The problem with all the recent attempts by the libertarian-leaning folks in the conservative movement and the Republican party proper to get social conservatives to acquiesce in a softening of what is expected of national politicians is that they fail to understand that these are moral questions before they are political ones. Too often, these people who urge us to compromise for a greater, future good are people without morals or with weak morals.
Because of this, because they are people without religious convictions or transcendent purpose (no life but this), they fail to grasp that we who have morals instead of mere ethics and know this life is of little consequence when compared to the next see the only way that we can truly lose on questions of abortion and marriage is to compromise. Indeed, the irreligious (and I include those of a thin, watery, wishy-washy, Deist-like faith) perhaps cannot understand.
Because we look beyond this life, the one thing we must not do is compromise our moral principles; the economic ones are far more negotiable. If this means I wander in the desert for 40 years, so be it. I will not become a party to evil. If it means I make common cause with the economic left in order to build a coalition to fight against abortion and for marriage, then I will bid farewell to the amoral libertarians with hardly a qualm. I cannot, I will not, support evil. I cannot, I will not, compromise with the evils of abortion and the destruction of marriage now in the hope that some good will arise from it later.
It seems a bit melodramatic, since no one is (yet) suggesting that we be put up against the wall for these beliefs, but I am made to think of Thomas More. “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
Neh 