Conservatism

This morning, I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR, wherein Toby Marie Walker, lead facilitator for the Waco Tea Party was debating Bryan Fischer, the head of the American Family Association about the direction of the Tea Party movement. While I'm not a Tea Party proponent by most measures, I can sympathize with their stated goals of smaller, less intrusive government and tax reform. Listening to Bryan Fischer, however, prooved to be an aggravating task.

During the piece, Fiscer repeatedly asserted that you can't be a true conservative without being a "Social Conservative."

According to Fiscer, his definition of "Social Conservatism was the adherence to the social values held by the dealers of the constitution, resistance of the homosexual 'agenda', and a pro-life stance.

Personally, I have a problem with that definition. For one, the social values held by the framers of the constitution were barbaric by today's standards. They had no issue with owning slaves, with cheating on their wives (sometimes with those slaves) and with rigging the system so that only wealthy landowners could vote, which in essence deprived the poor of any say in their own government.

Essentially, he is placing very flawed men on a pedestal and worshipping them. I will not argue that they were not great men, because they were. What they were not, however, were shining beacons of moral virtue to be emulated incorruptibly for all time. They operated with an eighteenth century perspective of the world, and that world is long past. To claim to hold their set of values exactly is to take all the decidedly bad with the good.

He goes on to assert that the framers of constitution espoused a right to life. While this was mentioned in the declaration of independence, it wasn't outlined at all in the constitution. In fact, your right to life has been proven to be an alienable right that can be redacted by the state. According to his logic, proponents of the death penalty can't be conservatives.

Granted, Fiscer was probably just referring to abortion rights. Ok, but where do you draw the line? Abortion? Contraception? Masturbation? Potential people is a tricky argument.

The AFA, of which he heads, doesn't really state this explicitly. However, in the FAQ of their site, they seem particularly concerned about 'pornography' in school. I don't know about you, but I was never exposed to pornographic materials in school. Unless you're possibly referring to the very clinical texts in my sex ed class that promoted the use of condoms?

Is this a subtle way of saying that anything other than abstinence only sex education is acceptable to true conservatives? Abstenance only sex education doesn't work.

Anti-abortion? Fine. But have a plan of what to do with those kids. Forcing women into poverty and children into orphanages makes his definition of Social Conservatism seem like yearning for Dicken's England.

And finally, let's address this 'Gay Agenda'. This is the one thing that sets me off, and not for the reasons one might think.

You can read the AFA's definition of the Gay Agenda here, but in a nutshell, it's as follows.

"From AFA’s perspective, we believe the core goal of the homosexual movement is to abolish the traditional, Judeo-Christian view of human sexuality, marriage and family. In that regard, the homosexual movement is the latest and most radical manifestation of the Sexual Revolution."

If you read further into the documentation on the site, their entire basis for objection to homosexuality is based on their particular interpretation of the Bible.

Let's forget for a moment that the word used to define homosexuality as a sin in the Bible is the same word used to describe the sin of eating shellfish. Let's forget for a moment that a large percentage of homosexuals in this country are, in fact, Christian and have little interest in eradicating Judeo-Christian marriages.

What we should look at here is that Mr. Fiscer is saying is that in order to be a true conservative, you must be a social conservative and to be a social conservative, you must be a Christian.

One should also take into account that marriage is a lelegal status granted by states, and is governed by law, regardless of how religions define it. After all, the defintion of marriage is not even consistent among various sects of Christanity, let alone from Christanity to other religions. (How many wives/concubines did Abraham have again? )

As a True Conservative, you are taking very real actions to enact your Christian beliefs into law, hence doing away with the separation of church and state, thereby correcting the mistakes of our Founding Fathers whose legal framework is inconvienant and inadequate, but whose antiquidated and comparatively backwards and biggoted social mores you still wish to enshrine and worship!

What?!?

This is what sends me into a tizzy! It's as if they haven't sat down and thought through their ideas and honed them into a coherent belief system!! They're at are at cross purposes, unless they're just giving some of them lip sevice in order to persuade others with emotional appeals, which would make them hypocrites.

Furthermore, it galls me that they assert that I can't be a real conservative without being a social conservative, and thereby being Christian as well.

And while I'm pretty much totally on board with financial conservatism, limited government, and the maximization of personal rights and responsibility, I'm forced to vote with Democrats because my moral conscious won't allow me to ally with 'Social Conservatism' that is really illogical bigotry in disguise.