HoodaThunk?

The Democrat primary is taking place today pitting Terry McAuliffe, Creigh Deeds, and Brian Moran against each other for the Governor’s race. There’s been quite a lot of talk about this primary among my fellow Republicans and we’re rightly interested in the results of the race. But there’s a call being made for we Republicans to vote in the primary today and several reasons are given.

Some are saying we should take the opportunity to try to skew the Democrats’ choice of a contender in the general election toward someone we’re confident we can beat. Others look at things more holistically and want to weigh in on the choice so as to get the best Governor should the Dems win in November. Others still merely want to be agents of chaos and throw a monkey wrench into the works of the Democrat machine.

Me? I say Republicans should observe all they like, predict for all they’re worth, but they should absolutely, positively not vote in a Democratic primary. I believe to participate in the party workings of an organization you do not choose to belong to is unethical.

Back in May 2006 I attended the 10th Congressional District GOP Convention and got both an eyeful of elitist display and a seriously bad taste in my mouth for events like that. I didn’t attend another such event until the RPV Convention in Richmond a couple of weeks ago. What happened at that first one that didn’t at the second was an attempt to unseat delegates who were already accepted by the credentials committee. After the convention, I wrote a post on the matter of freedom of association or, more aptly, freedom of disassocation. In it I spoke of the right of groups to not only form but be exclusive as to their membership:

The US Constitution does not mention in its text the term “freedom of association.” The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that such a thing is Constitutionally protected in that such a freedom is necessary in order to preserve other freedoms specifically safeguarded explicitly, such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. Inherent in this concept must also be that of a freedom of disassociation. You are free to associate with whomever you please. You are also free to not associate with specific persons. The issue becomes more cloudy when you’re dealing with a group rather than a single person. In our case, is the Republican Party free to not associate with a given person and, if such person is already a member, is it free to enforce a disassociation?

I would argue that private groups such as the GOP must be free to exclude persons from their association. Associations are made to gather like-minded persons together for some purpose. Perhaps it’s a chess club or a scuba-diving club or a network-security professional association that we’re talking about but the reason for the association is always the same. People with a common interest working toward a common goal gather to join in their mutual pursuits. Such groups must be able to deny membership to those they conclude do not share their common interest and to sever their association with persons already a member who demonstrate interests counter to the group’s stated goal.

The Democratic party exists for similar reasons as our Republican committees do: to further the political goals of its membership, primarily through the election of their members to public office. Their goals are decidedly different from ours so I can imagine that having a massive number of local Dems crowding into a GOP primary and swinging the primary race over to a gun-banning, socialist, all-access-abortionist with a plan to turn our military control over the UN would be bothersome to my fellow Republicans. Such a candidate would clearly not represent the goals of our party and would only have a ghost of a chance in a primary so long as people who have made no effort to join our party and do not share the party’s goals involve themselves in the process.

Republicans should be the ones deciding who the Republican candidates are. Democrats should do the same for theirs. Legal or not, it’s just not honorable, it’s just not ethical to get in there and mix up the results of their primary to produce a candidate we like. Bob McDonnell is a better candidate than any of theirs and I’m confident in his ability to get that truth across to the voters in the Commonwealth over the next few months. I’m working to help that happen and that’s where the efforts of my fellow Republicans should be.