5 Reasons for Jews to Vote Romney

There are many reasons for Jews to vote for Governor Romney. Here are the top 5.

1. Romney supports non-violence and doesn’t demonize rich or successful

President Obama said “rich people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure folks don’t take their stuff.”

“The spirit of empathy condemns not only the use of fire-hoses and attack dogs to keep people down but also accountants and tax loopholes to keep people down.”

He also mentioned that “The philosophy of nonviolence only makes sense if the powerful can be made to recognize themselves in the powerless.”

The president is destroying the moral foundation for respect of others’ property and lives. Accountants and lawyers are the real enemies of the people.

If G-d forbid we have a repeat of the Crown Heights riots, whose side does the president’s rhetoric support? If the Muslim Brotherhood and their offshoots act towards Israel or America with violence, are they wrong?

Even if he does oppose violence and terrorism in his second term, his rhetoric continues to lay out the ideological case for rising up against those who use the rule of law to keep things that others don’t have.

Of course there was also when he went off-script while making the fair point that we contribute to others’ success. The president got excited by the audience’s hatred, and proceeded to mock and ridicule those who think that they’re successful because of their own intelligence and hard work. He then had the audacity to not just claim he was taken out of context, but to outright deny that he said was he said.

The American media claim that Republicans “dog whistle” to racists when they use words like Chicago. If they applied the same standards to Democrats and Jews, they might wonder who exactly is being demonized by talk of evil accountants, lawyers, and people who think they’re successful because they’re so damn smart.

Mitt Romney will not demonize those who achieve success, nor stoke people’s resentment of those who have more.

2. Religious freedom & religious extremism

One of the many lies Jews tell themselves is that the right is dominated by intolerant fundamentalist Evangelicals. Well, the Republican presidential candidate is a Mormon. His VP is Catholic. The Supreme Court has 6 Catholics and 3 Jews. No Protestants. There is no Evangelical takeover of the country.

What the Evangelicals and those they support share are values, not theology. Those values center on respect for others’ religious views, and on a respect for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

President Obama on the other mocks that Leviticus “suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination,” and that Deuteronomy ” suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith.”

He is forcing Catholic employers to provide free contraceptives, sterilization procedures, and abortion-producing medications, regardless of whether or not this violates their doctrines. Before you think this stops there, consider the case of Elaine Huguenin, the photographer who was fined for refusing to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. The president had nothing to do with that case, but the direction is important. In America it is increasingly acceptable for the government to force others to commit acts they find religiously or morally objectionable.

And contrary to media spin, it’s the Democrats who have been getting more extreme on social issues. On abortion, for example, the Republican platform is roughly unchanged over the past two decades. The Democrats, on the other hand, have moved from pro-choice to pro-abortion. They dropped the language calling for abortion to be rare, the language calling to respect people on both sides of the issue, and the language calling to find ways to reduce abortions without reducing a woman’s liberty. It simply calls for taxpayer funded abortion on demand at any time and for any reason, while Democrats demonize anybody who thinks differently.

3. In 2016 Romney will run for re-election. Obama will …?

If elected, Governor Romney will run for re-election in 2016. This should stop him from straying too far from the will of the American people. President Obama on the other hand will have less need for the support of the American people than he did in his first term.

We don’t know what the president’s plans are after 2016. He has suggested that under other administrations the US has often been a force of evil. Would he try to cede some US power to a fairer world body? Will he spend any of his second term making sure that whatever he does after 2016 will make him richer and more powerful? Will he be looking for a promotion in 2016 from president of the US to something bigger?

President Obama famously told the Russian president “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” That may be his attitude about more than just leaving Europe vulnerable to Russian and Iranian missiles. If in his first term he limited himself to actions that the thought wouldn’t cost him reelection, what will he do in his second term?

4. Unemployment and the national debt

European economies are collapsing, and it’s not pretty.  The US is the world’s largest debtor nation. It’s getting worse. Jews and Israel may suffer disproportionately from economic collapse and decline of US power. Even if they don’t, Let’s just say it’s the kind of thing Jews and everybody else should oppose.

President Obama promised to halve the deficit and to get unemployment under 6%. They didn’t. And if they couldn’t fix Bush’s mess, they certainly can’t fix Obama’s. Governor Romney, working with both parties, is America’s best hope for economic recovery.

5. No red states and blue states

Long before President Obama ran a presidency and a campaign based on fanning the flames of racial, gender and class hatred a young Barack Obama expressed this wonderful, unifying vision:

“E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America.

“The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

“We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

Anybody who still clings to that unifying vision has a clear choice in 2012. Governor Mitt Romney.