I’ve been following the Sager–Ponnuru debate over the balance within today’s conservatism between social conservatives, big government conservatives and freedom-lovers. Latest installment here. I’m with Ryan, purely on the grounds that I think Bush conservatism has relied far too much on sectarian religious support and on expanding the power, reach and expense of the federal government. I don’t buy the notion that Newt Gingirch killed off small-government conservatism and so Bush has no choice. Gingrich is and was one of the least appealing figures in American politics. His tactics were crude and dumb. To abandon every small government principle because he screwed up a decade ago strikes me as silly defeatism. Ponnuru argues further that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies. (The massive exception is the anti-gay federal amendment, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.) Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office. The duplicitous, budget-busting Medicare entitlement alone should have caused an insurrection. It didn’t. I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.
A SINGLE MARRIAGE: I’ve written a lot – too much? – about marriage rights. But I have to say my views shifted deeply only once – when I actually attended a wedding. I wrote about it in my book, “Love Undetectable.” Watching a ceremony of commitment and love dissolves so much of the fear and panic that the subject in the abstract can conjure up. Here’s a similar tale. Money quote:
She was 80 years old, stoop-shouldered, her face weathered from life as a farmer’s wife in the San Luis Valley. She made her way down the aisle toward her grandson, a rosary in her trembling hands.
When she got to the altar, she nodded to the priest, who stepped aside as she turned to face the two young men who stood side-by-side in front of the church. In a soft, almost crumbling voice, she spoke.
“I was married to Jose Contreras on May 19, 1921, by a circuit priest. I remember how he took our hands and placed them together, like this … ” she said, turning to the young man on the right, her grandson, taking his hands and placing them into the other man’s open palms. “Then, he took this very rosary, and wrapped them around our wrists, saying a prayer in Latin, explaining that from this point on, we were bound to each other, that we were tied to each other in the eyes of God. We were standing in a field. There was no church nearby; there was no town hall for us to go to. We were married in the eyes of God. That’s all that counts.”
For the Pope, this act of faith and commitment is part of an “ideology of evil.” That is his tragedy. It is also the hierarchy’s. But one day, the church’s old leaders will see what this old lady saw, and enlarge the church rather than divide it.
The Dish 