I expect that so-cons will lose each of these battles in turn, and certain folks will then cluck about how the so-cons should have gotten with the so-called “conservative” platform that involves entitling Achmed to put only three of his Pakistani brides onto welfare instead of all four, or entitling Christian churches to worship “freely” so long as they consent to ordain at least one lesbian female per parish to celebrate the sacraments “fairly”. Never is there a serious policy challenge to the basic leftist doctrine that the state’s interests are paramount and the family’s and individual’s rights only secondary.

Ronald Reagan, for all his rhetorical successes, only ever managed to reduce the government’s rate of growth. Except for the social conservatives, nobody on the right seriously acts as though government can be unmired from the swamp of liberalism. As Yoda says, “that is why you fail”.

The problem with a strategy of harping on the threats of Marxism and Islam is, the latte ladies don’t think these really are any fundamental threat to our way of life. Liberals and elites think the benefits of Western civilization simply happen, like California weather or accident of birth, and don’t see how civilization requires a substrate of toughness. It’s the same mentality that leads to their blithely ignoring the fact that taxing the hell out of business kills the economy.

Social conservatism is a bogeyman for these people not its hermeneutic hinges on finer points of Biblical interpretation, but because its base axioms contradict the liberal assertion that the popular will can define or redefine morality itself. Most of the leftist hermeneutic is a reaction against Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular: they don’t care that their criticism is against a straw man of their own imagining. (Ever notice how many simple details they get wrong — depicting Catholics as young-earth creationists, e.g., or Baptists as rosary-prayers? They don’t care. Some things genuinely make no sense until you learn to see irrationality itself as indicative of a struggle against God, who is rationality — Logos — Himself.) Because the base philosophy of leftists is mere will-to-power, their politics, attitudes, and prejudices are similarly rooted in nothing but “I want” (cf. “I won”). The main thing is that so-cons stand in opposition to the revolution, therefore they are isolated and targeted.

This is the most proactive communication strategy we have yet seen from this administration. Please note they are also establishing (or re-cultivating) the perceptual equation “social conservative” = “Religious Right” = “anti-science” = “stupid.”

There are now people in power in this nation who believe socialism is the answer – while fooling millions into believing it will still be America as we know it, just better.

You tell me how we are going to change the minds of the educated, elite women who have all this influence? I’ve been around a few myself and I do not see how you can change their minds on the social issues. I don’t even want to try, because I don’t have enough time or patience. I can muster very good arguments, but I suspect they won’t convince any of those ladies.

But they must first understand that in the world that will replace the one they are destroying there will be no respect at all for women or gays. None. And when the alliance succeeds in putting us down, they will fight each other for control and the Muslims are going to win that one.

If it all boils down to the kind of milieu that Maureen Dowd is a good representative of, I’m not sure I want to live to see the Gotterdammerung they play a bit part in the orchestra of.

I can put on a public face and say nothing when these kinds of women lecture us about what they want, or their gay allies want to shove in our faces. Privately, I have my conscience to fall back on. But there is just too much at stake in the big picture.

You know what? If creating this mishmash of Limbaugh-Palin-and those Eeeeevillllll Christians works, and we can’t overcome it, then we don’t deserve to survive as a civilization and Republic. If our people are that shallow, venal, and cold then we deserve the encroaching darkness and the curtain coming down.

I am saying that if we want to change minds, we need to understand women like this first.

So, Fred, I am taking issue with your strategic prescription. Right now, like it or not, the White House and Left Democrats, through the vehicle of an attack on Rush Limbaugh, have turned the budget fight into a disguised proxy battle about culture and social issues. Their gambit doesn’t need to work to be successful: it just needs to distract.

“Rats, I’m knocked up. This is inconvenient. I need an abortion.

The single welfare woman:

Rats, the rent went up. I need another kid.

And the taxpayer shall pay for it all.

I understand what you are saying. It is most unfortunate that the survival of our nation and Western Civilization may depend on such a narrow class of people. If the premise of your reasoning holds, then we’re finished.

I think we need to take abortion and gays off the table by simply not talking about it. There are FAR MORE important things to worry about and present circumstances only amplify that.

I don’t think you will get most of those women on the Republican side. They are hostile towards any kind of pro-life and Christian ethic. Therefore, you play away from that crowd and take them out of the game. You then focus on economic, foreign, and defense policy which are all areas the the Leftist women are very, very weak in. Stay away from the social issues.

I have sympathies for the social conservatives, even if I do not share their whole shebang and their peculiar biblical hermeneutic. But we Republicans should not make the social issues the front burner stuff. This is just me being strategic in my thinking. I used to play ice hockey and when you planned your game against an opponent you always tried to not allow your opponent to play to your weakness. But always go at his weakness.

To Republicans who are very strong social conservatives and who want their issues front and center, I would say: there is just too damn much at stake to put a bulls eye on our foreheads. Up to this point, during the last two decades the Left has successfully caricatured Republicans as misogynists and homophobes who want to impose a theocracy. It’s a straw man, for sure, but it has worked. We need to take that out of the game, or at least neutralize it so that it isn’t a big moving target.

Western Civilization and our Republic are under assault. There is an emerging symbiosis of Marxism with Islam going on and if these people win all over the world, the world that emerges from it will be infinitely harsher on women and gays than the phantom Christian persecutors they so despise. This is how I would reason with the social conservatives AND with the Maureen Dowd’s of this world.

What IS relevant is what “liberal” positions on these social issues signify to the people who determine what is Socially Acceptable. I think the people who determine who and what is Socially Acceptable are Upper and Upper Middle Class urban and suburban women.

Strategically, the Republican (or conservative) message is not going to break through until you get a critical mass of these women on your side.

You’ve clearly laid out what I think is the heart of the matter. I’ve thought so for some time.

I find myself in a difficult position vis-a-vis these two antagonists: the secularist socialist elites vs. the literalist Christians.

I’m very, very uncomfortable with either of these antagonists. And yet I am very comfortable with Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. It’s very difficult for me to explain where I am as a Roman Catholic. I’m all over the map, depending on the theological and social issue. Some I’m quite traditional about (recently seeing a way to return to what I was brought up with, modifications as needed); others I am more moderate and sometimes liberal about. I don’t treat the Bible as a divine dictation, as Muslims treat the Qur’an.

Neither Limbaugh nor Palin would impose some kind of religious orthodoxy on the rest of us. They are not unsophisticated rubes, contrary to what the Ivy League educated pundits might think.

I am opposed to abortion-as-a-means-of-birth-control. Yet, I want to keep it legal for the rare cases where I think husbands/boyfriends and children want to save their mother rather than the baby. I think we in the churches can do a better job of training our young and reinforcing with each other the moral reasoning behind why life is sacred. It has to be an ethic that is freely embraced, not coerced. And an informed conscience and trained mind would go a long way towards achieving that end.

As for the whole gays thing… in most states now they can have legal partnerships which confer pretty much all the benefits they want. I’m opposed to altering the standards for marriage, which we Christians hold to be sacramental and between one man and one woman. Not a man and man, woman and woman, human and animal, human and multiple partners, and whatever other inventions the deviant could conjure.

These Ivy League elites have milked all the mileage one can get out of post-modernism/deconstructionism. It cannot be the basis for a flourishing civilization, as the evidence is overwhelming that it puts us in suicide mode while these pundits want us to keep hitting the snooze button.