My father use to irritate me no end back in my teenage days
when he’d smugly tell me, “just wait, when you’re my age, you’ll be
conservative, too.”
Like so many, I’ve been soul searching since the election --
in my own soul, for the soul of our nation. And I was a little surprised to
find some threads of what my dad might now call conservatism, like the strands
of gray showing up in my hair.
By the way, this conservatism theme is not a just a device
to introduce an argument against those who are *liberally* plundering Mother Earth…
but hey, while I’m on the topic, when *are* the conservatives going to start
conserving? When are they going to stop referring to pumping and sawing as
“increasing oil and timber *production*”? Timber is produced by sun and soil
over decades if not centuries, and oil was produced by sun and earth tens if
not hundreds of millions of years ago. The oil and timber industries no more
“produce” oil and timber than obstetricians produce babies!
Back to the gray hair: even though I stopped saying the
“under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance a few years ago, to protest the
creeping growth of GWB’s “holigarchy”,
I found myself aligned with Newt Gingrich in the Sonoma High School flag
controversy. The school administrators wouldn’t allow some students to display
the American flag for a class portrait, as they had problems in past years with
Hispanic students and the Mexican flag. This year’s flag flyers, backed by the
visiting former House Speaker, argued: this is America; displaying an American
flag in a class portrait can’t be considered controversial.
I was sympathetic. This *is* America, not Mexico, and the
flag no more represents Gingrich or DeLay than it
does Kennedy or Boxer. By banning the display of the American flag by these
students, the school administration somehow seemed to be acceding to the
conservatives’ exclusive claim on American patriotism.
Another case that stirred conservative feelings involves the
man whose complaints to the State have prompted gender-discrimination lawsuits
against two local women’s gyms. My reaction was, “why can’t this loser allow
women some privacy?!” Does he think the gals are in there conspiring, in a
Bohemian Club manner, to take over the country? (If they did, wouldn’t that be
a good thing?)
So my column here was pretty far along when I read it over the
phone to my daughter Laurel. She’s back in Moab, defending wild Utah from them
“oil producers.” As a student of constitutional law, she jumped all over my
nascent conservatism. The first and fourteenth amendments to the US Constitution,
she told me, do not make exceptions for behavior that might be unpopular with
the majority of Americans at any given time. Free speech protection is “content
neutral”; if an American flag is allowed, then any flag must be allowed. A
swastika could be banned because it was displayed on a live skunk, but a Star
of David similarly displayed would also have to be banned. Too bad if some
clunk wants to join a fitness club and ogle the sweaty women. The Constitution
protects that right, says my daughter. Of course, the female clientele have the
right to evil-eye him right out the door, too.
Laurel said if we don’t fight to preserve the rights of free
expression and equal protection under the law, *especially* when we don’t agree
with the content, then we shouldn’t expect “the other side” to be so
principled, either. If the “ayatollah wing of the Republican party” (as
columnist Ellen Goodman calls the Bushie
evangelicals) grows in power, what, if not the US Constitution, will keep them
from imposing their moral standards on the unbelievers? (That’s why we must
protect the Senate’s right to filibuster those theocratic Supreme Court
nominees!)
There’s nothing I can do to stop my head from producing more
gray hair. But I can exercise critical thinking to keep the gray matter inside from
going soft. I won’t set my judgment adrift in a current of moral conservatism. I’ll save *my* conservatism for our planet.