Before he finally headed for the high country that last time in 2006, one of Moses Sands' greatest laments was the failure of conservatives (who he called "protectors" of the Constitution) to educate religious people (who most everyone calls "social conservatives" without any clear definition of just what that is) about the proper relationship between their faith and the Constitution.
       Of course this subject is about to come up again, as the Republican Party tries to sort out its intellectual, cultural and class differences (all pretty subjective) while standing athwart history in a struggle to defend against a very objective enemy, one whose object is to crush the Constitution to smithereens. Since time immemorial, when petty is easy and life-and-death choices hard, there is a class of people who will always choose petty. (Remind me to write about that sometime.)
       William Buckley stood in constant reminder to us that the intellectual arguments standing behind the "social conservatism" of the unlettered and untutored rubes in the rural south and west are far stronger than those adopted by their so-called betters in the suburbs and cities (especially on abortion), and he was just the person to articulate those arguments on behalf of the hicks.
       But as seen by the other side of the argument, the real debate was one of class, and WFB knew that as well.  So it was far easier for the country club set, especially in the sound byte lingo of the day, to define the social conservative as a Bible-thumping hayseed instead of an erudite Yale man whose family came to these shores when King George was still in knee pants...allowing them to keep the "debate" on their side of the fence stile, and intellectual egg off their face.
       But Moses said (more than once) that there is a streak of tyranny in all religions, and small town Baptists and Mormons, parish Catholics and even Scandinavian Lutherans in Minnesota were no exception.
       All religions, including Christianity, tend toward dictatorial control if given enough rope. For centuries the Catholic Church burned all sorts of people, from atheists to heretics to mere dissenters, all from the position of an almighty power it had no right to claim...and deep in its heart knew so. When resistance finally erupted on a large scale in the 16th Century, the fact that it (the Church) didn't erupt into even deeper paroxysms of violence was because of its own self-examination of those tenets of faith. The Church changed. The Church "surrendered" back again to its faith...leaving temporal power to temporal men whose church the head of which, as Mark Twain noted, always was and always will be Beelzebub.
      This is where we (conservatives) fight our battles.
      Other religions through history had been even less bending, possibly because there was no inner redemptive quality in their faiths. Who can say? Today, there is a keen intellectual argument as to whether such a quality exists within Islam. I believe there is, as did Moses Sands. But others disagree. For years, westerners have been waiting for the rise of an Islamic Martin Luther, or at least an Avicenna or Averroes, which would cause the struggle in Islam to turn inward, toward the soul, toward the more pure intentions of the Q'uran.
      But as it stands today, so far, the forces within Islam who have declared war on America are the unredeemed forces of tyranny, plain and simple.
      In America, embedded in the 10th Amendment are powers that to some of us seem near dictatorial, especially if you find yourself in central Kentucky on a Saturday night and learn that the nearest cold beer is 20 miles away, across the county line. At one time, local blue laws even kept the drug stores closed on Sundays. And while law (and better sense) may have finally allowed them to remain open, there is still that cadre of folks, mostly older, (and their children who never got too far way from the teat) who seethe at the idea that their "right of majority rule" to close any business on the Sabbath, their Sabbath, had been superseded by some federal judge in Montgomery.
      In truth, they probably couldn't get a majority vote on that issue any longer, for most people, including some very fine Christians, have found that store being open on Sunday to be a benefit, and actually causing no spiritual harm either...at least to the non-busybody segment of their Christian community.
      You see, somewhere along the line most American Christians find no profit in ordering by law non-Christians (of all types) to abide by a set of rules Christians could just as easily impose on themselves without benefit of ordinance or constables. As all conservatives know, that role of Busy-Body in Chief always falls to the government eventually, where it resides now.
      Nor is this common sensical, live-and-let-live approach found in all faiths and one must ask why?
      The modern Left reminds us that most every modern government is a government of busy-bodies. Many American Christians loved the 10th Amendment fifty years ago, for it was always seen as their license to order their local culture (majority rules). But like the Muslims they also see that same Bill of Rights to be a license to corrupt when placed in the wrong hands. So, even as a person in Murfreesboro will gnash her teeth that someone in Nashville will claim the right and power to dictate what she should put on their cereal each morning, the fact that she may feel no compunction whatsoever in deciding where someone else ought to be, or ought not be, on Sunday morning, is an issue conservatives need to take up with our religious base.
      For if you think southern Baptists are bad, try opening up an accounting office in Show Low, Arizona, while also practicing the religion of  being a "Gentile".
      People are just funny that way.
 
      As I have often written, my mother was one of those people who believed that the local sheriff should go around every Sunday morning and haul out every man and woman still in bed and cart them off to church, or, if they choose, to some sort of community service...that did not involve labor, being the Sabbath and all.
     Still, she would never have rounded up a bunch of men and women and done it herself.
     My mother wanted the law to do it.
    And by inviting the law to do so, just ask any black American who can remember the old south just fifty years ago, she and her fellow Christians damn near destroyed the 10th Amendment...never knowing that today it, along with a new alliance with black people who find themselves enslaved now because of its absence...may well be their only rescue line.

    The question you on the outside looking in should ask, why is it that Christians, when they were all powerful, only shunned and ostracized, and passed local ordinances that favored their particular religious beliefs? If they were so dictatorial and invasive, why didn't they just barge though Clyde Barr's door when he beat his wife, then drag that drunk out and beat him until he repented? Why didn't they just take Lila Cornet out, who cheated on her husband, and stone her? Even the KKK wore hoods to signify that they were stepping outside the law.
    Imagine the Jewish and Muslim women who have been stoned, or the many Hester Prynne's who would have given worlds to get the cold shoulder, and nothing more, at Walgreens while buying condoms for Bruno. If Christianity were truly the tyrannical evil they say it is, there would never have been any need for a Klu Klux Klan. The local folk, through ordinance, could simply have sent the local sheriff and his deputies to talk to the pagan Asian or Jew who worshiped on Saturday and worked on Sunday, or the ignorant and backward (no doubt Yankee) white person who felt it was perfectly permissible to invite a nigra up on the front porch for lemonade and cookies. Why the need for disguise?
    Because the United States Constitution, from the very beginning, implanted a respect for law that superseded even the most basic religious faith, that's why. There were lines Christians would not cross which other religions will. For a century Muslims have come here and lived in peace, and secretly breated deep sighs of relief that so many of the harsher aspects of shari'a law did not have to be invoked...nor was there any power to order it so. This was how it was until the Wahhabi's began sponsoring mosques and madrassas, and the general rise of militant Islam associated with those teaching.
   As Europe may find out sooner than us, liberty and freedom of choice cannot co-exist with this strand of Islam.
   And there were lines which Christians would not cross that government most certianly will...and which seem to be aimed at the very Christians who first began the practice of passing off to the local sheriff (and child welfare agency and county attorney) the power to do to people what a nice cold shoulder could have done.
    There is an irony here. And like any sin, you really can't find release and redemption until you fully confess it. The small, "parochial" religious communities of America are now under assault...by the state, by the atheistic socialists, and by the class-minded members of their own party...using the tools they first brought into play during Jim Crow and hid under the sweet innocent name of "states rights".
    No one will take their pleas for rescue by the 10th Amendment seriously until they are prostrated at the foot of the sins they committed under it, for no one fully believes they won't just go right back to being petty tyrants in their towns once the pain has been relieved.
    Conservatism has to meet this head on...for the revival of the 10th Amendment is one of the major wedges we can use to get the black family to our side. It is also the one major way to remove populist appeals to a darker nature (read local race-and-religion baiting) as we saw in the 2008 GOP campaign. We are completely in favor of re-introducing God and prayer into the classroom. The recent rap-murders in Farmville Virginia remind us why this is so important. We are in favor of strengthening divorce laws, making it harder to get one, but also for strengthening marriage laws, making it harder to get one of those as well. And personally, I find a certain quaintness and innocence that a country should decide not to allow the sale of alcohol beverages, just as I find it legal (but not so quaint) that a California town can ban the sale of tobacco. (Just stay away from our guns!)
Vassar Bushmills