REPUBLICANS HAVE TO BECOME A MODERATE PARTY

IN 1950 IT WAS EASY TO CHOOSE which political party you wanted to align yourself with. The Democrats were thought of as the workingman's party, while the Republicans were seen as the party sympathetic to business.

Most blue-collar workers were Democrats, while the owner of the big business or the corner store was a Republican.

Those simple times are long gone. Democrats align themselves much more with welfare programs than with working people, (unless the workers belong to a union), and the Republican Party has decided to cater to the people who left the Democrats.

No longer do you hear a Republican declare, "What's good for business is good for the country".

FDR created numerous government agencies during the Great Depression, and most of those agencies continue to thrive long after their purpose has been met.

In the 1950's many people saw a government agency destroying the family. Men discovered they could leave their wives and children with no guilt, because the government would provide for them, in the name of Welfare.

In the 1960's, civil rights laws were passed, interstate highways were being built, and many black Americans left their Southern towns for the dream of living in a northern city where there were jobs.

The dream didn't come true for too many of those people. There weren't enough jobs for everyone who wanted one. Meanwhile, many city dwellers felt overwhelmed by the influx of black Southern families. Not because they were black, northern cities had always had a black population, but because they were most often undereducated and they came from a different culture, a Southern culture.

Many of the white city folks fled the cities, or moved to a more expensive area of the city, leaving the working-class neighborhoods to the new arrivals. Those areas soon became predominantly populated by black folk, most of them newly arrived in the city.

What happened to the black family man who couldn't find a job? For in the 1960's it was still the norm for the husband to work outside the home while his wife worked inside the home.

If a man lost his job or couldn't find a job, his wife and children could collect Welfare to pay the rent and buy the food, but they couldn't collect if the husband remained in the home.

Too many black men had to leave their homes, leave their wives and children, so that their families could get help from the government. It was a bad solution but it was the only solution for some families.

The Welfare system destroyed families, left children fatherless, women with all of the responsibilities of the home, and men with all pride and hope gone.

When the American people saw this happening and saw the Democratic Party change from the workingman's party to the Welfare Rights party, they looked to the Republicans.

Did the Republican Party see what was happening and have a solution to stop it, to correct it, to save the people who were so dependent on the government that they couldn't see a way to independence?

That's when the Republicans grabbed the Family Values card and ran with it. But they went too far. For some reason they decided to balance their new philosophy on a base of evangelical born-again Christians.

There is mainstream Christianity and then there are the radicals. For a fact, because I have heard it from some ministers, these radicals preach that if Hitler accepted Christ, he is in heaven, while those Jewish babies burned in the ovens are burning in hell now. And that is radical.

The Republicans latched onto the issue of abortion in order to attract the radicals, but in the process they have repelled many who had been thinking of joining the Republican Party.

Fact: Ronald Reagan was President for 8 years and abortion is still legal.

Fact: The Supreme Court has ruled about abortion. It's unlikely that will ever change.

Using abortion as their biggest issue has kept thousands and thousands of reasonable people from joining ranks with the Republican party.

Another thing the Republicans do is put too much emphasis on Christian values. Don't they know there are many people, even Christians, who do not agree with the radical base of the Republican Party?

For many people, we hear the word Christian and understand it means the type who get in our faces and ask us if we've been born again.

Methodists and Presbyterians, Catholics and Jews and Buddhists don't want to join ranks with extreme religionists. They don't like extremes on any subject. So the Republican Party leaves them cold. Too radical.

Unless the Republican Party becomes a centrist party, they won't find new believers from mainstream America. More and more of the American people are becoming independent voters looking for a candidate to be enthusiastic about instead of going to the polls and voting for the ones who is "not as bad" as the other.

Republicans could drop the abortion issue, reclaim the old "what's good for business is good for the country" saying, and independent-minded voters might start listening to them.

RIGHT NOW, NEITHER POLITICAL PARTY IS REPRESENTING THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS, AND IT WOULDN'T BE SURPRISING TO SEE A NEW PARTY CREATED, BASED ON THE CONSTITUTION. THERE'S A LOT OF TALK ABOUT IT.