Constitutional claims

The framers of the U. S. Constitution were mindful of religious conservatives, both in Europe and the "New World"; and, not only strove to protect religious freedom, but to protect against imposing religious beliefs on others. Present Republican Party candidates have the responsibility to read the Constitution, rather than to just wave it. There is another value, besides freedom, and that is responsibility for the welfare of children, born, by their mothers; and, ideally, their supporting male spouses. I will single out the Catholic Bishops, in the ignominious male panel assembled recently in the U. S. House of Representatives, because in forgoing the joys of a wife and children, they also are relieved of the responsibility of raising the born children. They do not have the distressing responsibility of choosing between the avoidance of, or termination of, a pregnancy in relation to the responsibility of raising two or more born children, when, for a number of legitimate reasons, that would put an undue burden on the rest of the family. Of course, due to wealth and/or generous health insurance, the candidates don't have this concern. That courting like unencumbered voters might be sinful, is of little importance to them.

Thing is, the counstitution of the 'founding father' allowed slavery, and denied about 3/4 of the population at the time the right to vote (that includes women, non-propertied whites and all those 'other persons'). There's an internal contracition if there every was one--where is the natural law there, where are the inalienable rights endowed by 'our' creator. There's the falacy of all those 'founding father' constitutionalist--Rick,Newt, RonP, the Heritage foundation, cato insitute--all of them. Work that one out and you can understand that the beuaty of the constitution is that is could be changed. First the african-americans got the semblance of rights (well, it took over a century more, but nobody's perfect), then women, and finally things are pretty universal. But now, well, less than 100% of those eligible ever register to vote, and less than 50% of those registered actually vote... Go figure.

"Social Conservatism"??? The 1776 Declaration was based on John Locke's 2nd treatise of government. John Locke is widely known as the Father of Liberalism. John Locke wrote that " all men are created equal in the state of nature by God". Locke declared that under natural law, all people have the "right" to life, liberty, and estate (property); under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens. In some cases, Locke deemed revolution an obligation.

So, hat was considered "liberal" in the 17th and 18th century, is now "conservative".

"Social Conservatism"??? The 1776 Declaration was based on John Locke's 2nd treatise of government. John Locke is widely known as the Father of Liberalism. John Locke wrote that " all men are created equal in the state of nature by God". Locke declared that under natural law, all people have the "right" to life, liberty, and estate (property); under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens. In some cases, Locke deemed revolution an obligation.

So, hat was considered "liberal" in the 17th and 18th century, is now "conservative".

I grew up as a social conservative. Then I got older and I grew up and got past it. There are too many problems with how things are done in the real world by such conservatives and their ideas just don't work in the real world. The poor are supposed to ask churches to help them, but churches rarely help the poolr if they are not already members, which is essentially a cry that all the poor ought to be religious hypocrites to get a meal. I saw that in action in my home town. The only place the poor could get a meal insisted they first listen to a sermon. The only clothing banks and food banks catered only to their church membership. Everyone is supposed to be equal in a democracy, not just those who come from a well established and wealthy religion.

I still believe that everybody ought to have certain basic rights - more so than ever before. However most socially conservative politicians throw out these very 'sacred' and supposedly god given rights, at the drop of a hat...or the slightest hint of a social hysteria that can be used as an excuse to grab them away.

Most conservatives, when it comes down to it, are hypocritical when they are frightened. They talks about small government and sacred freedoms but produce huge government and destroy liberty. The US now has, from the most socially conservative presidency in 100 years, a huge glutted security state of secret bases, buildings of security analysts, and underground computer complexes...all dedicated to violating the bill of rights.

I strongly believe in the freedoms of the constitution of the UISA< and some others as well that were missed and have over the years been 'inferred' into the constitution buy the supreme court (expression, etc).

I also believe that governments, if organised properly, can do more good ... ensure prosperity and health and education for their people in ways that no loose social associations could ever do. The constitution was made for a country of a few tens of thousands not 350 million plus...written in a world where nobody even dreamed of the things modern medicine can do for people or of a globe with over 7 billion people on it.

The world has changed,. Our standards have risen. The USA doesn't even have guarantees to privacy (here in AUstralia where I now live there is a "Privacy Commission" to protect us from Big Brother and Little Brother prying, and no integrated cameras at every traffic stop, snagging your facial structure and feeding it into a computer network.

I think it is time for a new rebellion against the tyranny that has arisen in this era, and a new structure for government based on what people can do today with modern technology. We can do batter than we are, and better than what people could imagine over 100 years ago.

not a world

for th epeople than any number of loose assosiactions. Why built the I5 corridor on the west coast of the USA? Was it a private road? No, it was built and it maintained by the government by tax money and no person with any sanity believes that we ought to go back to the earlier days when all roads were privately owned.

The notion that the Constitution should be read in the light
of the Declaration (viewed as a statement of Natural Law) is
particularly associated with the Straussians, and even more
particularly with Harry Jaffa, who saw the American republic
as 'redeemed' through Lincoln's recognition that the republic
was not simply an amoral forum for conflicting interests but
rooted in some basic moral truth; only on that basis could
slavery be expunged from it. The debate between Jaffa and
more conventional (formalist or Madisonian) originalists has
raged fiercely over decades both in academic venues and in
popular ones like National Review. Here are a couple of recent
summaries:

http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/conservatives-declaration-o...
http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/conservatives-declaration-o...

and here a recap of the memorable debate between Jaffa and
Robert Bork in the pages of National Review:

http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2008/08/jaffa-v-graglia-bork.html

Hmmm..interesting analysis. Or it could be that America wound up with all the Puritans that got kicked out of Europe. As has been pointed out, the Puritans of England were the folks who were so uptight that even other English people couldn't stand them.

The roots are in the prevalence of faith especially of the blind kind.

Conservatism, in general, is based on faith and tenets when things are not knowable or known yet. Liberalism depends on questioning and experimentation when things are certain. Neither of these are necessarily good or bad.

The situation in the US traces back to the times and areas when intellectualism was not needed to survive and thrive and in fact was often associated with the swindlers and manipulators who would take advantage of the less intellectual.

While self-reliance was a good outcome, faith of the blind kind also took hold in a large section of the population. Lower levels of education and critical thinking amongst those that eschewed and distrusted intellectualism promoted life by faith and tenets. Not just the religious faith but faith in governing, economics that relied on sound-bite axioms rather than be informed analysis. Since no intellectual could be trusted, power was given to local "prophets" or to those to reinforced the existing world view than shake it.

This is not to say the entire Conservative party is anti-intellectual. Unfortunately, the contemporary Conservative party has come to rely more more on the support of the blindly faithful partly because of its rigidity in adopting but ironically enough by the intellectuals of the party itself who have cynically adopted the "justifications by the means" to use them for their purposes.

Santorum poses a problem to the main party because he appears as a "prophet" to those with the faith but is not electable by the mainstream who reject blind faith based policies and rules. "Live by the sword, die by the sword" type of situation for the GOP.

The danger is that the group of "blind-faith" people have become self-sustaining because they have been able to influence education to the point that it has reduced the level of critical thinking needed to break out of it. The Internet makes those voices heard a lot more than it used to be and so have more power to self-sustain themselves via policies that sustain blind faith.

Can someone please explain the difference between a social conservative here in the US and a social conservative in (say) Saudi Arabia?

This article wouldn't have made a lick of sense a month ago, when everyone was touting Romney's centric-appeal precisely because of his (mildly-less) dose of social conservatism.

Santorum is good for Obama -- his views will send even fiscally conservative liberals like myself flocking to the polls for Obama's victory.

It seems to me that social conservatism probably has stronger roots in the independent, self reliant character of the pioneers who wrested much of the nation from the wilderness, natives, and Mexico than it does with the enlightenment ideals of a few elite citizens in the north east.

Connecting the deeply ingrained cultural values of independence and self reliance to revolutionary ideals seems pretty bogus. I think my frontier hypothesis is much more likely, especially given that the scotch irish folk who settled the greater part of America spent little time on the coast amidst the elite thinkers.

I think that the last paragraph states the case perfectly. It may not be about religion per se but individual responsibility.

Ronald Reagan opened the Republican door to the evangelicals. As it turned out he would have won the election without them. But he let them in, even though he never gave them anything they wanted. However this little baby grew and grew in significance, obliging politicians to respect the social conservatism of the evangelicals. Then the baby grew into a secular movement, the T-Party, many of whom are not social conservatives, emphasize no new taxes, small government and so on. These are secular objectives. The unity of the religious and secular social conservatism has become so strong that the Speaker in the House had to bow to them, generating a stalled Congress, and a stalled President. Every Republican is scared of them, and the primaries have become a farce. But we must remember that these two groups are simply a squeaky wheel. In a general election, they are nothing, even if in the Republican Party they are now everything.

But it is kind of funny to argue that certain inalienable rights endowed by our creator are due to our founding documents.

I'd argue this hyper religiousity (not meaning to offend anyone, just more religious comparative to other developed nations) comes from the propoganda the US had during the cold war. If we recall McCarthy and the Red Scare, athiesm equated with communism, which equated with evil. Granted socialism is nothing but a pipe dream, but the reality of it is that wanting to make sure ALL of your fellow men are not found in imporvished conditions is so Christ-like, one makes you wonder how his message would be received today.

I'm not sure that you're correct that the USA is 'so much more' socially conservative. People care about different issues, but it is difficult to get an abortion in Ireland, the UK allows school prayer, France banned people from wearing burkhas and for all this gay marriage talk, whilst a lot of people in Europe don't necessarily have a problem with it, it certainly isn't legal in a lot of EU countries.

The Founding Fathers are making a logical argument in the Declaration, and they write "We hold these truths to be self-evident" in analogy with axioms of geometry in Euclid.

It is much, much easier to assume inalienable rights endowed by a creator, rather than try to create a system of morality based purely on human nature. Attempting to do so would've made the Declaration about 800 pages long, even if the Founders had been motivated to try, which they weren't, not being atheists.

But almost no-one was an atheist back then. If people being religious in the 18th Century counts as an explanation for how things are in America today, there's nothing that explanation doesn't cover.

A rights-based theory is very simple to formulate and easy for people to agree upon. It gets modified to fit circumstances, almost always. If the right to life was really inalienable, the death penalty would always be wrong. But in practice, social conservatives alienate that right from people under certain circumstances. In fact morality has to be consequentialist. Religion gives an excuse to ignore consequences and stick to principles, but this is not what people do most of the time. They only become completely rigid when religion itself is at stake, in questions of social conflict and social control. Then they'll be completely unreasonable.

This is basically why social conservatism is on the upswing among a certain demographic. It's not that they are being particularly true to the Founding Fathers, it's that they are scared for their culture and for the influence and power of their group. Their rhetoric is full of doom, disaster, and hysterical paranoia.

It was natural for the Founders to describe a morality based on rights from God, but their attitude as a whole was based on compromise and negotiation of conflict between competing interests, not rigid application of religious dogma. This is why Obama is much closer to the spirit of the Founders than the current crop of social conservatives.

I believe in inalieable rights from God, and I'm neither a believing Christian nor a social conservative. I believe in gay marriage, don't care at all about abortion, and think that basic human services and infrastructure are government obligations.

The Declaration of Independence was essentially a political and diplomatic manifesto. It is fair game for a politician to use it, but it is also important to look at the politician.

Social conservatism is it's own thing, and the US flavor of it is not all that old. The problem with guys like Santorum is that he is a social conservative, but also a real holy warrior. Right now there is a kind of facile ecumenicism on the religious right based on fairly vague "family values" but mostly on opposition to abortion. The ecumenicism can exist because religion operates outside of the state and no one religion or sect can exert power over another.

But if a crank like Santorum gained real power, one wonders how long that happy state of affairs would last. When he said that the mainline protestant sects were outside the world of Christ, he said that in a prepared speech to college students and faculty at a Catholic University. It was not some off-the-cuff pander gone wrong. So he manages to get elected President, he manages to overturn Roe, prayer in the schools is reinstated, etc.

Then what?

And this story explains why America retains developing country levels of inequality. Because religiosity (frequency of prayer) is directly related to the level of inequality in society. High levels of inequality (coincident extremes of wealth and poverty) support religion and religion encourages it.

The biggest concern of influential religionists is the diminishing of the status of their religion through "socialism" or the expansion of the state. It would reduce inequality, poverty and dimishes the religionist's influence. That's why religionists are on a hair trigger reaction time when accusing those who may threaten their religion as socialists....irrespective of whether the accused are socialists or not. Typically they are not.