The Obama administration is considering forced vaccination of children and adults in response to the possibility of a swine flu epidemic this fall.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been preparing public school superintendents for the possibility that their schools will be used by the government as inoculation centers for a nationwide swine flu vaccination program which may include mandatory vaccination of public school students who are already required to receive several other government mandated vaccinations.

While there is a genuine threat of a swine flu pandemic, it does not justify the level of fear mongering being engaged in by the Obama Administration at a time which makes it look very much as if they are using this issue to advance their health care agenda. Although numbers like 90,000 deaths and 1.2 million hospitalizations from the CDC seem frightening, they fall within the parameters for the effects of the yearly outbreaks of other kinds of flu.

There is no legitimate reason for any program of forced mass vaccination, especially directed at school children and using state mandated public education requirements as a threat to force parents to comply. Mandatory vaccination programs are a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy and personal security. It is especially important that the rights of children and the rights of their parents to make decisions about their childrens’ welfare be protected.

Here in Texas we saw an attempt at forced vaccination when Governor Rick Perry tried to mandate that all teenage girls be given the Human Paphaloma Virus vaccine at a cost of over $400 per vaccination to the taxpayers. Outrage over the huge tax cost of the program was exceeded only by anger over having this vaccine forced on teenagers. Protests were so effective that the program was killed. Now we need to do the same on a nationwide basis.

The issue of vaccination – in fact the entire healthcare debate – comes down to one very simple question. Who should make the healthcare decisions for you and your family? Should it be you or should it be legislators or commissions of nameless and faceless government bureaucrats like those created by proposed healthcare legislation.

This issue is so important and so personal that giving up control to government is terrifying. As a result, we are seeing massive nationwide grassroots protests against government run healthcare because whatever the faults of the current system, people want to keep control and make their own health care decisions.

Vaccines are one of the great advancements of modern medicine and for the most part they are safe and important for protecting children and adults from real health threats. Nonetheless it is still morally wrong for government to force any kind of choice like this on citizens against their will. Government should protect freedom of choice, not take it away.

The Republican Liberty Caucus is working to oppose both so-called healthcare reform and mandated vaccination programs.

Citizens have the right to make their own health care decisions, including opting out of current school vaccination requirements and not being forced to comply with any future government inoculation program.

Americans should be trusted to make responsible decisions about the health of their family members and the safety of the community. The role of the government should be to protect citizens and their rights, not to make medical decisions for them without their consent.

So I ask again, who do you want making your health care decisions?

In a recent column, well-respected conservative pundit George Will wrote in his syndicated Washington Post column about the absurdity of laws against online casinos, and why the online casino and poker industries should be legal in the U.S. According to Casino News Authority, an online casino news agency, “It’s a huge step for a prominent Republican columnist to come out in support of the online casino industry.”

“Having turned gambling, which once was treated as a sin, into a social policy, government looks unusually silly criminalizing online forms of it,” says Will. He notes that “gambling is productive of pleasure for tens of millions of Americans for whom it is a frequent pastime,” and he doesn’t understand why “government should try to tightly circumscribe a ubiquitous human activity that generally harms nobody.”

In 2006, Congress effectively outlawed internet gambling by making it illegal for banks or credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling operations.

Opines the Casino News Authority website, “it’s good to see a Republican that understands the gambling industry, and more importantly, understands the freedom that Americans should always have.”

Of course, I agree with George Will — “Congress … SHOULD fold its interference with Internet gambling and certainly should get its 10 thumbs off Americans’ freedom to exercise their poker skills online.”  Exclamation point.

At least some Republicans understand the distinction between personal moral values and government-forced ‘moral values’.

Voters are increasingly turning away from the Republican Party, as voter registration and voter identity polls increasingly illustrate. And there seems to be few voices of reason on where the Republican Party should go from this point forward.

Voters under 30 voted 66% to 32% for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 – part of the biggest age disparity the exit polls have ever measured in a race for president. Young voters were the GOP’s worst age group in 2006 and 2004 as well.

According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “History suggests that an entire generation’s partisan profile can be shaped in the first decade of voting. Imagine a Democratic-leaning millennial generation (those born between the late 1970s and the year 2000) adding 4 million potential voters a year to the U.S. electorate over the next decade.”

Young voters are less socially conservative than the electorate as a whole on issues ranging from homosexuality to immigration. They are also more secular and participate less in organized religion. In a recent Pew poll, 25% of Americans born since 1976 were atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – compared with 13% of baby boomers.

“Young voters need to see a GOP that is more socially libertarian, particularly toward gay rights. With changing demographics come changing attitudes,” Republican consultant Mike Murphy wrote in Time magazine this month, lamenting in the same column that “A GOP ice age is on the way.”

The GOP also has to find a way to appeal to non-white voters.  In 2008, voters under 30 were 62% white while voters over 30 were 77% white .

So how can the GOP simultaneously attract black, Hispanic and Asian voters, continue its appeal to white voters, and also capture young voters?

Voters are looking for consistency — a cohesive vision for peace and prosperity — and solutions to our problems.

The Republican Liberty Caucus offers the solution: less government, more liberty.

Government at every level in this country continues to be too big, too intrusive, and too expensive.

Solutions we seek — from our nation’s dwindling health care system and dilapidated schools to our meddlesome foreign policy and increasing civil liberties violations — can be found when government is reduced or eliminated from the issue.

As a RLC Adviser Ron Paul has repeated time and again, liberty is the great unifier.  A vision of limited government unites all Americans in the great purpose of our nation’s government: to protect the rights of all American citizens and to be limited in scope and size.

Is there any vision more empowering than that?

Recently, Newsweek featured a headline claiming that “We Are All Socialists Now.” Perhaps it should have featured a picture of Demetrius Poliorcetes on the cover instead. The history of the ancient Hellenistic cities in what is now Arabia and Turkey might provide more useful knowledge about what is happening in the United States than one can find in newspapers, magazines or on television.

Michael Rostovtzeff was a Ukrainian-born archaeologist and professor of ancient history at Yale beginning in 1925. He died in 1952. He was among the first historians to study the ancient world’s economies and to emphasize the role of capitalism in the rise and decline of ancient societies.

I have just started reading Rostovtzeff’s monumental Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire*, one of a number of massive books that he authored. The text runs to 488 pages but there are in addition more than 200 pages of footnotes. Friends of liberty will do well to consider Rostovtzeff’s work.

He starts the book by discussing the history of Greece and the Hellenistic city states that Greeks founded in what is now Arabia and Turkey. He notes that “class warfare” was common in classical Greece proper. “This class-war made the growth and development of a sound capitalistic system very difficult.” In classical Greece there were widespread movements for redistribution of land and abolition of debts. The problem was so widespread that Athens and Itana in Crete required citizens to swear that they would not put redistribution of land and abolition of debts to the vote. It seems that ACORN has precedents.

Rostovtzeff writes:

“Revolution and reaction followed each other with brief delays, and were marked by wholesale slaughter or expulsion of the best citizens…What was lost by the Greek cities of the European mainland and most of the islands was gained by the Hellenistic monarchies and more especially by the Greek cities of the East.”

Unlike the democracies in Greece proper, the eastern Hellenistic kings of the fourth and third centuries BC were anti-libertarian capitalists, much like more recent rulers of Chile and post-Mao China. “The result was that every attempt at a social revolution within their gates was stopped by the strong hand of the Hellenistic monarchs, and that the cities were very rarely involved in external warfare.”

The kings’ anti-libertarian suppression of revolution had a libertarian effect, at least temporarily. “The accumulation of capital and the introduction of improved methods in trade and industry proceeded more freely and successfully in the East than in the cities of Greece proper. Hence the commercial capitalism of the Greek cities of the fourth century attained an ever higher development, which brought the Hellenistic states very near to the stage of industrial capitalism that characterizes the economic history of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

That is mind blowing. In the fourth and third centuries BC Greeks in Asia Minor were attaining 19th century levels of industrialization? In other words, from the year 300 BC until 1900 virtually no consistent economic progress was made? And how easy might it be to revert to the decline that followed the fall of the Roman Empire roughly 1500 years ago? True, these societies depended on slave labour. But recall that the American economy also so depended until 1862.

Rostovtzeff notes that the Greek cities not only had a large internal market and a large, competitive trade, but also:

“They gradually improved the technique of agricultural and of industrial production with the aid of pure and applied science…and they employed both in agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and in industry the methods of pure capitalistic economy based on slave-labour. They introduced for the first time a mass production of goods for an indefinite market. They developed banking and credit and succeeded in creating not only general rules for maritime commerce…but also a kind of common civil law, which was valid all over the Hellenistic world. The same tendency towards unification may be noticed in attempts to stabilize the currency, or at least to establish stable relations between the coins of the various independent trading states.”

These impressive advances, a globalization that occurred nearly 2,500 years ago, very quickly “stunted” and then was “atrophied” by “constant warfare which raged almost without interruption all over the Hellenistic world.” It didn’t take long for the military-industrial complex to assert itself.  ”The wars forced the Hellenistic states, both great and small, to concentrate their efforts on military preparations, on building up the largest possible armies and navies, on inventing new devices in military engineering, and thus wasting enormous sums of money as, for instance, in the case of the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorcetes.”

Rostovtzeff notes that this led to:

“Nationalization of both production and exchange, which was carried out in some, at least, of the Hellenistic monarchies, especially Egypt. By nationalization I mean the concentration of the management of the most essential branches of economic activity in the hands of the state, that is to say, of the king and his officials. Profitable at first for the state, this system gradually led to dishonesty and lawlessness on the part of the officials and to the almost complete elimination of competition and of the free play of the individual energy on the part of the population.

“Hand in hand with this tendency towards state control went the minute elaboration of a highly refined system of taxation, which affected every side of economic life. It was based on the experience of the Oriental monarchies, but it went much farther both in inventing new taxable objects and in improving the mode of collecting the taxes. The burden of taxation lay heavily on the population of the Hellenistic world…

“This disastrous economic system of the Hellenistic monarchies produced ever-growing discontent among the masses of the natives. From the end of the third century onwards the native population of Egypt, for example, rose repeatedly against its foreign oppressors…”

Naturally, the warfare and economic dislocations due to taxes and socialism in the Greek world opened the city gates to a rising new republic: Rome. Might the United States’ ever-expanding government spending; subsidization of corrupt and inefficient financial institutions and corporations; and its military-industrial complex open the door to the ascendancy of a new power, this time from the east?

*All quotes in this blog are taken from chapter 1, “Italy and the Civil War”.

Mitchell Langbert can be visited at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.

Obama has been meeting with top officials to map out a strategy for a new health regime for the Nation, much of it mandatory.

According to CBSNews.com, any health care reform plan that Obama signs is almost certain to call for nutrition counseling, obesity screenings and wellness programs at workplaces and community centers. He wants more time in the school day for physical fitness, more nutritious school lunches and more bike paths, walking paths and grocery stores in underserved areas.”

“The president is filling top posts at Health and Human Services with officials who, in their previous jobs, outlawed trans fats, banned public smoking or required restaurants to provide a calorie count with that slice of banana cream pie.”

The whole situation has libertarians craving a basket of onion rings and a beer.

“If you care about the sorts of things I do, then you are going to be losing big-time for the next four to eight years,” said David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of the book “Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children.”

Don’t get them wrong, critics such as Harsanyi say — they like broccoli and they lift barbells and they have no particular beef with a healthy president who was once described by his physician as having “no excess body fat.”

Says the paper, “They just don’t like it when government becomes the messenger and the enforcer.”

You can say that again.

I consider myself to be socially conservative in my personal beliefs. I’m not about to marry a man, encourage my daughter to have an abortion, picket a military recruiting office or smoke marijuana. But I am also a libertarian, so I do not believe in using the power of government to force my values on other people. I hope and believe that as a group the Republican Liberty Caucus shares this perspective and that our members understand that like the Republican party we are a “big tent” with room for anyone who agrees with our core principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty.

The RLC is not just a bunch of Libertarians who got tired of the bickering in the Libertarian Party. Many of us are long-time Republicans who are inspired not by Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard or the modern gurus of the libertarian movement, but by the fundamentally conservative belief in liberty which descends from enlightenment conservatives like Edmund Burke and the founding fathers and was reinforced by the great leaders of the Republican party like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Reagan described his own philosophy of government as libertarian and he saw no conflict between his libertarian beliefs and his personal moral principles. Like many Republicans he understood that there are separate spheres for the political and the personal. The RLC operates in the political sphere and is not in the business of advocating for or against any moral belief held by any individual. While it is true that we do not believe that it is the role of the federal government to legislate morality, that also means that as a group we do not advocate or oppose any position on personal moral, religious or social issues. There are other groups both inside and outside the GOP which address those issues quite well without our help.

The RLC has many members whose personal values tend towards the socially conservative, but they still share a belief in the principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty. We welcome them into our chapters because their beliefs do not conflict with our core principles. By the same measure we also welcome members whose personal beliefs tend to be more socially liberal. If we have differences on some social issues we can put those aside because it is more important to work together on the larger issues which we share in common.

Our nation is in peril and our most precious rights are threatened. Government is out of control and must be returned to the principles on which it was founded. Achieving this is the mission of the RLC and if it is your mission, then that should override all lesser issues and we ought to be able to find common ground and work together, because none of us will be able to live the way we want — whatever our personal social and moral beliefs — if we are no longer free.

I was very interested to see the reaction of many Republicans to the over-the-top behavior of the extreme right in the wake of the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller earlier this week. On The Next Right they quickly removed an offensive article and comments had loudly condemned the author. On Little Green Footballs they posted a substantial article condemning commenters and posters on several other right-leaning blogs for their comments about Tiller. These reactions give a clear impression that more and more mainstream Republicans are fed up with the fanaticism of the religious right, sickened over their behavior over the Tiller issue and just about ready to give them the boot.

Is it possible that this incident is the straw which finally broke the camel’s back and has created an unhealable rift between rational conservatives and the extremists of the religious right? Even Republicans who are socially conservative seem to have had enough of the extremist rhetoric and support for violence coming from people like Fred Phelps and Randall Terry. They seem to have woken up to the fact that the fanaticism and terrorism they oppose in the Islamic world is not much different from the beliefs held by some they considered allies.

As Barry Goldwater pointed out many years ago, the one thing which Republicans ought to be extreme about is liberty and on all other issues they ought to be rational and pragmatic. Maybe that lesson which he spent decades trying to teach with his own actions, is finally sinking in.

The obsession with legislating morality and with opposition to abortion and gay rights is really not part of the core Republican agenda. These ideas and the fanaticism they inspire were brought into the party through its alliance in the post-Reagan era with religious conservatives. Historically, Republicans have had a laissez faire attitude, not just to the economy, but also on moral issues. Republicans used to be dispassionate, leaving moral decisions in the hands of individuals and keeping government out of the picture. It seems like the pendulum might be swinging back in that direction.

As Abraham Lincoln said many years ago, our nation and by extension the Republican Party, was “conceived in liberty” and that idea of individual liberty ought to be the basis of every policy and every decision which Republicans make. There is very little question that abortion is a sin, but shouldn’t that sin be a matter of personal responsibility to be resolved between the individual and his or her soul and church and god? Once you get government involved, a change in policy or administration could as easily mean forced abortion and sterilization as you have in China as it could mean protecting unborn fetuses. Putting such personal decisions in the hands of government can only work out badly when there is the potential to go to either extreme.

This change in attitude in the GOP seems real and very significant. It has been building for years, starting with uneasiness with many Bush administration policies and perhaps culminating with the Tiller incident. That doesn’t mean that I expect a wholesale casting out of the religious right, but it does seem as if the more reasonable elements of the religious wing of the party are finally realizing that they have to distance themselves from the exrtremists, and perhaps put broader priorities first if they want to continue to play a role in the party and if they want that party to be successful. Extremism has been like an anchor dragging the GOP down and if the party cannot cast itself free of that extremism and chart a better course for itself it will never be successful.

Fanaticism and extremism breed violence and terror and are the enemies of liberty. If we are determined to fight them in the War on Terror how can we be less vigilant in opposing them at home? If we are to have a Republican party which makes liberty its first priority, then it must reject extremism and intolerance in every form. We can still embrace conservative and moral values, but we must accept that these are personal values and that only evil and oppression can come from giving government the power to dictate morality and institutionalize the prejudices of religious fanatics.

Senator Jim DeMint has an impressive record in the Senate. The Junior Senator from South Carolina’s main work since his election in 2005 has centered on opposing the increase of federal government spending, both under the Bush and Obama Administrations. He has been particularly hostile to bailouts for banks and other corporations. DeMint is also a vocal proponent of Right to Work laws and, as such, opposes the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) that would strip workers of secret ballot elections.

However, DeMint leaves much to be desired on social issues. According to the Charleston City Paper, “DeMint’s office has reasserted his commitment to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.” DeMint’s position is not particularly popular: only a small majority (54%) of gay marriage opponents favor amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, according to a 2006 survey.

Opines the paper: “DeMint’s strong support for states rights, while also seeking federal involvement on gay marriage may be indicative of a larger struggle between the religious and libertarian elements of the Republican Party as it rebrands itself.”

So just like the Democrats, DeMint simply picks and chooses what issues he wants government to take an activist role in.

Gay marriage is just the most recent example of the social conservatives’ war on individual choice. And it is but one example of some social conservatives’ interest in nationalizing issues that should not be decided by the federal government.

A 2006 survey of 2,003 adults found that 55% prefer that abortion laws be decided at the national level rather than each state deciding for itself. This desire for a national policy prescription extends to other social issues, too. Despite growing antipathy toward Congress and low levels of trust in the federal government generally, majorities or pluralities also favored a national (rather than state-by-state) approach to policymaking on stem cell research, gay marriage and whether creationism should be taught in the schools along with evolution.

It isn’t just abortion and gay marriage where social conservatives want government to intervene.  In 2006, the Family Research Council surveyed its members on immigration, and, by a ratio of 9 to 1, they believe illegal immigrants should be “detected, arrested and returned to their country of origin.”

I’m not saying that illegal immigration should be tolerated (it shouldn’t be) — although Congress has tolerated it for decades.

But a rational approach to the issue does not entail rounding up millions of people and sending them away.

A Pew poll from 2006, cited by the San Francisco Chronicle, found that two-thirds of white evangelicals consider new immigrants to be a burden and a threat to American culture.  The poll didn’t even include the word ‘illegal’.

Some evangelicals seem to have massive problem with gays and immigrants — and they think the government can (and should) solve their concerns.

How about foreign policy?

Surely the religious right doesn’t want government to intervene there, right?

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.  In fact, it was with the blessing of many social conservatives who supported unwavering authority for the Bush Administration’s War in Iraq, detaining terrorist suspects without due process rights, and torture policies.

This despite the fact that Christian Just War Theory stresses necessary cause, right intention, last report, and legitimate authority when governments wage a war. And the fact that the Constitution requires Congress to authorize war powers.

Yet the small (quiet) group of Christian evangelicals who questioned the Bush Administration’s policies on Iraq and waterboarding were labeled unpatriotic, anti-American, and bad Christians.

Voltaire once said, “Of all religions, Christianity is without a doubt the one that should inspire tolerance the most.”  Many Christians have been tolerant of others, and a few social conservatives have been able to align with libertarians via the Ron Paul movement.

Those Christians have stayed true to their principles while recognizing that government is not the solution to these complex social problems that plague society.  They need to wake up their socially conservative, evangelical brethren to the fact that using government as a tool of social coercion is unethical–indeed, anti-religious.

“I never will by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance,” said Thomas Jefferson.

Social conservatives need to practice a bit more tolerance and wake up to the fact that asking government to solve these social dilemmas is no different than activists on the left asking government for handouts.

And no different than giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com posted earlier in the week at his blog, asking “Are Republicans Going Galt?”

Pointing to the Tea Party’s origin within the libertarian movement, Silver questions whether the Republican Party is tilting in the libertarian direction in wake of their solid defeats in 2006 and 2008.

The objective evidence Mr. Silver presents includes:

• A recent Gallup survey suggests that 80 percent of Republicans believe that Big Government is a bigger threat than big business, versus just 10 percent who think the opposite. He says “it has now become almost a definitional issue for Republicans.”

• “The Republican alternative budget could be considered a somewhat radical experiment in libertarianism”; and

• Republican insiders are increasingly uncertain about whether gay marriage, which was such an important issue for the party over 2000-2004, is any longer a winning issue at all for them.

Comparing Big Government to big business doesn’t really tell us what we need to know, unfortunately. Big business may be one of the entities competing with limited government that Republicans “sell their souls to” — however, there are a plethora of other entities that Republicans have chosen before smaller government, including puppet politicians, special interest groups, neo-conservatives, pork projects, and religion, to name just a few.

The idea that the Republican alternative budget is radical in any way is foreign to me. It is a far better budget than any one that Republicans proposed under the Bush Administration (no surprise there), and this budget would ultimately reduce the size of government if adopted. However, it is not even close to “a radical experiment in libertarianism”.

Speaking to Mr. Silver’s final point: I’m no Republican insider, but I never believed gay marriage was an important issue for the GOP. Ditto on abortion.

In 2004, for example, the RLC issued a press release against the Federal Marriage Amendment.  My recent post at this blog, “Are Republicans Shifting on Gay Marriage and the War on Drugs?“, indicates that at least some Republican legislators — most of whom were already in the moderate wing of the party — have had the courage to support equal rights for gays.

To this point, I count just two libertarian-leaning legislators (both from New Hampshire) who had the courage to take a principled stance of supporting marriage equality for gays and lesbians. If Republicans are going to stand up for equal rights in the near future (and why shouldn’t we?), it will have to be libertarian-leaning Republicans who lead on the issue.

As evangelical social conservative commentator Cal Thomas wrote recently, “The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost [for social conservatives]. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are — to recall Harold Hill [in The Music Man] — ‘closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge’.”

In summary, I think the Republican Party is shifting, but it is not proven with the evidence provided by Nate Silver.  Instead, I measure it by how fast the RLC is growing (at a very rapid pace — we can barely keep up!), the enthusiasm of the Ron Paul movement, and the anger in the faces of those who attended the Tea Party protests last Wednesday.

The battle for liberty has just begun. Brace yourself.

According to the Log Cabin Republicans, 36 GOP legislators in six Northeastern states (including several RLC-endorsed legislators) have voted to affirm individual rights on gay marriage votes. Widely-respected conservative commentator Cal Thomas recently wrote that perhaps its time for evangelicals to give up on the issue of gay marriage. He says:

“To those on the political and religious right who are intent on continuing the battle to preserve ‘traditional marriage’ in a nation that is rapidly discarding its traditions, I would ask this question: What poses a greater threat to our remaining moral underpinnings?

Is it two homosexuals living together, or is it the number of heterosexuals who are divorcing and the increasing number of children born to unmarried women, now at nearly 40 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Most of those who are disturbed about same-sex marriage are not as exercised about preserving heterosexual marriage. That’s because it doesn’t raise money and won’t get them on TV. Some preachers would rather demonize gays than oppose heterosexuals who violate their vows by divorcing, often causing harm to their children. That’s because so many in their congregations have been divorced and preaching against divorce might cause some to leave and take their contributions with them.

The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost [for social conservatives]. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are — to recall Harold Hill [in The Music Man] — ‘closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge’.”

As evidence of Cal Thomas’s commentary, the Log Cabin Republicans have recorded the following recent legislative action affirming equal (not special) rights for gays and lesbians:

· On March 23, the Vermont Senate passed marriage with the support of a majority of the Republican Conference.
· On March 26, twelve Republicans (including two RLC-endorsed legislators) provided the margin of victory for marriage equality in the New Hampshire House.
· On March 30, three Republicans (including the RLC’s Art O’Neill) on the Connecticut legislature’s Joint Committee on Judiciary voted to codify the state’s marriage equality ruling.
· On April 3, six Republicans joined their colleagues in the Vermont House to send marriage equality to the Governor.
· On April 3, the Iowa Supreme Court recognzied the right to marry in an opinion written by Republican-appointed Associate Justice Mark Cady.
· And on April 7, the Vermont House and Senate successfully overrode a governor’s veto to make Vermont the first state to enact marriage equality without the order of a court – and six courageous House Republicans provided the margin of victory.

There may also be a shift among at least some Republicans on the issue of decriminalizing (and taxing) marijuana and medical marijuana. In a New Hampshire vote earlier this week, nearly a dozen RLC-endorsed legislators (including Reps. Coffey, Ingbretson, McGuire, Hopper, Ober, Pratt, Reagan, Renzullo, Soucy, and Vaillancourt) voted for HB 648, which permits medical marijuana use in New Hampshire if prescribed by a physician. The bill, similar to the California law that has been under attack by the federal government for years now, passed the House and now moves on to the Senate.

In a 1997 poll, 57% of Republicans supported marijuana for medicinal purposes.  Is that number on the rise?  There is no recent polling data measuring Republican opinion of decriminalization or medical marijuana and New Hampshire is the only state with RLC legislators that has pending legislation addressing the issue of medical marijuana.  So perhaps it is too soon to tell what the trend among Republicans is, but if New Hampshire is any indication, there has been a shift of opinion on medical marijuana among Republican legislators.

Medical marijuana is currently legal in Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

It seems that there is a positive shift in priorities among Republicans.

Perhaps focusing on critical economic issues instead of hot-button social issues will provide Republicans the leverage they need to once again become the party that advocates limited, Constitutional government and protection of individual rights.