Girl-Boy Wrestling, pro and con

February 24, 2011 By 334 Comments

You’ve doubtless heard of the young man in Iowa who refused to wrestle a girl who was also competing in a championship wrestling tournament.  Here are two takes on the matter.

The first from Caryn Rivadeneira, writing at a Christianity Today site:

When Joel refused to wrestle Cassy, he took an opportunity away from her. An opportunity for her to shine using her own God-given strength and ability. An opportunity to win or lose, fair and square.

I don’t mean to harp on Joel. I’m sure he’s a good kid who clearly meant well. These thoughts aren’t so much for him as they are for the rest of us as we wrestle with these sorts of issues all the time.

As Christians, when faced with less-than-best-case scenarios, we need to be in the business of affording others equal opportunities. Usually this means expanding our view of other people beyond how our culture would have us see them or how we think they are and getting it more in line with how Jesus sees them. Doing this usually means things get awkward. Doing this means we’re stretched way beyond our comfort zone.

Doing this means we might need to step onto a mat and wrestle, not despite our faith but because of it.

via Her.meneutics: The Argument for Girl-Boy Wrestling.

The second from my colleague Mark Mitchell, writing at the Front Porch Republic:

The gentleman is a social role that implies a recognition of forms and limits that constrain action even as those very forms and limits elevate the meaning and nobility of actions they enjoin.

Forms and limits are not welcomed in a culture that sees freedom as the highest good, a culture that fairly worships at the altar of individual choice. The history of the liberal project has been a steady and determined attempt to defy limits, to destroy forms, to expand the idea and practice of liberation to all spheres of existence. How can the idea of the gentleman, the essence of which necessarily depends on the propriety of limits, co-exist with the goals of liberalism? One admits of limits and finds nobility in respect for them; the other finds limits offensive and seeks to break down any hint of limitation, form, or residue of difference. When seen in this light, the gentlemen appears to be a throwback to an older age, an era that progress has left behind, an ideal embraced only by romantics and the hopelessly and helplessly nostalgic.. . .

It seems to me that Joel Northrup was raised to be a gentleman, and when he drew his first opponent at the state tournament, this ideal ran hard into the leveling impulse of the age. Or to put it in old-fashioned terms, gentlemen don’t wrestle with ladies. Reversing the sentence provides another truism: ladies wouldn’t dream of wrestling with gentlemen or of wrestling with anyone for that matter. Now I am on thin ice here, for if I embrace the idea of a gentleman, I am simultaneously embracing the idea of a lady. Doing so must appear, through the caustic lens of liberation, to be suggesting that ladies and gentlemen are substantially different and that a gentleman treats other gentleman in ways markedly different from the way he treats ladies. Precisely.

Richard Weaver once wrote that when the gentleman disappears so too goes the lady. Both ideals depend on each other and a society that provides the space for each will be far different from a society where both are seen as quaint relics from another time. Still it is heartening to see a young man attempt to uphold the ideals of the gentleman. Perhaps that singular ideal can be sustained during our long sojourn through the wilderness of liberalism. If and when we emerge on the other side, it may provide a hopeful reminder of what is possible and how a decent society might be constructed around ideals that foster acts of nobility, deference, propriety, and kindness.

via Gentlemen Don’t Wrestle with Ladies

Notice not just what side both arguments come down on but the assumptions and the implicit philosophies that lie behind their arguments.  Notice too that both writers are “conservatives” of one stripe or the other.  Both are Christians of one stripe or the other.

Which one makes the better case?  What can we conclude from these two arguments beyond the specific issue of boy-girl wrestling?

Filed Under: Culture, Sports Tagged With: , , 334 Comments

Another conversation with my brother

December 3, 2010 By 104 Comments

In case you missed it on the George Bush & Aids post, my brother and I had another exchange, in the course of which I formulate what I consider a truly conservative economic ideology:

He says: OK. I (“Dr. Veith’s” younger brother who is still and always will be a Democrat) hereby give George Bush credit for saving millions of lives as a result of his AIDS initiative. Hey, that felt kind of good!

Now for you conservatives, isn’t it about time to give President Obama credit for the bailout of General Motors?

I say: Jimmy (my brother) @3: Thank you for that concession. That was all I wanted. But what you want from conservatives shows that liberals do not understand the many different ideologies that they lump together under that label. Most people on this blog, I daresay, are suspicious of BOTH big government AND big business.

We do believe in free markets. To return to your earlier illustration, if doctors and pharmaceutical companies and everyone else in the health care professions could not make a lot of money from their work, we soon would be back to what you decried in the primitive health care endured by Adam Smith back in 1776.

However, the really big companies hate free markets. They don’t want competition that brings prices down and increases supply. This is the lesson of Monopoly, at which I beat you so many times, the object of which is not prosperity and abundance for everybody, but one person putting everybody else out of business and getting–with the state-run socialist bank–ALL of everyone’s money.

And even worse for us crunchy-conservatives or front-porch conservatives or social conservatives or whatever you want to call us than big government and big business is when both of those behemoths combine together into something that so gargantuan that it crowds out everybody! This is why we don’t like Obama’s bailout of the big banks and his merger with General Motors. This is also why we don’t like Obama’s health care system, which is a marriage of big government with the big insurance companies.

Then he says:

To my big brother,”Dr. Veith”. Thanks for reminding me how often you beat me at Monopoly.

I agree with much of what you said in your comments at #26. I agree that the individual can be harmed by both BIG government and BIG business. My question for you is how can we check the powers of BIG business?

Historically, it has been done in two ways, with unions and government. With the decline of unions, government is the principal way we can check the powers of big business. When conservatives reject any government role in a “free market system” as a mater of ideology, they are left with nothing to check the powers of big business.

I don’t think that a corporation should be allowed to make money any way it pleases. Corporations are fictional “persons” created under the law. Corporations exist to serve the people, we do not exist to serve the corporation. It is perfectly appropriate that the government that created corporations can and should regulate its activites. For example, the government should prohibit companies from selling dangerous products to the public, and should protect the safety of the company employees. I acknowledge that rules and regulations imposed by government on business can be too burdensome and heavy handed. So the rules and regulations imposed by government should be smart and pragmatic. But I think it is insane to reject the role of government in a modern free market economy on purely ideological grounds.

This is why I support Obama’s health care, because I think it is perfectly appropriate for government to prohibit insurance companies from denying people coverage for a pre-existing condition. Allowing insurance companies to only insure healthy people is a business model that does not benefit the public and is not sustainable in the long run.

Now I don’t want to start another debate on the wisdom or lack of wisdom of Obama’s health care. Time will tell. My point is that we should not reject the power of government to regulate the health care insurance industry as a matter of principal.

Does this make me a soci@list? I don’t think so.

I repost these exchanges because my brother is actually very perceptive, liberal though he is, and because they demonstrate the lesson I have been trying to impose on you all, that it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, to remain one big happy family through it all, and that it is possible to use discussions consisting of different opinions to come to actual insights.

Anyway, who is with me in this suspicion of big government and big business and, especially, their marriage with their hideous spawn?

And can anyone answer Jimmy?  What can limit both big government and big business?

Filed Under: Economics, Government, Personal Tagged With: , , , , 104 Comments

Legitimate government controls?

November 9, 2010 By 34 Comments

George Will, in a column analyzing the election as a repudiation of liberalism, includes an interesting quotation:

George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.

“These ideas,” Boudreaux says, “are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else’s contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments.” Liberalism’s ideas are “about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of ‘Big Ideas’ that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people.”

via George F. Will – A recoil against liberalism.

And yet, aren’t conservatives accused of much the same thing, wanting to control people’s social relations and moral sentiments, replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas?

Is the only difference that liberals want to control everyone, except when it comes to sex, while conservatives want everyone to be free, except when it comes to sex? That, I’m sure, is an overstatement. But how would you state it?

Libertarians don’t want to control anything, and yet, arguably, preventing people from controlling you will take substantial state power.

Could we agree that there are certain social goods that the government does need to promote? Like what? Whereas other areas of human life need to be unregulated? Like what?

Filed Under: Government, Politics Tagged With: , 34 Comments

Non-political spheres

October 26, 2010 By 46 Comments

R. R. Reno, in the context of another interesting discussion of the Juan Williams debacle, raises a point that conservatives need to remember:  Conservatives believe that some spheres need to be outside government interference, and thus not political.  (Unlike current leftist ideologies.)  Conservatives, therefore,  must be careful not to politicize those spheres themselves:

First, as I point out, the tendency to task everything to the political purpose of the moment is not good for the nation, because it has the tendency of perverting the non-political missions of important institutions, e.g., education, news-gathering, art museums, and so forth. Unfortunately, the Left has theorized culture in such a way as to make everything into politics, which eases their consciences as they politicize non-political institutions. What worries me is that conservatives in America assume that they must do the same.

The second thought follows directly. The struggle for political power is important. There are civic goods at stake in American politics: questions of fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, appropriate regulatory controls and social welfare policies, as well as the always important question of whether our laws are in accord with moral truths. But it is very important that conservatives not become counter-revolutionaries who have an essentially Bolshevik mentality oriented toward supposedly conservative ends.

One of the signal principles of true conservatism is that there exist personal and cultural spheres of life that are not the proper domain of government power. Therefore, no true conservative should use these spheres—family, education, art, and most importantly of all religious life—as mere instruments in the struggle for political power.

via More on Juan Williams » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

Someone might reply, yes, but since the left HAS politicized the family, education, art, and religion (hang out at a big university if you doubt that; browse the academic journals) undoing that influence will have a political shape.  Still, this is a good point, isn’t it?

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , 46 Comments

The Tea Party insurgency

September 20, 2010 By 94 Comments

Peggy Noonan, no fan of Sarah Palin,  nevertheless sees something happening here with the Tea Parties:

The past few years, a lot of people in politics have wondered about the possibility of a third party. Would it be possible to organize one? While they were wondering, a virtual third party was being born. And nobody organized it.

Here is Jonathan Rauch in National Journal on the tea party’s innovative, broad-based network: “In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists,” there is no chain of command, no hierarchy. Individuals “move the movement.” Popular issues gain traction and are emphasized, unpopular ones die. “In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on such a large scale.”

Here are pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in the Washington Examiner: “The Tea Party has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in American political history.” “It is as popular as both the Democratic and Republican parties.” “Over half of the electorate now say they favor the Tea Party movement, around 35 percent say they support the movement, 20 to 25 percent self-identify as members of the movement.”

So far, the tea party is not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it. This was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when GOP operatives dismissed tea party-backed Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. The Republican establishment is “the reason we even have the Tea Party movement,” shot back columnist and tea party enthusiast Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News. It was the Bush administration that “ran up deficits” and gave us “open borders” and “Medicare Part D and busted budgets.”

Everyone has an explanation for the tea party that is actually not an explanation but a description. They’re “angry.” They’re “antiestablishment,” “populist,” “anti-elite.” All to varying degrees true. But as a network television executive said this week, “They should be fed up. Our institutions have failed.”

via Peggy Noonan: Why It’s Time for the Tea Party – WSJ.com.

From the Left, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg sees the Tea Partiers as doing what the New Left tried to do.  From The Right’s New Left :

What’s new and most distinctive about the Tea Party is its streak of anarchism—its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent style of self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns. In this sense, you might think of the Tea Party as the Right’s version of the 1960s New Left. It’s an unorganized and unorganizable community of people coming together to assert their individualism and subvert the established order.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , 94 Comments

Three varieties of conservatism

August 23, 2010 By 236 Comments

Here are three different political ideologies that go by the name of “conservatism.”  The definitions and descriptions are taken from the first paragraph of their Wikipedia entries.  (You might want to read the rest of the entries.)  Which is better?  And how can advocates of these three possibly work together?

Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleo or paleocon when the context is clear) is a term for an anti-communist and anti-imperialist political philosophy in the United States stressing tradition, civil society and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity.  Chilton Williamson, Jr. describes paleoconservatism as “the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal.”  Paleoconservatism is not expressed as an ideology and its adherents do not necessarily subscribe to any one party line.

via Paleoconservatism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States of America, and which supports using modern American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries.[1][2][3] Consequently the term is chiefly applicable to certain Americans and their strong supporters. In economics, unlike paleoconservatives and libertarians, neoconservatives are generally comfortable with a welfare state; and, while rhetorically supportive of free markets, they are willing to interfere for overriding social purposes.

via Neoconservatism

Libertarianism is advocacy for individual liberty[1] with libertarians generally sharing a distinct regard for individual freedom of thought and action, as well as a strong suspicion of coercive authority, such as that of government. However, there are also broad areas of disagreement among libertarians. Broad distinctions such as left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism have been identified. Additionally, some distinguish between minarchist and varying anarchist views (such as the libertarian socialist and anarcho-capitalist views) of libertarianism.

via Libertarian

HT:  A comment from Cincinnatus gave me the idea for this

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , 236 Comments

Britain shrinks government

August 20, 2010 By 48 Comments

As our government is trying to be more “European” in asserting government control over the economy, Europe is going in the other direction.  Earlier, we looked at what Germany has done to prosper economically while the United States flounders.  Now Great Britain, in a coalition government of conservatives and moderates, is launching on a great experiment to shrink government and empower individuals.  From The Washington Post:

The Obama administration might be reasserting the government’s place in American life. But on this side of the Atlantic, the so-called Big Society vision of Britain’s new Conservative prime minister is of a nation with minimal state interference.

David Cameron’s 100-day-old ruling coalition is launching an effort to reduce the role of government, seeking to vest communities and individuals with fresh powers and peddling a new era of volunteerism to replace the state in running museums, parks and other public facilities. Supporters and opponents describe the campaign as the biggest assault on government here since the wave of privatizations by Conservative firebrand Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

The idea, one with distant echoes of the “tea party” movement in the United States, is to pluck decision making out of the hands of bureaucrats. Groups of like-minded parents and teachers, for instance, are being invited to open their own taxpayer-funded schools. The groups — not government school boards — will be able to determine the curriculum at these “free schools,” using their own discretion to make some subjects compulsory while omitting others they find objectionable or unnecessary, such as lessons on multiculturalism.

But the government’s push is also about pinching pennies in an age of austerity in Britain, which, like many nations including the United States, is heavily indebted and increasingly broke. Through the toughest budget cuts in generations, the new coalition is moving quickly to shrink the size of the state, with some estimates indicating as many as 600,000 public-sector job losses — or one in 10 — by 2015. At the same time, Cameron is backing legislation that would allow communities to take over, for instance, post office branches, staffing them with volunteers instead of paid workers.

“The Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in their workplace, don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face,” Cameron said last month in a keynote speech on the issue.

In what it calls a “radical extension of direct democracy,” the new government is moving to give citizens the right to veto property-tax increases above certain limits. In an effort to hold the public sector more accountable, it is also pressing forward with plans to have communities directly elect police commissioners while forcing the publication of more-detailed crime statistics to give residents a better picture of how local forces are doing.

The new coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is set to present legislation to dissolve the government health boards that once determined needs at public hospitals, which would allow doctors to become the ultimate deciders.

via Britain’s David Cameron seeks smaller government, more citizen involvement.

Filed Under: Economics, Government, International Tagged With: , , , 48 Comments

Christian right vs. tea partiers

June 24, 2010 By 436 Comments

E. J. Dionne sees conservatism reverting back to its old anti-government, extremism, and conspiracy theory days while abandoning its more recent Christian versions:

Barack Obama’s campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency’s major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism.

The reaction to Obama has also radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories long buried and strains of thinking similar to those espoused by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the 1950s and ’60s. . . .

What’s remarkable is the extent to which the Tea Party movement has displaced the religious right as the dominant voice of conservative militancy. The religious conservatives have not disappeared, and Sarah Palin, a Tea Party hero, does share their views on abortion and gay marriage. But these issues have been overshadowed by the broader anti-government themes pushed by the New Old Right, and the “compassionate conservatism” that inspires parts of the Christian political movement has no place in the right’s current order of battle.

Thus has Obama brought back to life a venerable if disturbing style of conservative thinking. In the short run, the new movement’s energy threatens him. In the long run, its extremism may be his salvation.

via E.J. Dionne Jr. – How Obama changed the right.

I appreciate a prominent liberal commentator not lumping Christian activists in with all the others and not demonizing the Christians for a change.  But do you think his analysis holds up?

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , 436 Comments

A conversation about the Hutaree

April 7, 2010 By 98 Comments

It was tODD, who is politically more liberal than most denizens of this blog (though arguably more theologically conservative than most denizens of this blog, Wisconsin Synod Lutheran that he is), who urged me to post something about the Hutaree (above). That started an e-mail conversation that I thought was worth posting in itself. Here are excerpts, arranged in dramatic form:

tODD: This story (also) has everything for conservatives! Christianity! Eschatology! And a strong belief in a limited federal government and the Bill of Rights (or at least some parts thereof). . . .

Okay, so maybe I’m tweaking you a bit, but I do wonder. You seem to enjoy posting articles about liberal ideology gone wrong. How do you feel when you read this article? After all, these people do have vigorous conservative beliefs. Obviously, we both believe that these people are wrong, though. But how do the Hutarees’ beliefs and actions relate to the modern right-wing/conservative/Republican/tea party movement? Can the latter completely wash its hands of the former? And
if so, do left-wingers/liberals/Democrats get the same pass?

Also, does it feel to you like we get more of these stories — or possibly more action from this type of people — when Democrats are in power? I’m reminded of Waco and Timothy McVeigh. I realize that
anti-government militia types are not only anti-Democrat-run-government, but I wonder if they’re more emboldened (or frightened) by the strong talk of socialism/treason/whatever from seemingly legitimate right-wing sources these days.

But if you don’t like that angle, there is always this irony: “Each of the suspects is being held without bond and they have all requested a public defender.” Ah, nothing like depending on the same government you were allegedly planning on attacking.

ME: I’m trying to figure out, though, in what sense are these people conservative? I know the unbiased media is characterizing them as such, and associating them as you do with the “tea party” protesters.

But just as I question this cult’s Christianity (doing battle with the anti-Christ? killing the children of police officers?), I question their conservatism (killing policemen? Uh, conservatives are the ones with “support your local police” bumper stickers. Do battle against America? Conservatives are the ones who are always patriotically wanting to fight for–not against– their country). And do you really think they are Republicans? Didn’t they get started to fight a Republican administration?

When I was in college, back in the 1970′s, before I became a born again conservative, I hung out with leftists of every description. There was talk of “offing the pigs” and of rising up against the government all the time. I don’t know any of that crew who got prosecuted. The ones who come to mind are now lawyers.

tODD: Ooh, I kind of thought you’d sloughed this one off. Also, yes, I smiled when you wrote “unbiased media”, even though you may remember that my claim isn’t that the media is unbiased, but rather that it is not monolithically liberally biased. All media is ultimately biased towards ensuring its own existence (which, for the “mainstream media” is, of course, biased towards ensuring income streams, namely advertisers and readers). Anyhow.

Of course, asking “in what sense are these people conservative” is just another way of asking what “conservative” means — by no means an easy feat these days. Is conservatism an ideology rooted in a few basic principles, from which flow various applications and actions? I’m sure you’d like to think so — as would I. Or is conservatism any one or more actions taken from a checklist labeled “Conservative actions” by someone claiming to be conservative? That’s the impression I get these days from most people. It’s why people can’t tell the difference between conservatism, Republicanism, republicanism, etc. For most people, conservatism has lost its rooting in ideas.

By way of explanation from a common ground we share, you can see that the same thing has happened to Christianity. Is Christianity a core belief in Christ the Son of God, who died for our sins and was raised, etc., from which idea flow various applications and actions? Yes. But there are lots of “Christian” things out there for which that idea is alien. All you have to do to witness this is to walk into a “Christian” bookstore. “See, this music is Christian because it talks about ‘love’ and references an ill-defined ‘him’ or ‘you’.” “This exercise book is Christian because it contains Bible verses.” And so on.

So, in that sense, we agree that these militia people are not conservative — provided that you and I have in mind the same definitions for the ideology at the root of that philosophy. And I don’t know if we do, because I’m a little wishy-washy on it myself.

And yet, as I noted in my previous email, they appear — “on paper”, as it were — as checklist conservatives. Pro-2nd-Amendment? Check. Opposed to large federal government? Check. Use Christian language and symbolism? Check. I’m pretty certain that much would earn you a vote from several self-professed Tea Partiers.

And no, I don’t think these people are Republicans at all. I thought I made that clear, but I can’t see that I wrote anything about that now. No, these people would also attack a Republican-run federal government, as I understand it.

And yet, I feel you’re missing something here, when you say “Conservatives are the ones who are always patriotically wanting to fight for–not against– their country.” Well, most of the time. And yet I’m pretty certain most conservatives are also strongly in favor of the American Revolution, and see in it the expressing of their ideals. Revolution: Not exactly conservative, of course. And so we’re back to the question of what the word means. But I’m betting that most conservatives today would fight on the side of the Colonies if they were back in the day of King George III — and that means fighting against their country, doesn’t it?

I’m also worried that not a few “conservatives” see themselves in a similar situation today, and are considering whether or not it’s really “their country” anymore. After all, if King George went too far, and that resulted in armed revolution (to, it may be argued, restore the way things used to be), then what is to be done when conservatives (quote-unquote?) are arguing that Obama has gone too far, that things need to be restored? King George was accused of making the monarchy into tyranny. Is Obama accused of doing anything less with the republic?

And that was ultimately my question. When legitimate conservatives delegitimize the President and our government, when they accuse them of destroying democracy and instituting socialism, how much are they responsible for the nuts who take their arguments seriously, for taking them to their, perhaps, logical conclusion?

ME: [I don't have the exact words, but I came back with the point that it was the left that spent most of the last decade delegitimizing the President--claiming that Bush was not really the president because they rejected the Supreme Court's decision on the Florida recount--and claiming that he destroyed democracy, instituted a fascist state, etc. I also pointed out that this group existed before the Tea Party protests. I since learned from the Wikipedia article that they were founded in 2008. Thus, they were not influenced by today's conservative rhetoric, and the government they were originally planning to overthrow was that of said President Bush.]

Now you jump in.

Filed Under: Government, Politics, Religions, terrorism Tagged With: , 98 Comments

A conservative manifesto

February 19, 2010 By 126 Comments

A group of conservative leaders have issued a manifesto entitled  The Mount Vernon Statement, which attempts to define what political conservatism is all about.  Excerpts:

A Constitutional conservatism unites all conservatives through the natural fusion provided by American principles. It reminds economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership role in the world.

A Constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.

It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.

It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.

It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that
end.

It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

Is this adequate?

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , 126 Comments