We knew it would be coming, didn't we?I'm talking about blaming the Republican loss on the party being too conservative. There's already been plenty of stuff out there trashing Sarah Palin (though she was clearly the brightest and best thing about the whole campaign) and there's the usual harping from libertarians, neo-cons and other Monday morning quarterbacks about the party being "too indebted" to the religious right.
As if the G.O.P. had any other energetic, principled and numerically relevant voting bloc besides the religious right.
Well, here to hop on this dogpile is P.J. O'Rourke writing in the Weekly Standard. (Yep, the William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Terry Eastland et al Weekly Standard).
Sigh.
...In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.
The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.
If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani...
It's clear that if orthodox Catholics and orthodox evangelicals want to keep a piece of the Obama-era Republican Party, they are going to have to get tough now and not let the whimpering, hand-wringing, religion-is-fine-as-long-as-it-stays-in-the-sanctuary wing of the party wrest even more control of the reins.
