Posted on 03/02/2010 10:18:02 AM PST by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
...Yet, as is always the case with popular movements whose star is rising, there are always those who want to hitch their wagons and use the movement to promote their own, often contrary, agendas. Such is the case with the gaggle of partway-conservatives — Ron Paulians, social libertarians, third partyists of every stripe and color — trying to latch onto the conservative freight train. One of the effects of this in recent months has been the attempt by many to downplay or even eliminate the place of social conservatism in the conservative alliance. Driven by libertarian types, there seems to be a concerted effort from some quarters to push social conservatism, and social conservatives by extension, out of the conservative resurgence. The argument (flawed, by the way) is that social conservatism — with its opposition to radical social lunacies such as gay marriage and unhindered access to abortion — is as inimical to freedom as economic socialism is. Hence, social libertarians and other supporters of social radicalism are using the opportunity to try to hijack the Tea Parties, hijack the activism, and hijack the conservative movement....
(Excerpt) Read more at renewamerica.com ...
You can have the extreme of Europe, where families of with more than one child are a rare sight in many cases, or you can have the other extreme of families of 15 kids, much of whose care is subsidized by you and I.
You state succinctly the basic tenet of what John Paul II called "The Culture of Death" - i.e. that people are there to serve some reified abstraction like "the labor force."
The "labor force" and the economy in general is called into existence by and for human beings. It isn't some larger thing that has an existence above and outside that of people that people somehow serve.
As to "who will pay for them" - the answer for conservatives should be "their families." The only place for government in all of that is to help ensure that families can be formed and that they can enjoy safe streets and all of the civil rights (including the rights to self defense, property, and liberty) that their Creator endowed them with.
I would add that your question seems to assume that we have too many people already for some reified "work force." But that's simply not true. This smacks of 1970s "The Population Bomb" nonsense.
Throughout the developed world - Europe, Japan and the North America - the middle classes failed utterly to replace themselves the past 40 years or so. As these childless couples now approach retirement there are far too few youngsters to replace them. That's the real problem we face. There simply aren't enough responsible and educated young people to manage the developed world. It's most emphatically not that there are too many young people.
I object to the characterization of social conservatism as “screaming about Jesus.” It is derisive of people of faith, and it is a profoundly inaccurate way to represent the religious and moral nexus that energizes so many social conservatives. Jesus taught us to love our enemies, to seek peace whenever possible, to care for those unable to care for themselves, etc. That’s a good dynamic to have in a free society. It has the potential to smooth over many of the blemishes of any given political or economic system.
And the concern over the unborn is in logical continuity with those values. The same kind of people who will not trample you on Christmas morning at Wal-Mart are also very likely to not be thrilled with dissecting or sucking the brains out of babies. We should want more people like this, not stigmatize them as “religious screamers.”
As for the other social issues, again, they can all be seen in as a network of related and interdependent ideas. The rule of law is a manifestation of respect for the lives of other people, their freedom, their property, their general well-being. And to the extent illegal immigration is destructive of the rule of law, it diminishes respect for life itself.
Therefore, artificially compartmentalizing all these branches off the same tree will just kill the whole tree. If individuals have their pet issues, well and good. But those who are thought leaders need to realize the potential either for good or for harm that can be done by making enemies out of ideas that should all be friends.
Reagan regretted his role in the California no-fault divorce act of 1969. At the time he thought it was a way to minimize the acrimony and social harm of fault-based divorce. As a conservative, he matured, and came to see the greater harm of trivializing the marriage bond. That maturity came, not from changing of his fundamental principles, but from a naturally occurring increase in insight about the effect of policies meant to implement those principles. You can hardly hold the entire conservative movement null and void over its need to grow and learn.
Therefore, as has happened so often in the past, one of the great moral anchors of western civilization has been pronounced dead prematurely. Indeed, to believe Jesus, marrying and giving in marriage will continue until the end of time. That would be the natural outcome of the natural forces at work which foster procreative relationships. Those forces will work whether governments sanction them or not. However, that does not disobligate a government from protecting its people’s interests in the naturally occurring process of creating freshly minted citizens.
Therefore, I for one do not see the harm in a federal recognition of either the natural nuclear family or the right of children thus produced to not be killed in the womb.
It's nice that Ronaldus Magnus felt bad about it later, but the fact remains that the damage has been done. It should be noted that Ron was divorced. I'm not casting aspersions, Heaven forbid, because I don't have standing for that, but let's keep in mind that his views of marriage weren't exactly the strict biblical constructionist sort.
And as I recall, Reagan didn't really do much to advance the anti-Roe cause. It just wasn't much of an issue for him. I see Ronnie as an instinctive patriot. He loved America as a son loves his mother, quite unlike Obama, who actually despises America, I do not doubt. But that shouldn't blind us to the fact that he had apparently bought into a lot of questionable presumptions.
You can hardly hold the entire conservative movement null and void over its need to grow and learn.
I didn't mean to give that impression. I don't wish to nullify the conservative movement, far from it. I merely wish to point out the inconsistencies in some of its more popular assumptions. I would also like to see the movement (and I voted for Reagan in the primaries 1976, so I've been in it as long as I've been eligible to vote)change focus. We should work to ensure the collapse of the federal government, or at least the great bulk of it, with power devolving back to the States and localities.
As the Constitution originally required.
I think that we get focused on the federal level because that's where the power and money is. But we should instead be working to greatly limit federal power with a concommitant increase in State power, and then fighting our conservative battles statehouse by statehouse, where we'll win far more often than we'll lose.
We need to focus on bringing down the federal leviathan, which is a necessary prerequisite to taking back the country bit by bit. We need to do a sort of "countermarch through the institutions" as the liberals did in the 1960s. We can't do that so long as the feds control all aspects of our lives, and the liberals control the feds.
The failure to have replacement level populations is only a problem in which there is a large social safety net that must be paid for by a work force. Europe could exist for centuries with declining birth rates if it didn’t have a large welfare state hanging around its neck.
Small population growth is the number one sign that you are a modern, advancing state.
Why did people have large families in the past? For two reasons. One children died a lot. Having ten kids ensured that you would have five children reach adulthood. The other is that children were cheap labor. They paid for themselves by working on the farm (or earning money in a coal mine or something).
There were practical reasons for large families that simply do not exist now.
“As a conservative, he matured, and came to see the greater harm of trivializing the marriage bond.”
I guess it’s good for him that he did not come to that realization while married to Jane Wyman.
Okay, I agree with that as far as it goes. I think your rather naturalistic explanation ignores the fact that we do have a welfare state that must be paid for. It also ignores the fact that a modern economy is based on consumption (70% of the US economy is driven by consumer spending) and that it is precisely young people with families who are the big consumers. Old people are not. It's IMHO a big part of our current predicament - i.e. we're trying to address the recession with methods that worked when the baby boom was young and in their prime, and not when they're old and they're spending like old people.
The only fix for these problems will be to import young people. And that's what we've been doing. For us it will mean Hispanics. For Europe it means Muslims. I prefer the social ramifications that we have. God pity the sterile Europeans.
But if we "social conservatives" are animated by common biblical principles, then all we need to impel us to have multiple children is God's mandate to "be fruitful, multiply and fill the Earth".
Well, ironic that. But your point is well taken. There are things in life I would rather have done differently. But even more the shame if one does not use all of life as a never-ending opportunity to learn, especially when one’s decisions will affect millions of other lives.
For me, the problem is that the federal and state should not be treated as either/or solutions for the abortion problem. I agree that it is in a sense easier to save unborn lives one state at a time. Unfortunately, to do that, one has to adopt the life boat ethic. I get the pragmatic appeal that has, but it is a gross oversimplification of what can be done to ameliorate the problem. We are (mostly) all grownups. I see no reason why a sophisticated multifaceted strategy should not be employed that simultaneously attacks both the state and the federal expression of legal norms.
SCOTUS did unspeakable violence to the Constitutional order by federalizing the issue. I agree that we're all grownups, which is why we need to focus on the legality of the question.
I understand your point, and I will try not to belabor my point beyond measure, and we might well come to an agreement to disagree, but I still maintain the question of abortion can and should be approached as in part a federal question.
The federal Constitution via the 14th extends the protection of life to human persons, and therefore, without a universal framework for what constitutes a person, the state has an impossible task; it cannot reliably determine whether abortion is murder unless it knows that the object of the homicide is a person under the law. If the states may privately determine who is a person and who is not, where is the logical stopping point? Dred Scott is precisely the kind of case that shows why the federal Constitution, by design, should be involved in recognizing the legal limits of personhood.
Furthermore, please note that from a natural law point of view, it is not that we are ceding to the federal the power to define those limits in an arbitrary act of legal positivism, but rather that we are requiring the federal, a creature of our own creation, to recognize those pre-constitutional limits, and to hold the states to a nonrebuttable presumption that abortion is an act against a person protected under the federal Constitution.
For a more extensive argument in the same vein, see the following:
http://www.all.org/newsroom_judieblog.php?id=2781
If you'll note, the author said nothing about federal vs. state level power. Indeed, looking at his past posts at Renew America indicates that he's a supporter of federalism. The point he's making is philosophically oriented, not functional.
Operative phrase being "in Massachusetts." Meanwhile, in 30-35 other states more conservative than Massachusetts, we don't need candidates like Scott Brown to win.
That's why the author of the piece mentioned the four foundations of conservatism - one of which is social conservatism.
Nevertheless, social conservatism plays a large part in conservatism because social conservatism involves the affirmation of timeless moral principles that underlay the entire thought processes that led to the philosophy upon which our country was Founded. When Patrick Henry said,
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolators should be a nation of free men. It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom....no free government, or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
He was making a moral statement. He was speaking of the self-government that is necessary for truly free individuals to be able to enjoy liberty. Henry, at the same time, clearly evinces an understanding that there is a public role in restraining individual excesses that would be destructive to the inculcation of self-government and the true enjoyment of liberty. That's exactly what the author of this piece is getting at - he doesn't care what you do in the privacy of your own home when it truly is something done in the privacy of your own home. The problem is, abortion and gay marriage, to use the examples mentioned, are not private, "bedroom" issues. They are public issues, and as such, legitimately fall under the public purview.
Culture and civilisation are holistic, organic wholes. We can't arbitratrily divide "morals and values" from the rest of the culture, as you seem to want to do. A decline in one will lead to a decline in the rest - which is exactly what we've seen since the erosion of the moral structure of this country after the 1960s. Social conservatism, far from being the province of a bunch of fuddy-duddies who don't like the idea of people having sex, is a necessary component to the maintenance of our society, our culture, or civilisation, and our foundation of freedom as a whole.
“Social Conservatism” sounds like a term invented to imply reactionary radicalism — “a social conservative wants to go back to __________ (white majority culture, closeted gays, theocratic local laws, etc).
This is as silly as trying to argue that "fiscal conservatism" sounds like a term invented to justify _______________ (slaves as property, 8-year olds working in coal mines, restricting the vote to those above a certain wealth level, etc.)
Likewise, much of what a conservative wants to value and protect has very little to do with Federal Government if Federal Government was in its proper limited confines.
Perhaps, but as I noted above, the author doesn't specify federal vs. local involvement, since that is the not the point of his piece, but a look at his Renew America history strongly suggests that he is a supporter of federalism.
I guess another way to express my distinction is that while I believe there is a social aspect to conservatism , I think the hyphenated term is like Afro-American — a distinction meant to promote seperation rather than a distinction. I dislike the term neo-conservative, fiscal-conservative and libertarian-conservative as well.
They all tend to be first read as saying the person is a half-baked or diluted version of the whole.
Oh, okay, I see what you’re saying now. I would agree.
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