There is much debate these days about what to do with social issues. With liberalism in melt-down mode, many voices are calling for a muting of social issues in our political discourse. It is said that we have to concentrate on economic issues, at any rate, and why bring up those contentious social issues which may allow our liberal friends a new lease on life?
All of such thinking is just so much rot – social conservatism is conservatism; the economic stuff is just icing on the cake. What matters if taxes are low and spending is cut if our society is disintegrating in a riot of immorality? What soldier fights for easy access to pornography and a healthy stock market?
Dave Hartline covers this issue excellently over at The American Catholic in a genuine must-read article. The fact of the matter is that if we give up the fight for basic morality – for basic truth, that is – then we surrender the field to liberalism. Hartline points out that those Catholic dioceses which have fallen in to the liberal swamp on social issues are lacking any spirit – they are dying away, even as they appear on the surface to remain large and powerful. Meanwhile, those areas where orthodoxy reigns are surging in strength and growing by leaps and bounds.
Our arguments about government spending, taxes and national defense will be quiet academic if we surrender the field to liberal morality. We might triumph over the next few election cycles on merely economic grounds, but if we are not also firmly engaged in the defense of morality, we’ll find our economic victories to be fleeting, at best. At the end of the day, we’ll find we have an empty shell of conservatism – something which looks impressive on paper, but which is wasting away for lack of a back bone.
I’ve said before that the most crucial issue we face today is abortion. Second only to abortion is gay marriage. These two fights are for the bedrock of our civilization. If we do not respect life and if we do not defend the traditional family, then we have lost everything, even if we gain 6% in GDP. A nation owned by the Culture of Death and pretending that a gay couple is the same as a straight, married couple with children is a nation which is doomed, no matter what else happens.
The merest glance at Europe’s disintegration and increasingly violent and aggressive Islamization is all we need to convince ourselves that their path must not be ours – but their path will be ours if we follow European conservatism down the path of “me too” on social immorality. Conservatism over there ceased to defend family and traditional morality – concentrating on the allegedly more important bread and butter economic issues. Now Europe can’t even defend itself; whole areas of European cities have become no-go zones of Moslem domination…and while European gays can marry, the majority of children being born in some areas are to Moslem parents.
Man does not live by bread alone – we don’t live by tax rates and GDP growth statistics. In order to live – really live, as men and women – we need a firm foundation of truth in our lives. That is what conservatism arose to defend, and must defend or simply have no point, at all.
Blogs For Victory 