Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 17, 1994 TAG: 9402240004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DICK ARMEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They say their Yuppie likes the Republican Party's stand on economic issues because he likes freedom and getting the government off his back, but he's concerned about its stands on social issues like abortion and gay rights. How, the Yuppie asks, can the Republican Party support less government in economics while (as he might put it) trying to "impose its values" on people on moral issues?
The pollsters' creature, if he exists, sadly misunderstands the Republican Party. The truth is that All strains of conservatives - the cultural conservatives of the "religious right" as well as our free-market champions - are united in their belief that the government should be limited and that people should be allowed to live their lives with a minimum of interference from Washington. We are, indeed, the party of freedom.
The religious right, far from trying to impose its values on others, is made up of families who are trying to keep the government from forcing its values on them. This was a defensive movement from the start, organized in the 1970s by evangelicals and orthodox Catholics because their way of life was under subtle attack by federal policies.
Nothing raised the justified fears of devout believers more than the realization that an appointed, nine-member court could impose its views on abortion, pornography, public prayer, education and even sexuality on communities across the nation.
Properly understood, the agenda of cultural conservatives is to neutralize the government's influence on disputed moral questions. Take, for example, the debate over the National Endowment for the Arts, which offers $170 million a year to fund art projects - many of them obscene, offensive or anti-religious. When cultural conservatives tried to reduce funding for the NEA, many on the left cried censorship. Yet, conservatives never questioned artists' right to produce even obscene art - they simply argued that the taxpayers shouldn't be forced to finance it, and thus encourage it.
The same is true on gay rights. Conservatives oppose giving government protections to gays because that would inevitably infringe on the freedom of others and constitute a government endorsement of the gay lifestyle. A gay person should be free to live without federal interference, but a family should not be forced to rent their spare room to him if it feels his lifestyle is unhealthy and immoral. There is a clear link between the two types of
conservatives. Conservatives who emphasize economics are devoted to the ideas of a self-regulating market to achieve the best possible distribution of goods. Conservatives who emphasize social issues implicitly believe in a kind of cultural free market in which free people, regulated through largely noncoercive means, may arrive at the best solution to the moral issues that divide us.
Just as economic conservatives do not want the government to tell us what kind of high-definition television to produce, cultural conservatives don't want it telling us what kind of art we should buy. The positions of both types of conservatives are consistent with a philosophy of freedom from government controls.
Cultural conservatives fear the power of the modern state for precisely the reasons that Friedrich von Hayek outlined 50 years ago in "The Road to Serfdom." They know that with its enormous economic resources - the power to tax, to fund programs, to regulate vast areas of activity - the state can spread its controls over our culture and erode our way of life. The safest course for anyone interested in freedom is to reduce the power of government as much as possible - and on that point conservatives of all strains agree.
\ Dick Armey of Texas is chairman of the U.S. House Republican Conference. This is adapted from an article he wrote for Policy Review, the journal of The Heritage Foundation.
by CNB