Goldwater

Goldwater represents a breed of conservative who didn't exist as a euphemism for religious bigotry or blind hatred of government or minorities.

He would be horrified to hear that his concern for civil rights and his respect for Americans as individuals would get him called a "commie atheist liberal" these days by members of the degenerate American right. Certainly he was proud to call himself a conservative, but he hails from a time with the label was one that still had self-respect involved in it.

Perhaps someday, Conservatives will take their good name back from the likes of Pat Robertson and Trent Lott, and once again offer Americans choice.

All quotes from Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Church & State Magazine, and public address to the US Senate. Compiled for reading on Usenet by "Tony G as Frank Cannon".
 

On gays and rights:

"The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they're gay," Goldwater asserts. "You don't have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that's what brings me into it."

"The first time this came up was with the question, should there be gays in the military?" Goldwater says. "Having spent 37 years of my life in the military as a reservist, and never having met a gay in all of that time, and never having even talked about it in all those years, I just thought, why the hell shouldn't they serve? They're American citizens. As long as they're not doing things that are harmful to anyone else. ... So I came out for it."

"Well, Charlie, I'm an honorary gay by now," Harrison says Goldwater told him.

On Bill Clinton:

Called a press conference[. . .] to urge Republican critics of Whitewater to "get off his back and let him be president."

On Clinton's conduct of American foreign policy:
"I worry about it because he doesn't know a goddamn thing about it. We don't have any foreign policy. ... The best thing Clinton could do - I think I wrote him a letter about this, but I'm not sure - is to shut up. Every time I turn that radio on, there's Clinton, making a speech. And he makes speeches on a subject he doesn't know anything about. He'd be much better off if he'd quit it, because even though he makes a good speech, I don't think heshould talk all the time. ... He has no discipline."

On Hillary Clinton, who was an ardent Goldwater supporter in 1964:
"If he'd let his wife run business, I think he'd be better off. ... I just like the way she acts. I've never met her, but I sent her a bag of chili, and she invited me to come to the White House some night and said she'd cook chili for me. Someday, maybe."

On the Clinton health care proposal:
"If you made it law, it would cost as much as the whole country is worth. I would have to sell my automobile, my house, my property, everything, and contribute it to that, and you know that's not going to happen."

On Clinton's relations with the military:
"The thing that worries me right now is Clinton. I don't think he understands the military. And I don't think the people around him understand the military. And evidently, they have no real compunction against cutting the military. ... If a country wanted to go to war with us, we better be ready, because we might not win the next war. It worries the hell out of me."

On Conservativism:

"What I was talking about was more or less 'conservative,' " Goldwater recalls, saying he was smeared by the people around President Johnson - "the most dishonest man we ever had in the presidency." Goldwater continues: "The oldest philosophy in the world is conservatism, and I go clear back to the first Greeks. ... When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye."

Goldwater affects bemusement at the Sturm und Drang he seems to have caused among those who once saw themselves as his ideological descendants. As a good conservative should, he says, "I haven't changed my outlook at all."

On JFK:

"Had he lived, he would have been a good president,"
 

On Dole:

"I said one day that Dole had a temper, and he got madder than hell. He has one. He has a mean one."

On alleged racism in the Marine Corps:

"They had a program on '60 Minutes' about a black man who was a decorated captain in the Marines, and ... I think they asked him to retire because he was black. The Marines are still a little funny about that. There are lots of blacks in the Marines - there are black pilots - but they don't like 'em. ... They're changing, but not that fast. I think they have one black general." (A Marine Corps spokesman said that Goldwater is mistaken, and that the Marines offer equal opportunity for all.)

On Shannon Faulkner, the young woman who [. . .] won a court decision to enter the corps of cadets at the previously all-male Citadel military academy:

"It's a state-financed and state-run institute, and there's no way you can say no to women. Now, if it were privately run with private money, they could tell women to go to hell."

On the Relgious Right:

"Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives."

"I don't think there was any Reagan revolution. This country is based, its economy is based, on free enterprise. The government's based on a constitutional democracy. And all Reagan did was to continue what Harry Truman did and George Washington started."

"Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's ass."

"I don't have any respect for the Religious Right."

"A woman has a right to an abortion."

"The religious factions will go on imposing their will on others,"

When Barry Goldwater died May 29 at the age of 89, the cause of church-state separation and individual freedom lost a great champion.

"I am a conservative Republican," he wrote in a 1994 Washington Post essay, "but I believe in democracy and the separation of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don't hurt anyone else in the process."

A few years later he told The Advocate, "I don't have any respect for the Religious Right. There is no place in this country for practicing religion in politics. That goes for Falwell, Robertson and all the rest of these political preachers. They are a detriment to the country."

In 1994 he told The Los Angeles Times, "A lot of so-called conservatives don't know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It's not a conservative issue at all."

Goldwater, an Episcopalian, had theological differences with greedy TV preachers. "I look at these religious television shows," he said, "and they are raising big money on God. One million, three million, five million - they brag about it. I don't believe in that. It's not a very religious thing to do."

"If they succeed in establishing religion as a basic Republican Party tenet," he told U.S. News & World Report in 1994, "they could do us in."

"Well, I've spent quite a number of years carrying the flag of the 'Old Conservatism.' And I can say with conviction that the religious issues of these groups have little or nothing to do with conservative or liberal politics. The uncompromising position of these groups is a divisive element that could tear apart the very spirit of our representative system, if they gain sufficient strength."

Insisted Goldwater, "Being a conservative in America traditionally has meant that one holds a deep, abiding respect for the Constitution. We conservatives believe sincerely in the integrity of the Constitution. We treasure the freedoms that document protects....

"By maintaining the separation of church and state," he explained, "the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars .... Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northem Ireland, or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state:"

Goldwater concluded with a waming to the American people.

"The religious factions will go on imposing their will on others," he said, "unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives...

"We have succeeded for 205 years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't stop now," he insisted. "To retreat from that separation would violate the principles of conservatism and the values upon which the framers built this democratic republic."

"Being a conservative in America traditionally has meant that one holds a deep, abiding respect for the Constitution. We conservatives believe sincerely in the integrity of the Constitution. We treasure the freedom that document protects...."

"By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars. Throughout our two hundred plus years, public policy debate has focused on political and economic issues, on which there can be compromise...."

"The great decisions of government cannot be dictated by the concerns of religious factions. This was true in the days of Madison, and it is just as true today. We have succeeded for 205 years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't stop now. To retreat from that separation would violate the principles of conservatism and the values upon which the framers built this democratic republic."