Re: What Next For Conservatives

Great column. As a matter of fact, I was going to post this very story before I saw that Andy had beat me to it. It also appeared in this morning's Winston-Salem Journal under this more appropriate header:

Sectarian Crusades Put Conservatism At Risk

I also saw this header elsewhere online while looking for the text:

Crusades unravel GOP coalition

But Andy neglected to post three of Will's words following the excerpt, This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of "intelligent design'' theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact.''

The words? But it is.

I especially like this bit:

"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.

And that's precisely the problem for the GOP these days. Ol' George Will nailed it.