voting for Huckabee? nope, sorry...

Submitted by plusaf (United States), Feb 5, 2008 at 00:29

as a point of information, not argument, to many of the posters on this thread, please note this:

while 'most everyone in the media and on blogsites focuses on relatively single issues like immigration, national defense, religious aspects, freedoms, safety, etc, there is a whole swath of us out here who can't easily choose either a republican OR democratic candidate that easily, and it creates problems for us in virtually every election.

it's pretty simple, but it's rarely addressed in threads like these, so i really would like to point it out for clarity:

virtually all republican candidates have strong religious views. it seems to go along with the other typical label, "conservative." from the viewpoint of atheists like myself, we don't want to risk voting someone into office who turns to their god for answers. we'd really prefer "critical thinkers" who have some legal, business, and "heaven-forbid!" scientific or engineering thinking background when it comes to the issues and challenges facing our wonderful country.

on the other hand, and this is not related to atheism, perhaps at all, but when "the rest of us" look at the democratic candidates, their platforms and the ideas they voice in public, some of them are equally abhorrent! pelosi and clinton have repeatedly made statements which, to our views, are basically Socialistic: "companies make too much money," "there's to much money concentrated in too few hands," and they sum it up with "so we must get our hands on that money, take it from them, and put it to the RIGHT or CORRECT uses!"

that side is nearly as scary, as many of us have, through luck or skill, made enough money to almost ensure a comfortable retirement [no Lexus, but not living under a bridge in our car, either], and we see the liberal-socialists as coveting our wealth with no better rationale than "they know better what to do" and "fairness" and, bottom line, if they outnumber us, a simple majority changes the tax laws.... the "tyranny of the majority" lets barely 50% of the VOTERS [not of the electorate] control the lives or wealth of the other 59%.... what was referred to as "mandate madness" in the Reagan Years.

so, we're faced with a lousy bunch of choices: huckabee, who would regulate our bodies [what we do in bedrooms, whom we do it with, and what happens if the result is a pregnancy...] and hillary, who wants to get deep into our pockets and purses and decide what should be done with the money we've earned, whether it's at the poverty level or billionaire level....... "she/they know better."

those of us who don't partake of either flavor of Kool-Aid are usually in the super-minority because of decades of divisiveness in schools, media and politics.

please, just try to understand that, for us, it's nowhere near as "black and white" of a discussion as EITHER side might like you to think.........

as a "funny story/side note"..... about 25 years ago, a co-worker [and devout Mormon] made a comment about "abortion rights" to me. he was curious about my views and opinions, that's all.... no, we didn't get into a fight, or even raise our voices..... but for just about TWO HOURS, i offered questions and arguments and rebuttals to his positions. .............. at the end of those two hours, he agreed with me that, yes, abortion was not a black-or-white issue, that it did have shades of gray to it, and that not all "solutions" were right for everyone.

and a year later he moved from Silicon Valley, California, to Corvallis, Oregon [not exactly a bastion center of liberalism, you know... ]

life's got a lot of gray to it.

and that, in my not-so-humble-position [imnsho], is a good thing.

ok, carry on, all...

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