“I am fiscally conservative but socially liberal.”
How many times am I going to have to hear that?
We are in an era of increasing awareness of the importance of fiscal responsibility, coupled with a moral decline that has led to personal responsibility being hardly an afterthought. So it is certainly no surprise that this has become a very sexy and chic political philosophy.
It essentially boils down to this: “I am for lower taxes and smarter spending and all that, but don’t get me caught up in that abortion stuff.”
The problem is that so-called social issues cannot be divorced from true conservatism. This philosophy, often called neoconservatism, results in little more than a speed bump in the path of the progressive movement toward its ultimate goals of statism and tyranny.
Conservatism, boiled down to its most basic form, promotes a stable government that allows equal opportunity and justice for all members of society while staying within its bounds. Any true conservative will thus be appalled about excessive taxation, deficit spending, intrusive agencies and overbearing regulation.
For the same reasons, any true conservative will also be appalled by abortion.
In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand. In so doing, the branch of our government charged with enforcing the justice of our laws executed the most farcical miscarriage of justice in the history of our nation. Millions of lives were on the line — lives that were protected under every system of law in the history of Western civilization. Abortion had been treated as first-degree murder in every courtroom and legislative body for countless generations, and a single vote in a court of law overturned centuries’ worth of legal precedent.
While there was no legal precedent for abortion, there actually was precedent for the general ruling, which stated that unborn babies “are not persons” and therefore are not subject to legal protection as human beings. Similar rulings were made in Nazi Germany, the USSR and elsewhere. Radical liberals never have a problem with stripping humanity away from a certain demographic of the population based on ethnicity, physical or mental handicap, religion or natal status in order to allow mistreatment or extermination on a large scale for political gain.
Why do conservatives feel the need to accept this tragedy? Because liberals were, as usual, given the opportunity to frame the argument.
By first convincing the American people that it was a moral issue (even though it had been a legal issue for centuries), then forcing the argument that the government cannot legislate morality (even though it always does), many have been shamed out of speaking up for the unborn.
It is not difficult to see that this issue touches on both aforementioned aspects of conservatism — responsible government and human rights. The Supreme Court wrongfully decided that an arbitrary “right to choose” trumped the right to life, which was listed first among the unalienable rights in our own Declaration of Independence. Inconvenience was made a capital offense, the ultimate price for which has been paid by millions of voiceless Americans while those who have a voice are shamed to silence by those who gain from this genocide.
If our government has the power to change the definition of a human being, do we really think we can stop it from raising our taxes?
If real change is to be effected in Washington, a wholesale transformation must occur in how our elected officials perceive life — yours, mine and that of the unborn.
Bob Minchin is a fourth-year electrical engineering major. His column appears on Fridays.
