Posted on 09/06/2006 9:13:55 AM PDT by Reagan Man
Rudolph Giuliani has repeatedly extended the hand of friendship to Christian conservatives in recent months. But a leading member of a think tank closely associated with the former Mayor has just delivered a powerful jab to the face of the same constituency.
Mr. Giuliani, long viewed with suspicion by the religious right because of his pro-choice, pro-civil-union positions, went so far as to campaign for former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed back in May. The move was widely seen as an attempt to curry favor with a voting bloc that will play a crucial role in electing the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008.
But last month, Heather Mac Donald—a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the organization that served as a semi-official brain trust to Mr. Giuliani during his time in Gracie Mansion—mounted a brazen frontal assault on the politics of piety. Moreover, she chose Pat Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative, as the unlikely platform from which to do so.
Ms. Mac Donald is a heroine to many in the conservative movement, in part because of her robust attacks on everything from feminist ideology (“lunacy”) to The New York Times (“a national security threat”).
She is also, not incidentally, a self-described nonbeliever.
“Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it,” she wrote in the Aug. 28 issue of The American Conservative. “They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.”
The article ignited a firestorm that continues to sweep across conservative opinion journals and Web sites. Pundits including John Podhoretz, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg have, to varying extents, made their disagreement plain. Philosophy professor (and Opus Dei member) Michael Pakaluk has complained that Ms. Mac Donald’s “mockery of common religious sensibilities … is so unfeeling as to border on the inhuman.”
Asked about the timing of her article, Ms. Mac Donald suggested that her exasperation with the religiosity of present-day conservatism had simply reached a boiling point.
“I’ve just been impatient over the last six years,” she told The Observer. “I don’t remember anything like this current assumption that candidates should talk about their relationship with God. What is that supposed to tell citizens?”
There is no suggestion that the Manhattan Institute fellow is doing Mr. Giuliani’s bidding in making the controversial case for secular conservatism. On the contrary, Ms. Mac Donald’s argument is more likely to be met with consternation by allies of the former Mayor, for fear that it could dynamite the bridges to the religious right that they have been so assiduously trying to build.
Baruch College political-science professor Gerald De Maio, who teaches a course on religion and politics, believes that the debates about a Giuliani candidacy—and about the issues raised by Ms. Mac Donald’s article—are manifestations of the longstanding divide in the G.O.P. between social conservatives and libertarians.
The libertarian wing, he said, “is muted. They count for much less than they used to. In many ways, Gerald Ford was the last President to represent that tendency. Now, one of the questions is: Could Rudy Giuliani get the nomination as a social liberal? I can’t see how social conservatives in the heartland can back him.”
Ms. Mac Donald admiringly told The Observer that the former Mayor “never invoked God, but transformed this city in ways that couldn’t have been imagined.” But she insisted that her main concern wasn’t electoral politics. She was, she said, more interested in the need for “a sound philosophical basis for conservative argument.”
That may sound like a nebulous aim. But it is also an honorable one.
When the President names Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, uses a sly phrase like “wonder-working power” during a manifestly political occasion like a State of the Union address or invokes God in support of his decisions in Iraq, he seeks, at the minimum, to give his agenda a religious veneer.
The invocation of religion in support of political beliefs is, above all else, a dangerously effective tool for foreclosing debate, discouraging scrutiny and suggesting that one’s opponents lack moral fiber.
The battle of ideas should be fought with the weapons of reason and logic alone.
That is not an intrinsically liberal idea. There is much to support in Ms. Mac Donald’s contention that conservatism is strong enough to prosper without being propped up by the language of religious piety.
But as Mr. Giuliani already seems to have demonstrated by his actions, many conservatives will never see things that way.
That's the funniest thing I've heard all day.
That's a good point!
Hitler, Jews and gun control is largely nonsense. The defining law was the 1928 Law on Firearms and Ammunition, which required registration of of gun owners/purchasers, ammunition purchasers, and hunters. Annually. Ironically enacted in part to disarm militias such as the brownshirts. And I know, if the Jews, a massive 1.5% or so of the population had only taken up arms, Hitler wouldn't have risen to power. Most of the clowns spouting that line are either historically ignorant, or would be acknowledging that the Jews of Germany got what they deserved, rebelling against the government and all back in 1928. However individually, a firearm might well have been the difference between escape and death. By 1938 any German Jew able to flee had fled. Largely to other parts of Europe, North America and Palestine being closed to Jews. By the time of the 1938 law, gun ownership in Germany had been over for a decade.
You seem to be suggesting he's a savy politician, who can get elected. Not my favorite, but if he can make it through the primaries, I suspect he'll win. As I've noted to others dismay, I'll vote for him, even McCain, over anyone I see the Dems putting up. And your question, statement perhaps, about the lack of a "social conservative superman", is a good one. Where are they?
I'll bite.
Under --------?
It's very, very early, but no one is standing up.
No such thing as "pro-choice".....that's a liberal construct. It's PRO-ABORTION.
If pro-abortion, anti-gun, homosexual agenda liberals like you are the face of the Republican party......then I'll have nothing to do with it.
And with the Rudy types anywhere near the WH we can all forget about the Bill of Rights, and representative democracy.
The "Endless War Hopefuls" tooting the horn for Rudy would just skip the US Constitution, and all the other formailities inherent under the representative government in which we live. Rudy and The Hopefuls would let various Mideast stinkholes decide for us who our president should be, and whether unborn babies should live or die.
Rudy is a liberal Democrat disguised as a Republican (he was, in fact, a Democrat before he ran for Mayor). Politics is not a masquerade. The goal of elections should be to diminish liberal influence on public life. Giuliani would surrender the public square to Democratic liberalism----to an agenda that is the antithesis of the ideals found in our Constitution.
Nobody obeys those gun laws you think so highly of except law abiding people who aren't a threat to anyone. The bad guys will always be ILLEGALLY armed no matter how many gun bans or other infringements of the Constitutionally guaranteed right to arms that people like you and Rudy would love to see enacted.
Any bystanders hurt in the free for all firefights in Times Sq. or on a city bus are just them breaks.
Absolute BS. That's the same kind of hysterical nonsense that I heard and read from the media whores every day of every week for months on end when Republican and a few moderate Democrat legislators in FL were trying to pass a concealed weapons permit law. It was totally baseless hysteria, and no such thing has happened yet in FL after 19 years of that law being in effect. The proven fact is that big city residents who can legally arm themselves and become trained and proficient with their weapons are usually less of a danger to bystanders who you claim to be worried about than many of the cops are. How many slugs did Rudy's cops pump into that black guy on his front steps who as it turned out wasn't even armed? IIRC it was something like 42 rounds. And that was just the rounds that struck the guy, no doubt there were that many or more cop slugs that ricocheted off pavement and buildings.
There are crowds on the streets and in buses in cities such as Philadelphia, Dallas, and Atlanta where any qualified law adult resident can get a CCW permit to legally carry a concealed firearm. AFAIK there have been NO accidental deaths or injuries from stray bullets fired by law abiding citizens in the streets or buses of any big city in the states that issue CCW permits to qualified private citizens. If there had been anything like that happening with any degree of frequency you can bet the farm that the MSM would be screaming about it from here to the ends of the earth.
Clinton was God's anointed?? Has your memory failed you or are you simply delusional?
Do you have ANY recollection of Clinton's goals, positions, and policies concerning social/moral issues? A woman's "right" to kill her babies for any reason or no reason was protected and honored as a prominent cornerstone of his administration. And have you have forgotten Monica and the adulterous shenanigans in the Oval Office, or do you think God approved of that abominable behavior?
The words God, anointed, and Clinton don't even belong in the same sentence.
Solid observation my friend.
Nice post.
Good bye - we will miss your open mind and your hollow skull.
I don't think so highly of gun laws. I think Democrats use the gun fears to go off the deep end in one direction just as gun rights fanatics often go in the opposite direction.
The issue here is what is the proper attitude for a big, hell, huge, city mayor.
And that attitude is that he/she doesn't want every a**hole to have access to the gun(s) of their choice. From that proper response, common to mayors nationwide, anti Giuliani propagandists are claiming that he would come after everyone's guns nationwide.
It's pure BS that every bad guy can get a gun and where a mayor gets an anti gun reputation is when he attempts to make sure every bad guy can't get a gun. The issue is that real bad guys may seek and procure a weapon but there are plenty of unstable people who would not be going out of their way to seek guns but if it were readily available they would and could cause havoc.
To all but absolute fanatics, the idea of getting on a NYC subway imagining that everyone may be armed is frightening.
Let me ask you where do you put limits? Can 18 year old plus students take guns to school? Ok to bring them on a plane? If a plane no why a bus yes? Ok to bring one to a Court House? Ball park?
Is the right absolute? Once you concede that it is not, and you must concede that, then some regulation of what and who is proper.
You concede in those cities you hold up as examples that the right is not absolute, you need a license.
You obviously missed the sarcasm of my response.
We are discussion a nominee and above you implied that the nation's security is insignificant regarding who is the President because security of the US is in the hands of God.
Considering that the President does have some say in our security- think Jimmy Carter- then the elected must be one God chooses, not us mere voters.
I've seen that attitude here before. Hallelujahs expressed for God choosing Bush. I just want to remind people that on that criteria God also choose Clinton.
This newspaper is another media fraud... Has Julie-Annie actually declared candidacy? No...
Has anyone declared a candidacy? No...
Of course.
They have fantasies that some citizens with guns can hold off a Government's power.
The Koresh cult had guns, as one example. The Government barbecued them.
Morality and all of those associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition that some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.
That is the gaping hole in the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
The so-called "Objectivists" have erected a cult around the dead body of Ayn Rand like the Communists kept and groomed their idol of Lenin's corpse...
Donald Rumsfeld...
Are you suggesting that I cease to be a U.S. Citizen when I enter any liberal big city?
"A covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void." (Thomas Hobbes)
"The right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished." (Thomas Hobbes)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.