Without naming names, two top Republicans have joined in on the condemnation of the idea Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels puts forward saying there should be a truce on social issues like abortion so the next president can deal with the economy.
In a new question and answer session with the magazine Christianity Today, pro-life Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took exception to the call for a truce. Jindal’s comments are important because he was considered a potential 2012 presidential candidate and is still highly-regarded by most Republicans.
“Indiana governor Mitch Daniels called for a truce on social issues until economic issues are resolved. Is this possible?” the magazine asked him.
“I think that it’s absolutely critical to get the economy growing without raising taxes or increasing the deficit,” he responded, but he quickly added his support for social issues.
“I’m also proud to belong to a party that stands for the sanctity of human life and traditional marriage. Those values remain important during good and bad economic times,” Jindal said.
Meanwhile, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said Thursday in Iowa that Republicans must keep values issues at the forefront in comments that Tom Beaumont, chief political reporter for the Des Moines Register, said sounded like “an indirect shot at fellow prospective Republican presidential candidate Mitch Daniels.”
“I think it shows there are some people who are willing to stand up and fight for the family and others who would rather, to use the comment of one potential candidate, call a truce on these things,” Santorum said during taping of Iowa Press at Iowa Public Television in Johnston.
“A truce in this case means ceding ground to the other side,” he added.
This is the second time Santorum has weighed in with a response to Daniels, doing so earlier this month.
The “truce talk” and the potential devaluation of social issues has weighed prominently on the minds of leaders of pro-life organizations — so much so that Tom Minnery, the senior vice president of government and public policy at CitizenLink, the public policy arm of Focus on the Family, has put out a new editorial on them.
“In this age of the Tea Party, some believe that conservatives should place all their emphasis on tax and economic issues, and push those pesky social issues — such as the right to life, and the definition of marriage — to the back burner. Some are just plain tired of us social conservatives,” he writes. “But the fact is, any consistent conservative is a social conservative.”
“When we take a closer look at what it takes to maintain a strong and free nation, with a prosperous, engaged and productive citizenry, it becomes clear, first of all, that social and economic conservatives have a lot in common,” he continued.
Minnery explains: “Some conservatives, because they lean Libertarian, believe that matters of faith should be mostly private because public religion threatens individual liberty. Actually, moral principles preserve our freedoms, and here is why that is true: All conservatives believe in the concept of ordered liberty — that is, the freedom to do what one wants to do, within the limits of what one ought to do. And from where does that “oughtness” come? It derives from the shared moral principles that must inhabit each heart, as a kind of internal moral gyroscope that tells each of us what is right and what is wrong.”
“In the West, these principles find their source in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, and if we lose that collective sense of “oughtness,” then individual liberty degenerates into selfishness, and eventually into social chaos. And, at that point, it is only the loaded gun and the barbed wire fence that can preserve order,” he concludes.
