Andrew Brietbart and that Big CPAC Tent

It is hip to be conservative and still have socially liberal niches these days. Is it even hip to say hip nowadays? Well, Captain Beefheart was one of my best friends, and I’m pretty sure I was there when he invented hip, so I’ll use it here anyway.

Conservatives nowadays are supposed to quote Reagan, but make sure the Left knows that we’ve read Nietzsche. We can oppose gay marriage and take our lumps but let no one believe for one second that we’re homophobic.

Perhaps that is why conservative media entrepreneur and professed former liberal Andrew Breitbart is throwing a bash for GOProud at CPAC this year.

After pointing out the importance of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the backbone of our society on Larry O’Conner’s radio program last week, Breitbart said, “the treatment [social conservatives] are giving gay conservatives at CPAC deeply offends me.”

We like Breitbart. He has been kind enough to link to us several times on his Big Government site in the last year and it has helped to send our readership skyrocketing. But he is wrong.

The last time we said Breitbart was wrong we ended up eating crow, but not this time.

Without question gays have been mistreated in society for all of time immemorial. Regardless of the conservative position on same-sex unions—not to mention same-sex conduct—gay bashing and the exclusion of gays as viable members of society was and is wrong.

But that is a far cry from saying that gays should be accepted as legitimate members of the conservative right.

These days we like to break down our conservatives: fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, neo-conservatives, gay conservatives, etc., all misnomers designed to split what should be cohesive idea. We throw theses labels around as though they somehow qualify certain members of the right to take time-outs whenever the game gets too rough.

All of this comes about, of course, as a result of the “big tent” label that the RNC likes to tout around election time, or whenever liberals attempt to point out the Right’s “narrow” views on social issues such as abortion, gun control, and, yes, same-sex marriage, among a litany of others the Left likes to drum as the new norm.

Republicans have for years flocked to the defensive whenever someone in the liberal intelligentsia hands down an edict—in this case that homosexuality is perfectly acceptable, and we are simply out of step with the times not to accept it—and invariably some Republican in Washington like John Boehner or his little ankle-bitter Eric Cantor, hover in the corner shaking like the Taco Bell Chihuahua, rather than contradict it.

But conservatism is not a big tent. One is either a conservative or one is something else. Conservatism is an entire pantheon of ideas that includes social mores, not merely a label that can be pinned on anyone who wants less government and lower taxes. Conservatism, unlike liberalism, does not allow for the adjustment of social mores, just because the social winds blow left.

I’m a big Tammy Bruce fan but she is not a conservative. She may be a libertarian with conservative fiscal and some social views, but that doesn’t get her a pass as a card-carrying conservative. To quote Rod Steiger in No Way to Treat a Lady, “Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”

Although conservatism is not narrow-minded, it is a narrow, non-expandable grouping of views based on what works in a free society. The idea of the big tent is a progressive view, not a conservative one. The big tent view has been honed out of decades of failed Republican policies that justified presidential candidates like Robert Dole and John McCain.

But conservatism doesn’t work as anything other than conservatism, as the disastrous election results have proven, time after time. True conservatism doesn’t care about what gays do in the privacy of their bedrooms, but we take great exception to the idea that we must accept their lifestyle as mainstream.

As conservatives, we do not accept gays into the so-called big tent, not because we’re homophobic—another utilitarian buzzword for being anti-liberal—or because we wish gays less than full representation as individuals in our society. We do not accept homosexuals as modern conservatives because homosexuality is not conservative.

Why Palin in 2012?

If you want to get a liberal’s blood boiling or see an elitist Republican’s face shrivel up like a prune and spit profanities, just mention Sarah Palin in the same sentence with the word president.

If the past is any barometer, Palin should have disappeared shortly after the 2008 presidential campaign and retired to a quite life of mid-level honoraria engagements at Rotary Clubs and book signings, much as Dan Quayle did before her. Instead she has become arguably the most polarizing political figure in American history.

While I don’t necessarily endorse Sarah Palin at this early stage in the election process, when one considers the resume of the current leader of the Western world, the idea that she is not qualified to be President of the United States is laughable. Barack Obama has literally no experience as a manager or leader, and it has shown abysmally.

Palin may not get my vote in the primaries, I don’t know, but whether she runs or not, I think misses the point. She is a firebrand in one of the most extraordinary grassroots movements in U.S. history, and that movement will either be the catalyst for true change with in the GOP, or the party will not survive the twentieth century.

Currently, the GOP does not show any signs of true change in the aftermath of November’s wave election. Right out of the chute the Senate leadership cut a deal with Democrats to extend the Bush tax cuts that cost the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollar in unfunded spending. Now they are about to raise the debt ceiling, and they are not likely to get much in return.

But this new wing, if you will, of the GOP provides the best hope in years of truly changing the direction of the Republican Party. Jim De Mint, Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty and Mike Pence are all, in some respects, of the same stripe as Palin, and the there are others. What Palin and they represent is a badly needed second chance for their party.

With all of the talk of Mitt Romney in 2012, no Republican worth his or her salt believes it; Romney’s flip-flops on core conservative issues: socialized health care, abortion and mushiness on other social issues, makes him a yawner at the polls in a general election. No, Romney is what the Old Guard hopes the electorate will buy; his presidency would secure their positions in leadership.

No doubt Palin faces an uphill battle in the primary cycle, not to mention a general election should she decide to run, but only a fool would count her out at this juncture. She possesses enormous clout with factions in the conservative right that make her viable possibility for 2012. But perhaps whether she can win is beside the point.

There are two primary reasons why Sarah Palin should consider a run in the next election. First, the Democrats are paralyzed with fear at the thought of her. She will prove a distraction that they can ill afford, if they are to rewrite Barack Obama’s record. Don’t expect Palin-Biden II; Palin destroys Barack in a one-on-one debate.

But perhaps the best reason for a Palin run in 2012, is that she will wield enormous negotiating leverage with the old-line leadership within the her party to establish and solidify planks in the party platform and—in the event she doesn’t win nomination—determine who the GOP candidate will be.