disneydude
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2006
- Messages
- 25,528
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- Location
- Los Angeles
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- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
By all accounts thus far he's been faithful to his current wife. The "family values" portion of the party is largely also the religious right. A tennet of the religious right is redemption and forgiveness. If he's still ongoing with the type of actions of the past and they come up during the campaign, I think he'd absolutely be sunk. But if there's no indication of that, I imgaine it won't be a huge deal. Will there be some that won't vote for him based on that princple? Absolutely there will be. But I don't think it'll be as large of a chunk as you think/hope. As to the whole "mockery of the claim" again, this goes back to the argument we've had multiple times and I'm not going to fully get into again. Hoping, pushing, and urging people through various ways to act in a good and moral manner even if you at times fail at it is not in and of itself hypocritical or horribly wrong unless you hold the belief that somehow your doing it is GOOD but anyone else doing it is bad.
If a father smoked weed and had a bunch of frivilous sex by playing women when he was younger, he would not be making a "mockery" of the notion of family values if he punished his kid for smoking weed or advising him that he shouldn't just use women for sex. Now, if the kid later caught the dad smoking and the dad tried to go "Well...um...its OKAY for me to smoke, but you're still grounded" then yeah, absolutely a hypocrite. If the guy is still smoking, knows its wrong, but keeps doing it despite the self loathing then its to me not hypocritical (perhaps more self destructive then anything) as he still believes exactly what he's instilling in his kid, he's just failing at living up to it himself. You could go "Well not living up to it means he shouldn't be pushing it on someone else!". Again, I disagree. We routinely push people to do better than we are able to do ourselves. Indeed, most parents hopes for their children is that their kid become better than they are in a variety of ways.
Thank you for your thoughts....I understand your point although I respectfully have to disagree. Forgiveness for whom? It seems to me that the GOP is very forgiving of Republicans that engage in immoral conduct, but will always carry around disdain for anyone else. I believe that should Newt get the nod, it clearly displays the shallowness of the whole "family values" mantra that the GOP loves to parade around. Although I hope and pray everyday that the GOP is foolish enough to nominate Newt, I don't think they will. I think, ultimately, Newt is just the current "not Romney" flavor of the week and will fall by the wayside. I hope I'm wrong. As an Obama supporter, I would gladly run against Newt any day of the week rather than face Romney in the GE.