OPINION:
Many conservative organizations have chosen to boycott this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but Veterans in Defense of Liberty will be there in force. Our group is going to CPAC to fulfill our sworn and solemn oath to “defend and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” Unfortunately, the nation’s pre-eminent grass-roots conservative gathering has become a showcase for the enemies of the American tradition.
The American Conservative Union’s (ACU) board of directors, led by Grover Norquist, Suhail Khan and until he stepped down yesterday, David Keene, seems to have forgotten the constitutional grounding of American society. The board continues to espouse the ACU’s founding conservative ideals of economic growth through smaller government, reduced taxation and lower government spending but has disconnected them from the funda- mental issues of liberty and the personal responsibility upon which that liberty rests. It likewise ignores the ACU’s original principles of traditional religious values and national security based on peace through strength. In truth, without the traditional social foundation, the economic principles from which it is derived cannot survive.
The ACU has landed solidly behind the radical homosexual agenda. Veterans in Defense of Liberty does not oppose people who are homosexual, although we do object to their behavior. However, we forthrightly oppose the policy prescriptions expressed by GOProud. We recognize the truth in the words of John Adams in his address to the military in 1798: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” GOProud intends to be that whale. Adams continued, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” When traditional morals fade away, the Constitution is sure to follow.
Mr. Norquist serves on the GOProud advisory board and also has advocated legalization of drugs, open borders and amnesty for illegals; supported closing the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay; opposed aspects of the USA Patriot Act; and supports the construction of the Ground Zero Mosque. He is actively promoting the Obama administration’s “engagement plan” with Islam, which has the Muslim Brotherhood’s seal of approval. He certainly has a right to hold those views, but it is false advertising to call them conservative.
The homosexual agenda of GOProud parallels that of other homosexual ideology, militantly demanding social approval and that homosexual principles assume the same moral high ground as heterosexual ideals. GOProud members use the Saul Alinsky-like strategy of seeking to subvert traditional morals: marginalization of their enemy and destruction of the traditional family. They favor repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment and seek to brainwash America’s youth through the school system by inserting favorable references to homosexuality in the curriculum as early as kindergarten. Religiously based moral objections to this approach are swept aside in the name of “separation of church and state.”
Church and family are the basis of the traditional values upon which our Constitution rests. Church and family have been the bedrock of American exceptionalism. Twentieth-century Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who inspired a generation of radicals, taught that leftist revolution is only possible if these hallowed institutions are first marginalized and then defeated. Any organization that works actively to undermine faith and family cannot by rights claim to be conservative.
Because we former members of the military have sworn to defend the Constitution, we have but two choices: Surrender and abdicate the CPAC battlefield or refuse to be pushed to the sidelines, stay on the moral high ground, fortify our defensive perimeter, roll up our collective shirt sleeves and return the ACU and CPAC to their original foundations of liberty, personal responsibility, traditional values and national security.
It would violate our organization’s mission statement, several of our general orders and the basic instincts of our members to abdicate the field and allow irreparable harm to be done to the conservative movement. If we pulled out of CPAC it would create a vacuum that other organizations would attempt to fill, claiming to speak for America’s veterans but supporting policies that the vast majority of those veterans abhor.
Veterans in Defense of Liberty will not neglect our oath by putting our heads in the sand and pretending that this is not a serious constitutional matter. We will defend the turf hard won by so many of our brothers who came before. We call upon all conservative groups to demand the resignation of any ACU board member who does not understand, advocate and live by the traditional conservative principles enshrined in the Constitution and sanctified by the blood of those who died to keep America free. They should be replaced by constitutional conservatives who understand the principles that have made America a “shining city on a hill” and are willing to fight to ensure that the concepts of conservatism, capitalism and American exceptionalism do not become servants to those who would destroy them. We are up for the fight. Bring it on.
Scott Magill is the executive director of Veterans in Defense of Liberty.
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