: to kill as
many of the enemy as necessary to impose one's will. It is a brutal, dirty,
dehumanizing business in which women and children should remain
non-combatants. Thus, American women will be exempt from military service,
except as volunteers; they will be kept out of combat as they have been
throughout our history, and they will be provided with separate barracks and
training facilities. A country that sends its women out to defend it is a
country not worth defending.

6. Mr. Truman called the presidency "preeminently a place of moral
leadership." I will put the moral authority of the office behind the causes
of life, family, and country, and support a rule of law based on a moral
order that is rooted in Biblical truth and the laws written by God on the
human heart.

"America was a good country before she was a great country," DeTocqueville
reportedly said, "and if she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."
Our fear is that America, the greatest nation on earth, is becoming less and
less a good country. High among the purposes of this campaign is to build a
party that will set about making America a godly nation again.
Buchanan Reform
P.O. Box 1919
Merrifield, VA 22116-1919
703.734.2700
http://www.buchananreform.com/new/statements/statement_of_beliefs.htm



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