Free Republic

With its managing editor endorsing same-sex marriage, will National Review join the ranks of the Church's persecutors? For decades, National Review has performed a hygienic function on the right, defining the bounds of respectable conservatism, marking it off from unreasoned, bigoted or conspiratorial worldviews. It acted as a virus check, targeting ideas which in fact were Trojan horses for dangerous radicalism — whether racial, religious or ideological. On several occasions, that magazine used its power for good, excluding from its pages apologists for ultra-nationalism, eugenics, racism, anti-Semitism and paranoid anti-government hysteria. For many of us, National Review is indispensable...