Don, murder is illegal because it's universally held to be a violation of natural law. Murder is not illegal merely because Moses read it in a tablet on Mt. Sinai. You'll notice that several other items in the Ten Commandments are not illegal -- at least until the Constitution Party "restores American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations". You can mutter "secular humanism is a religion" all you want, and I'll keep repeating: one side settles arguments with "X said so", where X is some god or some sacred text. There is no X whose arbitrary whims can settle a moral question for atheists the way that the whims of God can settle moral questions for theists. Please educate yourself by reading about Divine Command Theory.
I'll no more debate the virtue of protectionism than I'll debate the flatness of the Earth. You and the CP/AIP are welcome to votes of anyone reading this who doesn't agree with Ron Paul and me about the merits of free trade.
Yes, Cody, I've read the DoI. I personally adapted some of its language into the LP Platform this year -- plank 3.7. The DoI never invokes the Bible or even "scripture" the way the CP Platform does. The DoI talks about "self-evident truths" rather than revealed truths. It invokes "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- not the laws of Moses and of Moses's god. Jefferson would have never agreed with the CP Platform to "affirm the importance of Biblical scripture" when deciding e.g. that "the law of our Creator defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman." Sorry, but America's founding documents simply do not ever invoke the scriptural revelations of Christianity -- as much as you might wish otherwise.
Invoking the "year of our Lord" dating system to establish America as a theocracy is just laughable. The Bible is of course not mentioned in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, which instead explicitly prescribe "oath or affirmation" in each of the four instances they discuss such things.
Sorry, but no Communist regime (except perhaps North Korea) has ascribed supernatural properties to its leaders or their guiding texts. Your invocation of such regimes highlights an interesting irony. If I believed that the Bible were the revealed inerrant word of an omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent being, I would _embrace_ the charge of uniquely advocating political rule according to that text's divine wisdom. I surely wouldn't be so embarrassed by the charge of "theocracy" that I would say theocracy is a sin that everyone is guilty of. I would instead say that my brand of theocracy is the only authentic one -- sort of like what the CP Platform does when it identifies "our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of these United States".
Diagnosing the CP as theocratic is not at all the same thing as "bashing Christianity". But thank you for confirming that your politics and your religion are so intertwined that you cannot mentally distinguish disagreement with one from disagreement with the other. That's a deliciously subtle piece of irony.
"Talking about Christian values in government" is not theocracy until you start saying (as the CP does) that "scripture" should shape the government's laws. Maybe you need an Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not use strawmen to misrepresent thy neighbor's opinions.
As for condemning the entire LP because of the views of a few members, well, let the political party that is without kooky members cast the first stone. If you want to change the subject from comparing party platforms, at least have the intellectual courage to admit it.
John Lowell, you just broke my irony meter with your charge of "bigotry" against Libertarians whom you proceed to vilify with a litany of vicious generalizations. You clearly have some issues you need to work through. I hope your walk with your Lord eventually leads you to a more charitable place.
