| ||
|---|---|---|
76th Governor of Georgia 39th President of the United States Appointments Tenure Presidential campaigns Post-presidency
 | ||
Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Below is a list of his political positions, some of which he expressed during his presidency and others during his post-presidency.
Although Carter was personally opposed to abortion, he supported legalized abortion after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade , 410 US 113 (1973). [1] Early in his term as governor, Carter had strongly supported family planning programs including abortion to save the life of a woman, birth defects, or in other extreme circumstances. Years later, he had written the foreword to a book, Women in Need, that favored a woman's right to abortion. He had given private encouragement to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, Doe v. Bolton , filed against the state of Georgia to overturn its abortion laws. [2] As president, he did not support increased federal funding for abortion services. He was criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union for not doing enough to find alternatives. [3]
In a March 29, 2012, interview with Laura Ingraham, Carter expressed his wish to see the Democratic Party becoming more anti-abortion, allowing it only in the case of rape, incest or risk of maternal death. [4]
Carter is known for his strong opposition to the death penalty, which he expressed during his presidential campaigns. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Carter urged "prohibition of the death penalty". [5] He has continued to speak out against the death penalty in the U.S. and abroad. [6] In a letter to the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, Carter urged the governor to sign a bill to eliminate the death penalty and institute life in prison without parole instead. New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009. Carter wrote: "As you know, the United States is one of the few countries, along with nations such as Saudi Arabia, China, and Cuba, which still carry out the death penalty despite the ongoing tragedy of wrongful conviction and gross racial and class-based disparities that make impossible the fair implementation of this ultimate punishment." [7] In 2012, Carter wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times supporting passage of a state referendum which would have ended the death penalty. [8] Carter has also called for commutations of death sentences for many death-row inmates, including Brian K. Baldwin (executed in 1999), [9] Kenneth Foster (commuted in 2007) [10] [11] and Troy Davis (executed in 2011). [12]
In October 2000, Carter, a third-generation Southern Baptist, severed connections to the Southern Baptist Convention over its opposition to women as pastors. Carter took this action due to a doctrinal statement by the convention, adopted in June 2000, advocating for a literal interpretation of the Bible. This statement followed a position of the convention two years previously advocating the submission of wives to their husbands. Carter described the reason for his decision as due to: "an increasing inclination on the part of Southern Baptist Convention leaders to be more rigid on what is a Southern Baptist and exclusionary of accommodating those who differ from them." The New York Times called Carter's action "the highest-profile defection yet from the Southern Baptist Convention". [13]
On July 15, 2009, Carter wrote an opinion piece about equality for women in which he stated that he chooses equality for women over the dictates of the leadership of what has been a lifetime religious commitment. He said that the view that women are inferior is not confined to one faith, "nor, tragically does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple." [14] In 2014, he published A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. [15]
Carter has publicly expressed support for both a ban on assault weapons and for background checks of gun buyers. [16] In May 1994, Carter and former presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan wrote to the U.S. House of Representatives in support of banning "semi-automatic assault guns." [17] In a February 2013 appearance on Piers Morgan Tonight , Carter agreed that if the assault weapons ban did not pass, it would be mainly due to lobbying by the National Rifle Association and its pressure on "weak-kneed" politicians. [18]
Carter has stated that he supports same-sex marriage in civil ceremonies. [19] He said: "I believe Jesus would. I don't have any verse in scripture ... I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage, but that's just my own personal belief. I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don't see that gay marriage damages anyone else". [19] Evangelist Franklin Graham criticized the assertion as "absolutely wrong". [20] [21] In October 2014, Carter argued ahead of a Supreme Court ruling that legalization of same-sex marriage should be left up to the states and not mandated by federal law. [22]
Carter ignited debate in September 2009 when he stated: "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he is African-American". [23] Obama disagreed with Carter's assessment. On CNN, Obama stated, "Are there people out there who don't like me because of race? I'm sure there are... that's not the overriding issue here". [24]
In 2005, Carter criticized the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay, demanding that it be closed. [25] He stated that the next president should make the promise that the United States will "never again torture a prisoner." [26]
In 2013, Carter praised the Affordable Care Act (the major health care reform law put forward by President Obama), but criticized its implementation as "questionable at best". [27] In 2017, Carter predicted that the U.S. would eventually adopt a single-payer healthcare system. [28] [29]
Carter vigorously opposed the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC that struck down limits on campaign spending by corporations and unions, going so far as to saying that the U.S. is "no longer a functioning democracy" and now has a system of "unlimited political bribery". [30]
James Earl Carter Jr. is an American retired politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A Democrat, he previously served as a Georgia state senator from 1963 to 1967, and as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975.
Focus on the Family is a fundamentalist Protestant organization founded in 1977 in Southern California by James Dobson, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The group is one of a number of evangelical parachurch organizations that rose to prominence in the 1980s. As of the 2017 tax filing year, Focus on the Family declared itself to be a church, "primarily to protect the confidentiality of our donors." Traditionally, entities considered churches have been ones that have regular worship services and congregants.
James Clayton Dobson Jr. (born April 21, 1936) is an American evangelical Christian author, psychologist, and founder of Focus on the Family (FOTF), which he led from 1977 until 2010. In the 1980s he was ranked as one of the most influential spokesmen for conservative social positions in American public life. Although never an ordained minister, he was called "the nation's most influential evangelical leader" by The New York Times while Slate portrayed him as a successor to evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is a Christian denomination based in the United States. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination, and the largest Protestant and second-largest Christian denomination in the United States. The word Southern in "Southern Baptist Convention" stems from its having been organized in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, by white supremacist Baptists in the Southern United States who were supportive of enslaving Americans of African descent and split from the northern Baptists. During the 19th and most of the 20th century, the organization played a central role in the culture and ethics of the South, supporting racial segregation and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy; it denounced interracial marriage as an "abomination", citing the Bible. In 1995, the organization apologized for its initial history. Since the 1940s, the SBC has spread across the states, having member churches across the country and 41 affiliated state conventions, while keeping its original name.
The availability of legally recognized same-sex marriage in the United States expanded from one state (Massachusetts) in 2004 to all fifty states in 2015 through various court rulings, state legislation, and direct popular votes. States each have separate marriage laws, which must adhere to rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States that recognize marriage as a fundamental right guaranteed by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as first established in the 1967 landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia.
Lincoln Davenport Chafee is an American politician. He was mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, from 1993 to 1999, a United States Senator from 1999 to 2007, and the 74th Governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015. He was a member of the Democratic Party from 2013 to 2019; in June 2019, The Boston Globe reported that he had become a registered Libertarian, having previously been a Republican until September 2007 and an independent and then a Democrat in the interim.
The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is a small American, unaffiliated Primitive Baptist church in Topeka, Kansas, founded in 1955 by pastor Fred Phelps. Labeled a hate group, WBC is known for engaging in homophobic and anti-American pickets, as well as hate speech against atheists, Jews, Muslims, transgender people, and numerous Christian denominations. Their theology and practises have been rejected almost universally by Christian churches.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American retired politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Obama, a member of the Democratic Party, was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and previously worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering politics.
Richard Duane Warren is an American Southern Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author. He is the founder of Saddleback Church, an evangelical megachurch formerly affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention in Lake Forest, California.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in the United States are among the most socially, culturally, and legally permissive and advanced in the world, with public opinion and jurisprudence on the issue changing significantly since the late 1980s. In 1961, beginning with Illinois, states began to decriminalize same-sex sexual activity, and in 2003, through Lawrence v. Texas, all remaining laws against same-sex sexual activity were invalidated. In 2004, beginning with Massachusetts, states began to offer same-sex marriage, and in 2015, through Obergefell v. Hodges, all states were required to offer it. Additionally, in many states and municipalities, LGBT Americans are explicitly protected from discrimination in employment, housing, and access to public accommodations. Many LGBT rights in the United States have been established by the United States Supreme Court, which has invalidated a state law banning protected class recognition based upon homosexuality, struck down sodomy laws nationwide, struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, and prohibited employment discrimination against gay and transgender employees. American public opinion is overwhelmingly supportive of same-sex marriage. A 2022 Grinnell College National Poll found that 74% of Americans agree that same-sex marriage should be a guaranteed right while 13% disagree, with strong majorities among both Republicans and Democratic voters.
The Democrat Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Founded in 1828, it was predominantly built by Martin Van Buren, who assembled a wide cadre of politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party. Its main political rival has been the Republican Party since the 1850s. Like the Republicans, the Democratic Party at a state level has traditionally been a big tent of competing and often opposing ideologies. In recent times, both parties have homogenized greatly in their ideological views, with modern American liberalism — a variant of social liberalism — being the majority ideology in the party.
The political positions of Mitt Romney have been recorded from his 1994 U.S. senatorial campaign in Massachusetts, the 2002 gubernatorial election, during his 2003–2007 governorship, during his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, in his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, during his 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, and during his 2018 senatorial campaign in Utah. Some of these political positions have changed, while others have remained unchanged.
The Almanac of American Politics (2008) rated Barack Obama's overall social policies in 2006 as more conservative than 21% of the Senate, and more liberal than 77% of the Senate.
LGBT history in the United States spans the contributions and struggles of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, as well as the LGBT social movements they have built.
Steven Lee Anderson is an American preacher and founder of the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement. He is pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. He advocates for the death penalty for homosexuals, and prayed for the deaths of former U.S. president Barack Obama and Caitlyn Jenner. He produced a documentary titled Marching to Zion in which he "championed a wide range of antisemitic stereotypes", according to Matthew H. Brittingham of Emory University.
LGBTQ+ conservatism in the United States is a social and political ideology within the LGBTQ+ community that largely aligns with the American conservative movement. LGBTQ+ conservatism is generally more moderate on social issues than social conservatism, instead emphasizing values associated with fiscal conservatism, libertarian conservatism, and neoconservatism.
Black liberalism, also known as African-American liberalism, is a political and social philosophy within the United States of America's African-American community that aligns with primarily liberalism, most commonly associated with the Democratic Party. Modern liberalism is a core value of the Democratic Party, which has consistently received 85-95% of the African-American vote since the 1960s due to the support of the Civil Rights Movement by U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
The social policy of the Donald Trump administration was characterized as socially conservative.
Faithful Word Baptist Church is a New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church in Tempe, Arizona, that was founded by Steven Anderson. The church describes itself as "an old-fashioned, independent, fundamental, King James Bible-only, soul-winning Baptist church." Members of the church meet in an office space that is located inside a strip mall. Anderson established the church in December 2005 and remains its pastor.
