Conservative Views on Freedom, Religion, and The Free Market

I’ve already posted my reaction to Mitt Romney’s speech and noted how a Washington Post editorial, as well as a liberal columnist, shared my disagreement with Romney’s statement that “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” It should be noted that some conservatives have raised the same objection. For example, Peggy Noonan wrote:

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else. 

Ed Morrissey shows that some conservatives do share Romney’s bias, ane even finds free-market economic systems to be a reflection of God, but is at least willing to treat all, even the infidels, equally:

I understand where Romney drew his inspiration for equating freedom and religion. In part, he drew it from the Declaration of Independence, which talks of inalienable rights “endowed by the Creator”. Without a Creator to make man in His image, one can hardly believe that all men are created equal In pragmatic terms, the diversity of individuals shows a wide variance of productivity and commercial value, which gets expressed in a free-market economic system. However, as souls who are all children of a Creator, we are just as siblings in a family, and should be treated as equals to honor that Creator.

After reading this, it is just amazing that an athiest like Ayn Rand managed to champion the free-market system.

1 Comment

  1. 1
    Nelson M. says:

    Kudos to Ms. Noonan. She even called them idiots. I never heard her say anything that deviated from the Republican party line before.

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