I wonder how many people hold politically conservative values but shy away from labeling themselves conservative due to the baggage they associate with the term. I wonder how many people hold these values while voting for political leaders who oppose them. I know voters are individuals, voting and abstaining for good and bad reasons, but I think part of the blame for this disparity falls on those of us who call ourselves conservative. We have not communicated well enough, or as Bertie Wooster might say, we’ve flubbed it before giving it a good go. Ok, he wouldn’t say that, but you get the idea. Don’t you? Nevermind.

On Monday, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., and columnist Jackie Gingrich Cushman writes about the typical ideas associated with the day, but I have another idea. I think King’s words are apt for today’s conservatives.

“For many years we have shown an amazing patience,” King said, and I think conservatives have shown a good bit of patience as well. We have, as King went on, sometimes given our American brothers in government and elsewhere “the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated.” But today I say we need to be “saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”

Freedom and justice are what conservatives promote. We want nothing less for our American brothers than life, liberty, and opportunities to pursue happiness. I tend to think we have been too patient in our attempts to be understood—-patient and a bit wrong-headed.

Conservatives don’t want to cut government spending. We want to keep bureaucracy from hamstringing your freedom.

Conservatives don’t want to cut taxes. We want you to keep as much of your hard-earned paycheck as possible. We also don’t want to punish you for succeeding in business or saving over the years by taxing you unfairly.

We don’t want to throw out immigrants who are trying to make a new life for themselves in our country. We want a stable process for welcoming immigrants into our country.

And we don’t want to deny women healthcare choices. We defend the lives and freedoms of every man and woman from conception to old age.

Conservatives champion loving our neighbor as we would ourselves, which includes defending the helpless and helping the poor and orphaned, but here’s the rub between us and liberals; Continue reading Conservatives Have Been Too Patient →

Alisha Harris of World blogs on a law firm that has asked the IRS to scrutinize one of the firm’s clients, a pastor who delivered a political sermon. Harris writes that the firm, The Becket Fund, “maintains that a pastor should even be able to endorse or condemn certain candidates from the pulpit, as long as he is speaking privately to his congregation.” The tricky IRS code has only been on the books since 1954. One of the Becket Fund lawyers said, “For a hundred and seventy odd years of our history, people were allowed to speak freely without fear of losing any tax exemption and our country was not turned into a theocracy because of it, not even close.”

I agree. I don’t know what problems must be overcome in our current tax code, but I don’t understand why pastors or non-profit organization leaders must mussel themselves on specific political issues or people. People should be able to talk openly about anything, especially government.

Cranach blogs about “Life on Mars,” a BBC cop show about a modern cop who was thrown back to 1974 and encounters cultural difficulties while trying to solve crime. G.E. Veith writes, “What I like most about the show is not so much that science fiction overlay but the well-scripted mystery plots, which are stellar examples of the police-procedural mystery genre.”

Bud has a list of peeves with things such as “Novelists who can’t think of something more creative than to have novelists as characters” and “Publishing people who use the word ‘best’ and other silly superlatives to describe things they know are not.”

You know, I think political polling is becoming a pet peeve for me. It’s addictive but pointless. It’s the same as carefully unwrapping a gift so that you can peek at a corner of the box. Can’t wait for Christmas. Can’t focus on making cookies. No, you have to count, shake, and peek at your gifts under the tree. Course, my guy isn’t doing great in the polls right now, so that encourages my irritation, but still the national and state polling for the last several months has gotten oppressive. Please stop.

Speaking of political peeves, I don’t understand what internal party politics has to do with honest voters in various state primaries. How is it just for a party to declare the votes in Michigan worthless? Is the same thing happening in Florida? That’s not right. Those people should be able to vote in their primaries just like the rest of us.

Getting back to literary peeves, I think my only real peeve is hearing that a book deals honestly with hard subjects from the author or marketer and finding that it does not. I don’t guess that’s a big deal though. You see that kind of thing all the time in different ways.