Thursday, December 04, 2008

Conservative Values

A commenter at Giving up on God (sort of) by David Harsanyi said a funny thing.

David seems to focus his energies on diminishing religion and being a booster for "medicinal marijauna", and gay rights and so forth. It is hard for Dave to admit, but those aren't conservative principles.
I guess using God's own anti-depressant is a bad thing but getting your anti-depressants from the medical cartel is in alignment with God's wishes and true conservatism. Who knew?

I wonder if the complainer also knows that early drafts of the US Constitution were written on hemp paper and the US Frigate The Constitution also known as Old Ironsides had hemp sails. Or that George Washington grew a lot of hemp. In fact George said "Make the most of the hemp seed. Sow it everywhere." Jeeze. It is beginning to look like our county was founded by a bunch of hippies.

And you know what is worse: people still like to print Bibles on hemp paper for its durability. So next time you Real Conservatives™ go to church be careful. You Bible may be printed on a product of the Devil Weed. Oh. The shame.

And rumor has it that Baron VonSteuben a German General who helped Washington at Valley Forge was a homosexual. If you consider sex with 17 year old boys pedophilia he was a supposedly a pedophile too. And horror of horrors there is a VonSteuben Metropolitan Science Center (high school) in Chicago. Fortunately Washington was so desperate for help he overlooked the Baron's alleged indiscretions. You have to wonder what our country was coming to though to allow such reputed degenerates into the military. Especially as leaders. I guess it was part of the evil gay agenda to subvert the country at its very founding.

I guess we are fortunate that the founders were more interested in Liberty than in the True Conservative™ agenda.

H/T Eric at Classical Values.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

At one level, conservative values are about right and wrong.

At a deeper level, they're about what works.

My favorite example of this is 'Kosher'. For the technology of the time, it wasn't just the law, it was also critical to survival.

The contrapositive is: If it doesn't work, it isn't conservative.

M. Simon said...

Dishman,

Yes.

What cultural conservatives fail to recognize however is that their conservative "values" were not eternal. The various prohibitions were an invention of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Those changes in the law were more about dominance than morality. As dominance fades so does the "morality". And the screams are more about the loss of dominance than about the loss of morality IMO.

I don't know if you have read this:

Drug War History

It documents the laws and how they were a mechanism for dominance over various minority populations.

Tom Cuddihy said...

On hemp-- George and just about everyone else was growing it for rope, not smoke. Not that there's anything wrong with smoking it, just a dishonest association.

On Von stuebenville or whoever he was --like the many gays who serve in the ranks today, the overwhelming evidence is that GW didn't ask and the Baron didn't tell. Rather a stirling and shining example of the early success of the current policy, wouldn't you say.
And if the Baron had been marching around in a yellow banana hammock demanding his rights to marry another man, I daresay he wouldn't have accomplished much for the revolution.

Anyway, I think David's point is not so much that medical marijuana is a liberal notion as that there's not much of important conservative principles at stake either way, so being for or against it a distraction from issues that affect conservatism. The drug war is an intrusion on private commerce that is indeed constitutionally questionable, but not much more so and much less consequentially so than the unaccountable federal reserve, the fcc, the wagner act, and countless other far more damaging federal overreaches.

M. Simon said...

Tom,

The destabilization of Mexico and the financing of the Taliban might say that the Drug War has geopolitical implications. Making it more than a side issue.

When the situation gets bad enough something will be done. Right now it is just below the radar. It won't be for long.