This last weekend I attended part of my state’s Constitution Party convention at a hotel near the airport. I had heard on the radio that the parties V.P. Candidate, Darrell Castle would be the key-note speaker. I arrived just before 1 PM, which is when I understood Castle would be speaking. There was probably about thirty people there, one of home was a friend from an old singles ward I used to attend, he was there with his wife. The state party chairman, a short black man, unusual for Idaho, started the meeting by showing us a couple of YouTube clips of the parties presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin (an ordained Baptist minister and radio-talk show host) laying out his platform, at what appers to be a Barns & Nobel bookstore. That platform was small government, out of Iraq, anti-abortion, ect. Ect. In short the Constitution party is basically and overtly Christian version of the Libertarian party. In fact later, when I asked a member of the party why they weren’t simply part of the Libertarian party he replied by saying: “Because we acknowledge God and they don’t”.
After the YouTube clips my friend handed me a copy of the conventions schedule, from which I learned that Castle wasn’t scheduled to speak for another hour and half. There were to be two other speakers before Castle, a former Reagan aid turned organic farmer, and the lone Constitution party member of Montana’s state legislature. Not practically interested in either speaker, I zipped over to spend an hour with my brother and his family who live near by. I returned in time to catch a fair amount of the Montana state rep’s speech, which ultimately went about a half hour over. Apparently other members of the Montana state house find him annoying, and he loves to tell stories about that.
Anyway finally came Castle’s turn, and he spoke about all the radio interviews he does, and foreign policy, and small government ect ect. He seemed a comparatively reasonable guy, not showy like the previous speaker. Attendance had increased some by the time he started his address, with the audience consisting primarily of older people, and the overall feeling I got from the crowed was defiantly one of resentment at the political power structure, and that the country had been corrupted and needed to be ’reclaimed’. When I got up to leave prior to Castle finishing his address (things had gotten off schedule and I had other plans for the Five O’clock hour) a member of the party intercepted me and tired essentially to recruit me. We had a somewhat awkward roughly 15 minute long conversation which eventually turned toward religion and in which I defiantly held my punches. Attending was an interesting little curio of an experience, but I don’t anticipate much if any further involvement with America’s fifth biggest political party. By way of short political analysis, considering Bob Barr has pretty strong credentials among the base that might vote for the Constitution party candidate, I think if those voters want to send a statement, it might more effectively be sent by voting Libertarian in November.
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I don't think that it is right to say that the Libertarian party does not acknowledge God while the Constitutionalist does. The basic difference in my understanding is that the Constitutionalists feel that the Christian idea of religion, morals and Deity should be part of the governing bodies. The Libertarian simply believes as with most of its other beliefs that the government simply does not have the right nor the reason to impose moral legislation, which it leaves up to communities and churches.
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