OPINION:
As a longtime conservative, I believe in building coalitions. We can’t agree on everything, and it doesn’t help the cause to concentrate on areas of disagreement.
That said, when someone throws a brick through a church window, it’s absurd to pretend that isn’t a serious breach.
A number of prominent self-styled conservatives have embraced the false premise that homosexuality is morally irrelevant or even something to be promoted through public policy. Some have gone so far as to demand that open homosexuality be imposed on our nation’s armed forces.
In short, they have adopted the left’s position that any resistance to incentivizing homosexuality is evidence of hate or bigotry or ignorance. Their reasoning does not run very deep and tends toward this: According to surveys, lots of young people now think it’s cool to be “gay,” so who are we to oppose it? Plus, I know some nice gay people.
Well, so do I. But I also know a lot of other folks with behavioral quirks that don’t rise to the level of an “unalienable right” given us by our Creator.
There’s no law against changing one’s mind, but honesty should impel these former conservatives to recast their affiliation if they abandon a paramount conservative value and embrace a paramount plank of the left. The conservative movement - and the nation - prospers when it honors all three vital legs of the stool: traditional values, lower taxes (less government) and national security. If I woke up one day and suddenly began agitating for higher taxes and bigger government, I wouldn’t be surprised if other conservatives saw that as a deal breaker. And if I joined a group advocating higher taxes, well, that would seal it.
This is no small disagreement. Conservatism, if it means anything, reflects the understanding that, as Russell Kirk said, “there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society … such convictions may take the form of belief in ’natural law’ or may assume some other expression; but with few exceptions conservatives recognize the need for enduring moral authority.”
In doing battle with liberals in the mid-20th century, Kirk noted that conservatives “uphold the principle of social continuity. … Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long and painful social experience, the results of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice.”
On a deeper level, conservatives such as Edmund Burke and America’s Founders understood instinctively that our rights come from God, not from an ever-evolving government, and that “to tamper experimentally with great states and human nature, out of a vague faith in Progress and Process, is infinitely perilous.”
The conservatives recruited to the gay cause cannot plausibly defend homosexual acts on grounds of health, biology, science, religion, individual well-being or societal benefit. They can only pretend that these things are irrelevant and ignore crucial distinctions. We are created either male or female, regardless of what’s going on in our brains. To elevate fantasy over biological reality is a pathology of the left, not something a conservative would buy into. We all have many desires, some healthy, some not. Desires in and of themselves do not validate behavior. Just ask Bill Clinton, John Edwards or Mark Foley.
Conservatives understand the organic nature of things, which is why they see hearth and home as the first defense against tyranny. Conversely, liberals attack hearth and home with ever-expanding sexual license. They disparage normalcy and marriage precisely because that advances their unholy scheme to replace God in our hearts with government as our Savior.
No actual conservative could embrace the campaign against normalcy. It’s been a staple of the left since the French Revolution. In the name of equality, all that was good and normal was thrown aside on the way to the brothels and guillotines. To be sure, there have been prominent people who have indulged in homosexuality and other sexual detours. But they had the good sense not to insist that everyone else bless it.
Scratch a socialist, and you will find a sexual revolutionary as well. In his 1884 essay “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Marx’s co-author, Friedrich Engels, railed against the “bourgeois family,” happily predicting its demise with the rise of socialism. He dismissed marriage as “the subjugation of one sex by another” and advocated collective child-rearing and “the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion.” He’d be right at home today, sitting on the board of GOProud or some other Trojan Horse of the left. Oh, he’d argue with them over economics, but on the central mission of GOProud, the Log Cabin Republicans or the Republican Unity Coalition - to destroy resistance within the GOP to the homosexual political agenda by declaring “neutrality” - he’d be right at home.
These groups should be officially de-recognized and their members welcomed as individual Republicans, period. To put it another way, the reason the organizers of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade excluded a “gay Irish” group was not because they didn’t like homosexuals. It was because the group’s underlying goal was not to celebrate Irish heritage. Its members could have done that just by marching as - Irishmen. Their goal was to steal the Irish mantle and attach it to the vice that did in Sodom and Gomorrah.
In any advanced nation, one of the major parties defends the moral order, which includes the sanctity of marriage, even for those who don’t believe God created it. Those attracted to that party realize that all else - property rights; free enterprise; the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion; and even the nation’s security - rest on morality and family. As sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin pointed out, Greece and Rome declined when their citizens preferred sensate pleasures. Lord Acton said essentially the same thing:
“By their disregard for private interests, and for the moral welfare and improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital elements on which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by the decay of families and the depopulation of the country.”
The liberal sex agenda is based on the falsehood that desires validate anything. They don’t. As Kirk summarized, this is a prideful trap made in hell:
“A man is afflicted by hubris, overweening presumption, if he tries to cast aside the wisdom of his ancestors and to create out of his tiny private stock of reason some brand-new structure of metaphysical doctrines.”
So, in the interest of honest labeling, may I suggest that conservatives who have no use for transcendent morality begin calling themselves something else?
Partial Conservatives? Bread-Alone Conservatives? Two-Legged-Stool Conservatives? (Better make that One-Legged for some Ron Paul supporters.)
Or how about just Former Conservatives?
Robert Knight is a senior writer for Coral Ridge Ministries and the co-author of the new book “Ten Truths About Socialism” (dangersofsocialism.com, 2010).
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