C-PAC: The political right’s intelligence and competence problem manifests again (Part 3)

Earlier this week William McGurn’s column in the Wall Street Journal included this summary of two potential Republican candidates for president in disagreement:

“In a June profile by the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson, Indiana’s Republican governor declared that to get the country running again, ‘the next president would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues.’ …

Now it’s back in the news after another possible contender for the GOP presidential nomination, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, went on the attack.

‘[F]or him to say that those issues need to be put in the background, I just, I’m stunned by it,’ Mr. Santorum [said]. ‘Obviously, the economic issues are front and center. But you have to talk about the economic issues even in the cultural and moral context.'”

Many other conservative writers have taken Governor Daniels to task for his knuckleheaded statement. The phenomenon of hubris as mentioned in part 1 of this series comes to mind.

McGurn makes two very important points here:

“[T]he aggression on social issues today emanates mostly from the left, whose preferred vehicle is a willing judge inflicting his private social preferences on the law. Anyone who believes that a Republican call for a truce will end this is living in dreamland.”

McGurn’s column is worth reading in full, especially for paragraphs like this one (emphasis is mine):

“The sizable majority among Republican caucus-goers and primary voters is economic conservative, social-issue conservative and agrees with the tea party,” says pollster John McLaughlin, whose firm has surveyed both Republicans and tea partiers. ‘As for tea partiers, we found that they are both more pro-life and more frequent churchgoers than the electorate. Social issues may not be what gets people out to tea parties, but neither are social issues going to turn them off the GOP.'”

As this column has noted often, if a current or aspiring conservative leader is ignorant of, as Laurie Higgins of IFI calls it, radical immorality, he needs to get educated. If he is uncomfortable with discussing the necessary opposition to the “homosexual agenda,” he needs to grow up and get over it. The Founding Fathers were never afraid of discussing the absolute need for a virtuous society – including exactly what virtuous meant. Our current would-be leaders shouldn’t be afraid either.

I’ll close this part by quoting a post by Joe Carter on the First Things website titled “Guess Who Thinks We Should Legislate Morality?

“Anyone who has paid attention to the self-described lives of homosexual men must be struck by the mind-boggling promiscuity – in fact, by the acceptance of promiscuity, and even group sex, as a matter-of-course part of the homosexual life. Yet, as the argument goes, such promiscuity is not simply the result of the desires of homosexual men themselves.

It is also, it is said, the result of their inability to form legally binding marriages. If marriage were available to them … then that would not only recognize and reward those men who would have devoted their lives faithfully to one another in any case. It would encourage other men to do the same. It would restrain the promiscuity; it would change the world of the homosexual male.”

Joe Carter doubts that would be the result because, as he writes, “I don’t believe that the relations of male homosexuals are analogous to the relations of married men and women.” Carter continues:

“For people who make this argument assume, tacitly, that it would be a good thing if the relationships of male homosexuals were more permanent, and since they would not be more permanent if the men involved did not want them to be so, we must conclude that the goodness includes the desire, now made more frequent, of the men to form permanent relationships. In other words, the tacit assumption is not simply that a law permitting male-male pseudogamy would be just, but that it would make many of the men themselves more virtuous.

And that, dear readers, gives the game away.”