Social conservatism is probably the most misunderstood leg in the three-legged stool of the Conservative movement. The accusation against social conservatism is that those who are proponents seek some sort of moral police on the scale of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The two issues that are pointed to so that the moral police argument can be made are homosexual marriage and abortion. While many social conservatives are certainly opponents of both political issues, there is a much greater, more philosophical, foundation for social conservatism as a political theory or a component of conservatism as a whole.

In the cases of homosexual marriage and abortion the underlying thoughts behind opposing these political issues are the freedom of religious practice and the sanctity of life. There are numerous cases where Christian business owners and churches are either in the middle of litigation or have gone through litigation for resisting the notion that they have to accept the premise of homosexual marriage.

Since the ruling in 1973, Roe v. Wade, the sanctity of life in the United States has been on a rapid descent. The nation has gone from killing babies in the womb to allowing doctors to administer a lethal amount of medicine with the purpose of killing elderly people, some of whom have not a single ailment. And now everything in between fills our local newscasts, from the murder of individuals on a street corner to pondering whether or not there is a moral impediment to killing a child shortly after it has been delivered into the world. (This is not an exaggeration. In the Journal of Medical Ethics "philosophers" Alberto Giuilini and Francesca Minerva wrote "We propose to call this practice 'after-birth abortion', rather than 'infanticide', to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus…rather than that of a child.") But even given all of this about our current culture, there is yet something deeper that social conservatism seeks to address.

The actual war that is being conducted in our culture is not pro-life vs. pro-abortion or traditional marriage vs. homosexual marriage, but, rather, it is a war centered on the relationship between each citizen and the relationship of the citizenry to its government. In the United States it is not enough to just allow abortion, but tax money is used to fund abortions. It is not enough to allow civil unions of homosexuals so that they can participate in all of the same legal perks that heterosexual couples enjoy, but churches are coerced into allowing homosexual unions be performed on their property. There is an animosity amongst the people and one side seeks to use the state to control the other part beyond the traditional concept of the rule of law. A large portion of the citizenry of the US, in some form or another, believes that it has a claim to the property or the estates of the rest of the citizenry.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, wrote:

"...the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be, where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: for who could be free, when every other man's humor might domineer over him?"

This is the great battle within the current culture of the United States. Does one citizen have a right to use the state to coerce another into giving up a piece of his or her property for the benefit of the other?

Today, in 2012, the federal government exerts tremendous power over the individual and this power has created great strife in the culture, and this is what has brought the reaction from the social conservatives which people claim to be their attempt to establish a theocracy. When a teacher of a public school can be suspended with pay for sleeping with her students, but a Catholic priest is threatened with jail time for doing the same thing with altar boys, there is a disconnect in reciprocity. When religious institutions are forced by law to provide health insurance policies that provide contraception and abortifacients but the principle of abstinence cannot be included in the sexual education curriculum in public schools, there is going to be a backlash.

In terms of Lockean thought the United States has become a lawless nation, and social conservatives merely seek to reinstate the rule of law.

Robert McReynolds works as a government contractor at Ft. Belvoir, VA as an intelligence analyst. I spent five years in the Navy and was stationed at NSA and on board the USS Bulkeley (DDG-84). I am currently completing a Masters degree in International Relations at the Catholic University of America. He can be .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).


The BasicsProject.org informational and educational pamphlet series is now available for Kindle and iPad. Click here to find out more...

The New Media Journal and BasicsProject.org are not funded by outside sources. We exist exclusively on tax deductible donations from our readers and contributors. Please make a tax deductible donation today.