Matt Barber and Shawn Akers dedicated a recent Liberty Counsel "Faith & Freedom Radio" program to pushing back against GOProud's effort to get the Republican Party to ignore the Religious Right's social issues agenda, blasting GOProud as liberal group that is masquerading as a conservative organization in order to divide the conservative movement and explaining that the only true conservatives are those who are conservative on social, fiscal, and national defense issues:
Barber: Groups like GOProud are liberal/libertarian organizations that are in place, and I believe furtively so, to really create a divide and conquer scheme within the Republican Party, to really divide and separate and try to splinter off people from the Tea Party movement when, in reality, the vast majority are, as I point out, those three-legged Reagan stool conservatives.
Akers: In order to form a complete conservative, you have to have all three of those things. And if any one of those things is missing, you have something but its not a stool. It won't hold you up. You are not a conservative. You have to be fiscally conservative, defense conservative, and socially conservative.
Barber: You are absolutely right.
Akers: [And] those three legs are not created equal. The fact is when we talk about social issues ... name me an issue that is not social. Social simply means that it has to do with society - what we mean is moral. Fine, show me one of those issues that doesn't deal with morality.
We we talk about defense, we're talking about literally when we will take up arms. You'd better have a moral set on why or when you are doing that.
When we're talking about economics, we're talking about who's going to receive what, how you're going to manage money, who's going to get paid what, how we're going to handle all of the things in our lives - there shouldn't even be a moral component, it had better exist in a moral framework or you've got a very bad system on your hands.
So the fact is of those three stools, they're all three social conservative legs. You can't separate social conservatism from the rest.
Barber: And take the hot button social conservative issues, the ones that they really like to talk about: abortion and so-called gay rights.
On the abortion issue, I'm sorry, but if you claim to be a conservative and you're pro-abortion, you're not a conservative.
I don't think anybody who is not pro-life is qualified or fit to serve. If they can't understand a fundamental right to life, they don't belong in office as far as I'm concerned.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All, again, inexorably linked. You cannot have one without the other and liberty, of course, was at the forefront. And groups like GOProud seek to remove our liberties, they seek to radically redefine family. They push a radical, leftist homosexual agenda and we're not going to let them get away with it.
Evangelical Christians make up overwhelmingly the base of the conservative movement and even of the Republican Party and it is ill-advised of Republicans to go against, really, the will of the Evangelical conservative movement, of the complete conservatives, of the Reagan conservatives and they do so at their own peril, the conservative movement does so at its own peril.
