Second Amendment, Abortion, Small Government and School Voucher are stale issues. Do not stuck in there.
Few tea party candidates lost due to strong stance on abortion with no exceptions (rape and incest etc.). Abortion is a very serious issue. Main stream media asks a very simple question. Are you against abortion under any circumstance? If a candidate saya yes, his or her candidacy is over then and there. Most Americans are against abortion but with exceptions. As a leader one must run to win the election to save the nation and strive to bring in economic stability that will make abortion rare.
If a Republican leader has guts to say that he is against abortion but understand the exceptions, then he will win the general election.
If abortion made completely illegal even for rape, then some civil rights group will get visitation right for the perpetrator and his family. Nothing would be worse than this.
As it stands now no candidate should get tangled in the abortion issue.
Rather Rick Santorum should promote family, marriage and child bearing and provide financial incentive to have children under two parents.
Winning this election by a conservative American is a must for the future of this great nation. By winning the election Rick Santorum can save million American babies an year, by supporting strong families. But losing the general election, by taking strong stance on abortion he cannot save none.
Hermain Cain put succinctly that he is pro-life. Pro Life defines meaningful and thoughtful stance. Million others and I hope Rick Santorum stakes a stand that is prolife and not suppressing women.
We need a pragmatic leader that is Rich Santorum who represents middle class with strong family values. Rick Santorum should lead by example and not by legislation. We do not need laws against abortion when everyone can understand and appreciate life that is procreated under holiest circumstances.
Our challenges are not forcing a women or a girl bear a child that procreated due to atrocity that no religion approves.
Our challenge is defining what is America and what it stands for. Liberals want falling birthrate among Americans and uncontrolled immigrations to make the nation poor and weaker and eventually destroy the super power status that liberals despise.
Moe Lane
Dan Spencer
Dan McLaughlin
Jeff Emanuel
Rasmussen today
neilmacarthur Friday, February 10th at 10:59AM EDT (link)has Santorum outperforming Romney against Obama by 6%.
He definitely can win.
So, Santorum can win by flip-flopping and becoming pro-choice? I don't think so
chrysostom15 (Diary) Friday, February 10th at 11:55AM EDT (link)This is probably the least well thought article I have read in a while. There is no reason to believe that it would be in Santorum’s best interest to flip-flop on abortion and become pro-choice.
The only thing that such a flip-flop would do is make him appear disshonest like Romney, and it would end his campaign and chance to win.
To speak beyond politics and speak as a conservative. Conservatives believes that government protects life, liberty, and property. The protection of life is the first item listed.
I hear alot about changing hearts and minds. If someone was a pro-life person, but anti-freedom; I could see them view things that way. However, someone cannot be free if he or she can be killed. The state has a duty to protect life, period.
To sit and watch mothers kill their babies is to fail to protect life. Any country that does not protect life does not protect liberty.
If by a mere majority the basic right to life is taken away, we live not in a free socieity, but in a tyrany of the majority.
norfolker is quite correct, and you are mistaken.
deVere Friday, February 10th at 12:54PM EDT (link)The American people will not support a legal ban on abortion for rape cases, and where the life of the mother is at stake. The consensus is that it’s up to the mother to make a decision in those cases. Many heroic women have chosen to bear a child under those circumstances, but only a small minority of Americans would wish to criticize let alone prosecute them if they had chosen otherwise.
The doctrine that life life begins at conception, and the 14th amendment protects all human life equally, even at the single cell fertlized egg stage of development, is never going to win at the polls. Anti-abortion referendums have failed in Mississippi and South Dakota. What chance do you think it has in Ohio and Florida as the signature issue of a Presidential race? None, zero.
We would all like to see abortions become as rare as possible, and for this issue Ron Paul most certainly has proposed the correct idea. Congress should act under Article III and the 10th amendment to restrict the right of the federal courts to review state abortion laws. Repeal Roe v Wade, and then let each of the 50 states decide what to do.
In 1860 Republicans all hated slavery, but they chose as their candidate the man who was considered most moderate on the issue, Abraham Lincoln. To effect change you must first win elections. And as I have pointed out numerous times Rick Santorum’s extreme abortion position is his most serious political weakness. Perhaps it is really just as disqualifying for Santorum as Ron Paul’s loony foreign policy is for Paul,
The life produced from rape or incest is still a life
GregInFla (Diary) Friday, February 10th at 10:28PM EDT (link)that is worth as much as any other. People need to understand that pro-life means exactly that: for life. And whether that life was conceived from love or from a rape, that is still a life. Killing a child for the crime of the father should not be condoned.
– A true evolutionist would let endangered species die off. Think about it.
– The sign outside the courthouse said no signs allowed. So I took it down.
– Atlas Shrugged is now on the non-fiction aisle at Amazon.
That's a fine moral doctrine for you and your family to observe.
deVere Saturday, February 11th at 1:37AM EDT (link)But if you want it to be enforced by criminal law against everyone else in your society, you will need at least a majority of your fellow voters to concur. At the moment that majority is clearly not there, as the referendums in South Dakota and Mississippi prove.
So you need to choose. Is your most important priority winning the election and removing Obama from office, or is it insisting on your perfect moral doctrine even if it assists abortion-supporting Obama to continue in office?
I choose nothing of a sort
GregInFla (Diary) Saturday, February 11th at 10:39AM EDT (link)Abortion, like any murder, is legislated/governed/criminalized by the states. It has nothing to do with federal policy.
– A true evolutionist would let endangered species die off. Think about it.
– The sign outside the courthouse said no signs allowed. So I took it down.
– Atlas Shrugged is now on the non-fiction aisle at Amazon.
Since the infamous Roe v Wade decision abortion has wrongly been made a federal matter.
deVere Saturday, February 11th at 11:00AM EDT (link)And now Rick Santorum and other like-minded people wish to entrench that mistake by insisting that abortion is prohibited by the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
I'd rather have a leader who supports life
GregInFla (Diary) Saturday, February 11th at 4:45PM EDT (link)than death.
– A true evolutionist would let endangered species die off. Think about it.
– The sign outside the courthouse said no signs allowed. So I took it down.
– Atlas Shrugged is now on the non-fiction aisle at Amazon.
I agree with you both.
littlehouse18 (Diary) Saturday, February 11th at 11:03PM EDT (link)The child shouldn’t be the one getting the death sentence for the man’s crime. He/she is as much a human being as a planned child. I pray one day people will realize this.
Now, I have only heard Rick state his personal thoughts about what he thinks is morally right on this issue of rape/incest (which is by the way a red herring – there are few such cases). I have not heard him say he would try to make his personal position law. Does anyone have any evidence of this? If he did, then his campaign would be in trouble, sad to say, even though such laws would never be passed.
Some references:
deVere Sunday, February 12th at 12:07AM EDT (link)http://www.ricksantorum.com/oped/my-fight-life
http://teresamerica.blogspot.com/2011/08/abortion-rick-santorum-vs-rick-perry.html
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/01/23/rick-santorum-hits-obama-gop-2012-opponents-on-abortion/
If life begins at conception, and the 14th amendment protects all unborn human life equally with born, then Rick Santorum’s view implies that all abortion is murder, plus in-vitro fertilization, plus many forms of birth control, which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg; all homicide.
This view is both politically untenable and also legally impractical. In recent years the pro-life movement has become more extreme, abandoning the completely legitimate call for repealing Roe v Wade, and replacing it with the claim that the existing US constitution bans abortion in the 14th amendment. In this view the problem wasn’t that the Supreme Court Justices overstepped their powers (which they did), but that they had the wrong point of view. I strongly diagree with this new 14th amendment claim,, which practically guarantees another generation of unrestricted abortion.
Rick Santorum has advocated the opposite 10th amendment solution in the past:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-04-23-santorum-excerpt_x.htm
Hopefully he will see the light and return to his previous view, which is both legally and politically sound. Otherwise Obama’s got a big issue to potentially club Santorum over the head with.
Moral and political opinions are different
GregInFla (Diary) Wednesday, February 15th at 10:41PM EDT (link)Rick has a right to his personal views. The rape/incest are political red herrings anyway. Again, if he favored death, like Obama does (survive an abortion and be left to die — he voted for that) I’d worry.
– A true evolutionist would let endangered species die off. Think about it.
– The sign outside the courthouse said no signs allowed. So I took it down.
– Atlas Shrugged is now on the non-fiction aisle at Amazon.
Let Rick be Rick
joeydavis (Diary) Friday, February 10th at 1:27PM EDT (link)Don’t doubt Santorum’s abilities to position himself with the electorate. He won 4 times in a heavily Democratic congressional district. He won twice statewide in a blue state Republicans haven’t carried since the 1988 landslide.
Don’t get pigeonholed by the media on a single issue. Don’t chase polls. Turth is if the single issue voter is voting on abortion, they probably either agree with Santorum’s absolutist stance OR they’re going to vote against him and ANY Pro life candidate. Those with softer opinions are not likely to choose a candidate based on his abortion stance.
The same is true of almost any hot button issue. The media loves to talk hot buttons but the voters really don’t care.
Santorum’s support and his election hopes reside with socially conservative, blue collar Democrats in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri and Iowa. those voters won’t punish him for his position.
Being able to beat Obama 85-15 amongst Republicans and get beat 70-30 amongst Democrats is much more important than winning Independents.
Joey Davis
Don't expect support in PA
steve962 Friday, February 10th at 2:41PM EDT (link)You can pretty much count out Pennsylvania for Santorum. No way is he likely to win here – in fact, if he gets the nomination, it’ll motivate PA voters to vote against him.
He won in Pennsylvania only by downplaying his social agenda and presenting himself as a small government fiscal conservative. He proved to us he *wasn’t* one, and everything I’m seeing from him so far seems to be catering entirely to the social side with lip service to the fiscal side.