Reprint: On Conservatism and Race

This didn't make the blog last year, but it should have, and so it will. This was originally posted as a Facebook note on July 14, 2009, in the wake of the disastrous election of Audra Shay as YRNF Chair. A year later, living as I do in Senator Jake Knotts district, it seems just as fresh today.
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OK, so I hate having to write this at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, but it is what it is. For a kid who grew up in a house with a Biblical worldview (and thus without so much as a hint of racism), this issue is nearly alien to me. Yet I am confronted with it, and find I need to write it out.

Within the past two months, we have witnessed a meltdown within the Republican Party on the issue of race. I have multiple friends and acquaintances who have made unfortunate Facebook comments that have found their way into the media. Always there was some underlying excuse – look at the political climate, or there was some other subcontext for the comments, whether the left’s hateful treatment of Sarah Palin, the Obama Administration’s policies on spending and taxes, those on the evolution side of the creation debate, or Walmart’s decision to unionize. Whatever excuses are made, the underlying racial nature of the comments made remains inexcusable.

Folks, if we are going to reclaim the mantle of leadership in this nation, there is no room for this sort of behavior. “Conservative” does not refer to bringing some sort of single-ethnicity rule, or the exclusion of those who look different from us; rather, it refers to “conserving” the intent of our Founding Fathers when they wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

All are created equal – by Almighty God, and given rights that we today still work to secure. Governments should, Conservatives believe, exist to protect those rights and our citizen’s lives – and do little else. Liberty flourishes when government power is constrained. Economies flourish when governments tax little and spend little and Liberty is allowed to grow. Free peoples prosper; enslaved peoples do not.

And yet I read this morning about the “permanence of racism in the American experience.” I’ve seen racism come from both sides of the American ideological divide, from the left-wing attacks on Michelle Malkin's Asian ethnicity, to the anti-Semitism found on the fringes of the right and left, to the unhinged remarks of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, to what J.C. Watts condemned as the “race-baiting poverty pimps,” to what President Bush termed the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to the Facebook comments so many of us have had to deal with in the last three months.

My friends, let this not remain. If we are to continue to build a civil society on the principles our Founders laid out – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rights from God, to all, protected by government – we must stop the ethnic divisiveness and hatred that plagues so much of the rest of our world.

The Apostle Paul makes plain in his epistles that the Christ-follower must have no place for racism or ethnic hatred. Those who in the past have abused Scripture to excuse racism miss the plain words of his letters to Galatia or Ephesus: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female: you are all one in Christ Jesus… One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and in you all.” Not divisiveness, unity. If indeed “Christ is in us, the hope of glory,” we have no room for divisions on such trivial matters as the place of our birth or the tone of our skin.

I hope that we Republicans will remember this and learn from the mistakes of the first half of this year. We cannot capture the attentions of the public, nor convince the public that we are deserving of a return to national leadership, if we cannot also get past the racism of yesteryear that has rightly and strongly been rejected by the vast majority of the American public. Our message of limited government, liberty, and personal responsibility cannot be heard if it is drowned out by controversy over who should be allowed to enjoy those blessings of liberty.

I hope you will join me in this endeavor; I hope that you will take these words to heart and to work in your own community; I hope that you will share this with others.

And I hope that God will richly bless each and every one of you as you seek to follow His heart and do His will.

On the Election Results

OK, so this was supposed to be a You-Tube style video... we even shot it (fireside, no less). Sadly, the new technology we were trying out has some glitches (like, the camera and the new laptop don't want to talk to each other...)

So, instead of a new web video you get... the transcript of a video that never will be seen. Go figure.

Enjoy anyways.

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Hello. My name is Joshua Gross. I live in Lexington, South Carolina.

I’m talking with you today to share my thoughts on this election and to call you to action as a result of what happened yesterday.

For the last eight years, President George W. Bush has led America through difficult times, fighting a two-front war in Asia, after the deadliest terrorist attack in our nation’s history and dealing with numerous natural disasters at home and abroad.

Unfortunately, those crises left our President without bargaining chips when it came to dealing with corrupt Washington politicians in Congress. When those politicians came asking for money, President Bush apparently felt he had no choice but to give in to those demands, for fear of losing support for an increasingly unpopular war, despite the successes that war faced on the ground.

As a direct result, the Bush years will be remembered for their bipartisan Washington corruption, and for the massive load of federal debt left behind in their wake. Our national debt now stands at ten trillion dollars. In budgetary terms, the federal government is now five times as large as it was when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980 on his message that the Government was too big and spent too much. The recent bipartisan Wall Street bailout alone was $100B larger than the entire 1980 federal budget.

Yesterday’s election results can rightly be judged as the repudiation of President Bush’s policies (and his willing Republican accomplices in Congress) in exchange for amorphous promises of “hope” and “change”.

Now our country faces the farthest left-wing Socialist government in our history – top to bottom, led by Obama, Reid and Pelosi. If you’re hoping that Harry Reid is the Voice of Reason among those three, you are indeed in very deep trouble.

We in the conservative movement need to realize that the Founding Fathers vision of liberty was not what voters repudiated yesterday – they rejected what they saw as a third Bush term – hardly a conservative notion. Exit polls tell us that voters saw Republicans as “having lost our way” or being inept in governance. Only 9% of Americans thought Republicans were “too conservative.”

So,what do we need to do as conservatives? We need to get back to the basics our Founding Fathers intended. We don’t need to be all things to all people – we need to be all things to the people in our conservative coalition. We need to be liberty-minded conservatives first and Republicans second. We need to realize that power for its own sake must never be the answer we seek; rather we seek to protect the rights and responsibilities of the individual free American to seek life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the manner that he or she sees fit.

In the past, our conservative coalition has stood on four legs of a stool. We must reaffirm our commitment to all four of those legs if we are to succeed.

We need to continue to stand up for life and for natural marriage. We need to stand against the corruption of higher taxes and Big Government Socialism while we stand for the dreams of individual liberty and responsibility embedded in our Constitution. We need to continue to stand for a strong military and against the threat of Islamist Sharia. And we need to provide for the basic needs of a nation, securing our borders and ensuring the rule of law. Over the next four years, we are going to have ample opportunity to fight each of these battles at every level of government.

We need to make these fights under a new generation of leaders at every level, from town councils to the U.S. Senate, in government and at the grassroots level of party politics.

We need new leaders in Congress who will stand up against the onslaught of Socialism over the next two years and lead under the banner of conservative vision.

We need new leaders in state legislatures – here in South Carolina and around the country – who will learn from the mistakes of Washington Republicans and stop the out of control government spending. This means making difficult and sometimes politically unpopular choices that the left will demagogue. Those choices must still be made, and must be explained in the larger framework of liberty and individual empowerment.

And we need new leaders at every level within our Party, from the precincts to the RNC. The conservative movement can retake our primacy within the structure of the Republican Party, but it will require focused effort on our part.

The character of this new generation of leaders will be forged in the fires of fierce opposition as we stand up for what is right. We will need to be reform minded – keeping in mind Lord Acton’s warning about the corruption of absolute power. And we will need to stand up for the values that unite us as conservatives.

I hope to be one of those leaders. And I hope that you will too. We have much work to be done, and many who will oppose us at every turn. I hope you will join us anyways.

May God Bless each of you, and may He bless the United States of America.

Why I'm a Conservative Republican

I have no idea who this is, but I endorse what he's saying - wholeheartedly.

William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925 - 2008)

Sad news today - William F. Buckley, one of the founders of modern conservatism has passed away today at the age of 82. Buckley will be remembered as the founder of the National Review, who report this morning that Mr. Buckley passed away in his study. Somehow appropriate.

Buckley will also be remembered as the host of Firing Line, as one of the most gifted writers American conservatism has ever produced, and as a one-time CIA spook turned author and societal commentator. He was a fervent anti-communist, a staunch supporter of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and one of the most formidable masters of English vocabulary.

He will, most certainly, be missed. Feel free to post your own tributes in comments.

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Michelle Malkin quotes Reagan at a Buckley/National Review tribute:

One final note: I think eventually the pundits and analysts are going to catch on to the enormous force and deep roots of the conservative movement. Some of them even seem to have finally realized that I actually am one and that I mean it. And when that happens, they are going to realize something not only about this journal, but about its founder and editor: that Bill Buckley is perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era — that he changed our country, indeed our century...

So, Bill, one last word to you. We thank you for your friendship. You are, of course, a great man. And so we thank you also for National Review, for setting loose so much good in the world. And, Bill — thanks, too, for all the fun.

God bless you.