Both Born Again...But My How Different.

George Bush and Jimmy Carter are both born again Christians but manifest their beliefs so differently it's amazing.


Abortion:

Jimmy Carter did not believe in abortion; at same time, he was sworn by oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Carter did everything he could do within the bounds of the law to minimize and discourage abortions.

Carter found 2/3 of the women who have abortions claim they can’t afford to raise the baby so Jimmy Carter strongly supported the WIC program to give special benefits to women and children.

Death Penalty:

George Bush accelerates the abortion rate by cutting the funds for the poor so that it makes it harder to have a baby and would also like to cut $122 million from the WIC program.


The Supreme Court ruled shortly before Jimmy Carter became President to authorize the death penalty which he did not believe in and he was relieved that no one was executed under his administration.

George Bush, on the other hand, holds the record for the most executions as governor in the history of the United States. He can take credit for 152 people that were executed during his tenure as Governor. Yet, Texas continues to rank last in almost every social service area, but they hold first place in the number of executions as of the last year George Bush was Governor. The Chicago Tribune reported that in one-third of those cases, the lawyer who represented the death penalty defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred. In 40 cases, the lawyers presented no evidence at all or only one witness at the sentencing phase of the trial.

The rise of fundamentalism has affected politics including national policy in domestic and foreign affairs and affected the religious community much with George Bush as President than when Jimmy Carter was President. The times were very different and fundamentalism was barely a blip on the radar screen.

Jimmy Carter said in response to one of Terry Gross' questions, "There is an ostentatious and aggressive effort among the religious right leaders publicly to align themselves with the republican party provided the republican party members they support are adequately conservative so this marriage has been a radial departure from the ancient values of our country.

At the same time, through various means, some of them not well publicized, there has been a tremendous amount of taxpayer money sent to our churches and the argument has been can the churches are allowed to be discriminatory against people who receive services through them from taxpayer’s money. Bush’s policy is that we should not make the churches declare non-discrimination … let them discriminate."

Jimmy Carter also had to deal with an oil crisis. There were boycotts against the sale of oil toward the US, because we were friendly with Israel and than Iraq invaded Iran and all the oil from both countries was terminated from the world supplies and in Carter's last 12 months the price of oil skyrocketed. Jimmy Carter implemented requirements for increasing fuel efficiency because, his main thrust was to conserve oil and energy. Toward the end of his Presidency, fuel efficiency increased from 12 mpg to 27.5 mpg, unfortunately, that policy was terminated under Ronald Reagan, and the efficiency requirement has been lost.

George Bush has not asked us to conserve until recently, and there are no actions on his part, to back up his words. In fact, the opposite is true, he has done everything in his power to support the "big business" of oil and little or nothing to develop alternatives or develop policy to conserve oil.