We are only days from the election which will determine the future course of this country and the freedom with which you will be able to live your life. What exactly are the differences between the parties? You hear repeatedly on the news that President Trump is a serial liar, and yet I covered in a recent blog the lies that Joe Biden has repeated over and over through the years, including the many that went unchallenged by the moderators during both presidential debates. But what of the Parties themselves? What do their platforms say about their core beliefs? Republicans vote in line with their Party platform over 80% of the time and Democrats vote with their platform over 70% of the time. So, their platforms are important. One can also look at the behavior of those who lead both Parties and of their followers. Thus, here is a brief look at a tale of two Parties.
*In the Republican platform, “God” appears 15 times. So do the words, “divine, Creator pastors, prayer, sing, praise, Bible, Catholic, morality, sanctify of human life, Judeo-Christian heritage, and God Bless America. These words and phrases never appear in the Democrat Party platform. In the Democrat platform, I could not find the word “God,” but I am told I missed the one mention.
*In the Republican platform, faith appears 26 times. It appears only 9 times in the Democrat platform.
*In the Republican platform, Christian appears 8 times and Muslim appears once.
Christian appears once in the Democrat platform, but Muslim appears 8 times.
*The Republican platform does not mention protestors, but the Democrat platform references protestors 3 times.
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*The Republican platform talks of fathers 6 times, of strong families, of traditional marriage, of traditional family values, of traditional religious beliefs, and of the right to pray at school. The Democrat platform mentions none of those things.
*The Republican platform talks of the U.S. Bill of Rights while the Democrat platform ignores our Bill of Rights in order to address the United Nations 8 times!
*The Republican platform 6 times talks of bipartisanship. Instead, the Democrat platform rails against President Trump 120 times.
*The Republican Platform talks of religious liberty 6 times. The Democrat platform mentions religious liberty 3 times but LBTQ rights 30 times.
*The Republican platform speaks 10 times of our inalienable rights. The Democrat platform ignores inalienable rights but talks 14 times of reproductive rights.
*The Republican platform talks of the rights of conscience (not having to act against your religious beliefs). The Democrat platform ignores that, but speaks 181 times of color/race rights (something already guaranteed by the Constitution).
*The Republican platform mentions the Declaration of Independence 4 times. Instead, the Democrat platform ignores the Declaration of Independence but talks once of the U.N. Declaration.
Beyond, the 2020 platforms of the Republican and Democrat Parties, we should also look at the behaviors of their leaders and their adherents.
*Every Republican President has graciously welcomed his Democrat successor to the White House, and Republicans, while disappointed and vowing to elect a Republican the next election, have still accepted the outcome of the election. We are gracious in defeat. Democrats, not so much! The Democrat Party and the Clinton campaign created an elaborate hoax before the 2016 election in an attempt to tie the Republican candidate Donald Trump to the Russians and to the supposed Russian hack of the DNC Server. With the collusion of Democratic operatives in the FBI, CIA, and DOJ, a Special Counsel was appointed who knew within weeks that there had been no collusion. Nonetheless, his team spent over three years indicting minor campaign officials for unrelated crimes and even indicting a Russian company that was not in existence in 2016.
During those three years and after, Democrats tried everything to overturn the election from begging members of the Electoral College to vote for Clinton even though Trump had won the most Electoral votes, to trying to retroactively abolish the Electoral College and award the presidency to Clinton. They impeached President Trump for a perfectly legitimate phone conversation with the President of Ukraine. They finally stole his tax records and announced he had only paid $750 in taxes for two years in a row, not bothering to explain that it was because he had substantially overpaid taxes before that and instead of taking a refund, had applied that money to the subsequent years’ taxes.
*Democrats have been encouraged by Democrat members of Congress to harass members of Trump’s administration, running them out of restaurants. This eventually spread to any Trump supporter, as the media maliciously attacked an innocent Catholic teenager who was accosted by a leftist activist in Washington, D.C. That they were wrong is apparent in the millions of dollars that they have already paid the young man in legal settlements. Democrats began to accost those wearing MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats, or otherwise showing they were Trump supporters in restaurants and on the streets, pouring drinks on them, beating them up, and even murdering them. A Sanders’ supporter opened fire on Republicans practicing for a ballgame, injuring several and sending House Minority Whip Steve Scalise to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A Democrat neighbor of Republican Senator Rand Paul, attacked him as he was riding his lawn mower. Paul suffered lung injuries which necessitated an eventual operation. When President Trump contracted the Coronavirus, many Democrats, including celebrities and “reporters” tweeted out hopes for his death.
*Republican lawmakers have not encouraged their followers to harass Democrats. Republicans have not attacked people wearing Biden hats (are there any?). Instead, we have found amusing ways to gently tease Democrats. The Biden/Harris bus was going to do a three-day tour of Texas to ramp up enthusiasm and it did – for Trump. By the time the bus reached Dallas earlier in the week after passing through several towns, they had over 100 cars and trucks behind them flying Trump flags and with their occupants shouting “Four More Years.” The bus even ran a red light to try to ditch the parade of cars. Then Friday, it happened again. After a brief stop in Austin, the Democrats gave up and put a lid on the tour because there were far more Republicans there than Democrats who had shown up. A historian, Dr. Eric Servini, had flown down to help with the tour and tweeted that the Trump supporters had “ambushed” the Biden/Harris bus and he had called 911. He claimed many of them were armed. (Hey, it’s Texas!) When the police arrived, he complained, they refused to do anything. (Since when is it illegal to drive down the road behind a bus, even a Biden bus?) Dr. Servini was certainly in a tizzy, but all the pictures of the cars parading behind the bus look pretty peaceful.
*Republicans don’t do much marching in the streets. When they do protest, as with the March for Life, for example, they pick up their trash before sunset and go home. As for rioting, Republicans, like President Trump, are solidly behind the police and strongly for law and order. We don’t consider stealing someone else’s property, setting fires, and smashing windows as a way to protest.
As we all know so well, Democrats like to protest, and when they protest, they smash windows in stores and passing cars, loot, burn buildings to the ground, and injure and kill police officers and sometimes innocent bystanders in the process. The Democrat leadership has been largely silent about these domestic terrorists, refusing to disavow them, and Democrat mayors and governors have allowed Black Lives Matter and Antifa to destroy their cities without lifting a finger to stop them. Democrats have called for defunding the police or even doing away with them and replacing them with social workers. Only recently has Joe Biden spoken out against the riots while the Democrat media still talks about the “mostly peaceful” demonstrations.
*President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have supported clean coal, natural gas, and fracking, seeing the United States become energy independent for the first time since the 1950s. Joe Biden and Kamal Harris have both said repeatedly that they will stop fracking if elected and get rid of fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar. They plan to spend trillions on retrofitting houses and other buildings as well as creating massive wind and solar farms across our landscape, killing birds, eating up farmland, and ruining the beauty of the landscape, all in order to supposedly reduce the warmth of the earth by less than 1 degree over the next century.
*Republicans believe in the liberties outlined and guaranteed by our Constitution. The Democrats want to restrict our right to free speech, our right to own guns, and our right to worship God as we choose, turning our capitalistic society into a socialistic cesspool that will sink our economy just as surely as it sank the economies of every other country in which it has been tried.
*Under President Trump’s leadership, the country will be encouraged to continue returning to a normal open economy as we draw nearer to having several COVID vaccines. Under Joe Biden, the economy will undoubtedly be shut down again as he has already said he would do so. And this, despite the fact that more and more evidence shows that lockdowns only postpone the spikes in the virus and despite the fact that well over 99% of all people under 70 who catch the virus survive it. In the 70 plus age group, according to the CDC, just 0.05% of COVID patients die. That is less than 1 percent. But for this, the Democrats continue to shut down their states, and Joe Biden would shut down the entire country.
*Under this Republican administration, the country flourished, seeing historically record unemployment for minorities, lower taxes, and increased income, especially among the lower income brackets. Manufacturing jobs have returned to the U.S. and new trade deals have been negotiated which no longer punish the American worker. And, despite the refusal of Democrat governors to open up their states, the economy has begun to rebound and rebound much faster than anyone expected. GDP in the third quarter increased by 33.1%, the highest increase ever recorded, and jobless claims are going down as “Now hiring” signs are appearing again across the country. Under Joe Biden’s term as Vice President in the Obama Administration, we were told manufacturing jobs were gone forever and that a GDP growth of less than 2% per year was the new norm. Unemployment was rife and many simply dropped out of the labor force entirely as there were simply no jobs to be had. Minorities were especially hard hit.
*The Republican Party believes in the sanctity of life, even the life of the unborn baby whose heart beat can be detected at only 5-6 weeks after conception. The Democrat Party believes that the convenience of the mother should give her the option of killing that unborn, beating heart, anytime she chooses. They call it reproductive rights. I believe God would call it murder.
*Republicans across the board are for freedom, the freedom to try your hardest to succeed, and yes, sometimes even the freedom to fail. We know that a people who build their lives themselves — work for their wages, pay for their own houses — these people feel pride in their accomplishments and strive to take care of what they have worked so hard to obtain. Democrats wish to give people salaries even if they are able bodied but choose not to work. They want to pay for college, forgive the massive loans that foolish students have incurred while pursuing their useless degrees in gender studies, provide free housing in suburban areas, turning the well-kept neighborhoods into untended garbage-filled streets because those living in the free housing have no stake in keeping their home and area looking nice. They didn’t pay for it, so why should they worry about taking care of it?
*Republicans love America and believe in her. They recognize that there are always things that we can improve upon, but they still believe she is the greatest country on earth. Republicans are patriotic. They know that slavery was a blot upon the history of this nation as it has been and, in many cases, still is a blot upon the histories of most nations of the world. But they also recognize that less than 100 years after the country gained its independence, years during which it was finding its way as a fledgling nation, it fought a Civil War that resulted in the freeing of all slaves. The cost was great. Nearly 360,000 young men from free states gave their lives to preserve a slave-free Union. When Union troops left the defeated South, southern Democrats, many of whom were active in the Ku Klux Klan, terrorized freed slaves, finally establishing Jim Crow laws which enforced segregation in all aspects of life. Yet, in the 1960s, Congress passed two Civil Rights laws, pushed through by Republicans and signed by Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, that gave equal rights to black Americans. Since then, blacks have reached leadership positions in every area of life: in businesses, in politics, and even in the courts. Two black men have served on the Supreme Court and a black man was elected to two terms as President of the United States. Yet Democrats call this a racist country (despite the fact that there are not enough black voters to have elected the black president by themselves), a country of systemic racism, or white supremacy where the color of your skin at birth determines whether you are victim or victimizer. They have no love for this country but wish to see it demolished and rebuilt as a socialist utopia.
This election is the most important election of my 72 years. At stake are all the freedoms that the Constitution guarantees us. At stake as well, is the idea of America as the great melting pot, a land where people of all colors and from all nations come together as Americans. Republicans still believe in the melting pot. Democrats believe in black Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, all of whom are being victimized by white Americans.
Democrats see themselves as the Party of the non-religious, so it is no wonder that they no longer subscribe as do Republicans to the words of Jesus as recorded by Mark 12 verses 30-31: “And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”