1.....Single-issue voters are land mines candidates must avoid stepping on. I am PRO-CHOICE, but America’s current mood is so pro-life that a pro-choice candidate would be unelectable. Romney’s strong pro-life stand worries me. In one sentence, he puts “the right to life itself” on the same level as “abolition” of slavery and “civil rights.” Republicans claim to be for small government. But the strong pro-life position is for government so huge as to have the power to intervene between a pregnant and her physician.

2.....I applaud Romney’s American ORIGINALISM, our Founders’ original vision and, in our reading of our founding documents, their original intent. Since the 1933 publication of the Humanist Manifesto I (continued in II and III), antisupernaturalists have tried to spin our heritage into atheism, marginalizing religion into the private sphere. Romney is precise in nailing this as “the religion of secularism,” which anti-Americanly intends “the elimination of religion from the public square.” (He did not denigrate the adjective “secular,” and he spoke approvingly of Lincoln’s phrase “political religion”—now called “civil religion.”)

3.....Rightly, Romney tells us that while the specifics of his religion are none of our business, we should consider the general tangencies of his religion to our American heritage and hope. One exception, a specific: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” Differences among Christians, and even among religions, should not prevent cultural-political convergence in a “symphony of faith.” Our Founders “sought the blessings of the Creator,” whose “children” we all are.

4.....The speech was both theocentric (God-centered) and antitheocratic (against religion’s dominance of government, as in the sharia aim of Islamism—which he rightly called “theocratic tyranny”). We Americans and our government should be realistic about the threat: “Radical Islam seeks to destroy us.” But as the Declaration of Independence affirms, the “Creator” and not government is the source of human rights—in Romney’s words, “liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government.” A truth, he says, we should not be hesitant to affirm in politics and education. Such theocentricity protects us against both theocracy (with its faith-dominance) and secularism (with its reason-dominance). We should be “thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty.”

5.....America’s contribution to political theory is simply stated in the First Amendment: political and religious institutions are mutually independent—though as social realities, politics and religion are interdependent, with a gated fence (not a “wall of separation”) between them. Romney’s speech showed a competent grasp of this clear but complex arrangement. “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” “I am an American [not a Mormon] running for president,” though mine is “the [Mormon] faith of my fathers.” The presidential oath of office would be “my highest promise to God.”

6.....Of our Founders, Romney likes John Adams for his moral and religious sinews, as in this quotation: “Our country was made for a moral and religious people,” and can’t work without this double “bridle” on “human passions.” The bridle has worked loose, and we are facing “the breakdown of the family,” with horrendous societal consequences.

We Democrats say that government should do for the people what the people need done but cannot do for themselves. I, however, could vote for a Republican if he or she were the candidate most balanced in understanding (1) the roles of faith and reason in the American mind and (2) the relative roles of private and public responsibility in American life.