Bauer: No Way Around It -- A Vote Endorses a Party's Values

by Bill Fancher, Jeff Johnson, and Jody Brown
October 19, 2006

(AgapePress) - - Pro-family activist and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer contends voters can't separate a candidate from his or her chosen party's values.

Many voters insist they cast ballots for the candidate, and not for the party with which the candidate is affiliated. But Bauer, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, disagrees. "Whoever is elected comes here to Washington, and the first work they have is to organize Congress," he says.

What that means, explains Bauer, is that Democrats will be putting Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and like-minded liberal in charge of the party's agenda. And the first vote any elected candidate will cast, he says, is for the party's organization.

Gary Bauer

"You could elect a good Democrat in your state and that good Democrat is going to come here and make Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton and all those left wingers the leaders of their party," he states.

The staunch family advocate says he does not think, for example, that even a pro-life Democrat could be very effective in such a situation because "they will not be able to do pro-life things when they come here to Washington, DC."

Bauer feels that just as a vote for any Republican is a vote for that party's goals and values, a vote for any Democrat is a vote for that party's agenda. While Bauer and other pro-family leaders are concerned about many aspects of the Democratic agenda, perhaps foremost is that party's stated opposition to state constitutional amendments defending traditional marriage. Twenty states have passed such initiatives since 1998 -- 11 of those just two years ago -- and eight more are considering similar proposals on November 7.

Democrats' Plan for Defeating Amendments
In response to the success of those state ballot measures, the Democratic National Committee announced this summer it had adopted a five-point plan for fighting measures defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Parts of that plan include labeling those ballot issues as "divisive" ploys by the Republicans and others to deflect voter attention from other important issues, and working with the National Stonewall Democrats -- a pro-homosexual element within the party -- to develop "strategy and talking points" to combat the proposed amendments.

Peter LaBarbera

On Election Day 2006, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin will consider constitutional amendments declaring marriage to be only the union of one man and one woman. The president of the group Americans for Truth believes the amendments should pass with little difficulty in five of those eight states.

"Arizona and Wisconsin are more of a battleground," Peter LaBarbera asserts, "and then there's a special situation in Colorado where there's a pro-domestic partner initiative that was very smartly, by the way, put up by homosexual activists. So those are the three states to watch. I think the rest of the states will pass handily."

That has been the case in all of the 20 states where a marriage amendment has been adopted by voters. The average approval rating has been 68 percent (see chart). But LaBarbera warns that if the so-called "civil union" amendment passes in Colorado, voters can expect homosexual activists to employ the same strategy in the future when other states are considering constitutional amendments defending traditional marriage.