It's not whether you legislate morality, it's whose morality do you legislate, says Republican presidential contender Gary Bauer, who attacks pornography and adult-oriented entertainment yet otherwise paints himself as a defender of Constitutional privacy rights. \nGARY BAUER - Attacking porn but defending privacy?
And the former Reagan Administration official isn't exactly considered a political shrinking violet. He's a strong if poor man's influence on the conservative side of the political field. His somewhat strong showing in last weekend's Iowa straw poll securing his position as a man with a following his party will at least have to meet, perhaps even accommodate, to win the White House back.
Bauer finished fourth behind Texas governor George W. Bush, Forbes publisher Steve Forbes, and former Transportation Secretary and Red Cross president Elizabeth Dole.
"Somebody's values are going to win," Bauer told a small group affiliated to the Rev. James Dobson's Focus on the Family television ministry. But will they be his? "We just have to have the confidence to get in the public square and say that our values will be best for the country."
And Bauer does not flinch on pornography or privacy issues, for that matter. He calls pornography an attack on women and children "that leads to harmful and violent behavior," as a position paper which he has excerpted on his World Wide Web site states it. "Our nation made great progress in fighting the illegal obscenity business under the Reagan-Bush Administration(s)," he continues, "but under the Clinton Administration not one new obscenity case has been opened." \nELIZABETH DOLE - No "electronic back doors" for porn.
The result, he says, is that the porn industry "is back," especially online, "and the worldwide sexual slave trade operates with increasing boldness." He calls for reopening "the obscenity prosecution operation" at the Justice Department and creating new sections within federal agencies "whose major task is to prosecute adult obscenity and the international sexual slave trade."
On the other hand, however, Bauer sounds almost libertarian when the question turns to general privacy rights. He accuses the Clinton Administration of promoting "numerous" measures intruding upon ordinary citizens' privacy. "Few if any Americans want their health records on the Internet," he says in his position papers, "or their bank records reviewed by bureaucrats or sold to businesses.
"I oppose government intrusions that assault the Constitution and violate individual rights."
Bauer's critics have scored this and other seeming contradictions in his planks. A New York Times analysis of the Bauer campaign suggests the head of the Family Research Council is determined to cast himself as more than a religious protest figure, when he's campaigning away from his social conservative core supporters.
He frequently casts himself as an unapologetic disciple of Ronald Reagan, the Times observes. He spends as much time attacking China for human rights abuses and unfair trade as he does insisting he'd never appoint a Supreme Court justice who supported abortion, the paper continues.
He also calls for lower taxes, more national defense spending - classic Reagan campaign stances - but he also strays well enough off the conservative reservation, even though he says placing fourth in Iowa last weekend solidifies him as a better-than-credible conservative presence in the Republican presidential chase.
The Times says outright that Bauer aims simultaneously to present himself as an independent thinker. He opposes Social Security privatizing, supports more federal intervention to insure family farm survival, and backs one part of the Democratic proposal to regulate managed health care, saying patients "in some instances" should have the right to sue HMOs.
But the question, the Times and other observers say, is whether Bauer's actual aim is just to stay in the GOP race long enough to guarantee front-runner George W. Bush and others staying the course "ha(ve) to answer to, and perhaps accommodate, the concerns of most conservative Republicans." The paper adds, however, that according to the candidate and his closest associates, he is in it to win it.
Meanwhile, among the other three top Republican contenders, only Dole has commented strongly and overtly on adult-oriented entertainment. She supports legislation mandating porn-blocking software on library and school computers subsidized with federal tax dollars.
"In today's world where the Internet and chat rooms have become second nature to second graders, parents need help," says a Dole position brief on her World Wide Web campaign site. "(W)e shouldn't let pornographers slip in through an electronic back door."
