TIFTON — Approximately 100 people listened Saturday afternoon at the UGA Tifton Campus Conference Center as four of the seven Republican candidates for governor addressed issues and answered questions. The event was sponsored by the local Tea Party Patriots and Georgia Conservatives in Action.

Darrell Osborne, a founding member of the local Tea Party Patriots organization, said he wished people would understand the group is not oriented toward any political party.

“We are not affiliated with any political organization,” Osborne said. “We’re just like other Tea Parties around the nation.”

Osborne said the organization invited Democratic gubernatorial candidates to a similar forum earlier “but they didn’t respond.”

Those Republican gubernatorial candidates who participated in Saturday’s “round robin” included Eric Johnson, the president pro tempore of the state senate and a Savannah architect; Ray McBerry, president of Ray McBerry Enterprises, Inc., a company that produces radio and television commercials, primarily in the Atlanta area; John Oxendine, state insurance commissioner; and Austin Scott, state sepresentative from Tifton, also an independent insurance broker.

Johnson said he is pro-business, pro-family, pro-life and pro-guns and he believes the campaign for governor is about trust. He said that he believes in small government and free enterprise and that the state needs to comprehensively reform Georgia’s tax code. He also said he believes parents should have more control over their children’s education.

“Parents should have the right to chose where and how to educate their children,” Johnson said.

Johnson said he was a graduate of a public school and that he and his children, one now a lawyer and another a preacher, were also. He said he wants to be “the Zell Miller of education in Georgia.”

“I will be as controversial as he was with the HOPE scholarship,” Johnson said and he believes education could be improved by making it run like free enterprise.

McBerry said he believed there needed to be less federal government in people’s lives and stronger state’s rights. He said he believed in the 10th Amendment and in “reigning in an out-of-control government.” He described himself as a traditional conservative and a Christian with “appreciation for the Bible and the Constitution.” He said all of the nation’s problems didn’t begin with the election of President Barack Obama and Republicans as well as Democrats were to blame.

On taxes, McBerry said, “There’s no reason any American citizen should worry about losing their own home at the end of the year because they didn’t pay rent to the government.”

McBerry said if elected governor he would close all abortion clinics according to Georgia law. He said he was pro-gun and that he believed people had a right to bear arms. He said agents with the Federal Emergency Management Agency were wrong in trying to take guns away from law-abiding citizens in New Orleans after the storm.

“The first time a federal agent is caught doing that in my state, he’ll find himself in a Georgia jail waiting for someone to come and bail him out,” McBerry said.

Oxendine said he believed politicians have forgotten that they work for the people.

“Public service is just that, serving the people,” Oxendine said.