While flyering for the Clean My Ride campaign, our fellow interns ran into some people from the Republican Youth Majority. It's not a clone of Young America's Fascists...er, Foundation, but rather has three main positions: pro-choice, pro-environment, and fiscally conservative. Board members include some of moderate Republicanism's greatest hits: Pete Wilson, Bill Cohen, William Weld, and so on. 

What to make of this? The not-surprising part is that there is a group like this; many young people (and plenty of older ones) are sick of the litmus tests in politics, and young people(even with evangelical Republicans) are almost always to the left of their parties - though the Iraq War is a notable exception to this rule. The surprising part is their choice of issues. More in extended.

Being pro-choice really isn't as daring as perhaps RYM would want us to think. Whereas abortion is social issue #1 for Democrats, being pro-choice for a Republicans is probably more akin to being anti-civil union among Democrats, while being a pro-life Democrat is like a pro-gay marriage Republican (note the distinction between civil unions and marriage). After all, there is are one-and-a-half pro-choice candidates running for the Republican nomination (Giuliani and Romney, who gets the half for only being pro-choice on the inside), and they're not the only major members of the party who are pro-choice. On the Democratic side, yes, Harry Reid has become Senate Majority Leader, and NARAL swallowed hard to not raise too much of a fuss about Bob Casey, but in the vast majority of cases it is a deal-breaker.

More interestingly, though is being pro-environment yet fiscally conservative. To quote their website, "common-sense environmental policies that conserve natural resources and respect free-market economic principles must be adopted. A healthy planet is good for business, and good for the Republican Party." Of course, that's two sentences, leaving how exactly you pay for it. Balanced budgets should occur, but I'd like to hear what they'd cut. Schools? Health care? Weapons? Just asking...maybe I'll go to their weekly happy hour and find out.