Huckabee and The Natural Law- Where Conservatives and Catholics Failed

Tip of the Hat to The Brown Pelican Society for the link from Catholic World Report . By the way we are having a Louisiana Catholic Blogger Update today so stay tuned faithful Louisiana Catholic readers.

I am going to be alternating posts dealing with the political, faith and sports today. I have a lot of catching up to do. Pretty soon I will be doing another post on the "Romney lost because he was a Mormon myth again". I will explain why I think this is not helpful later.

However for all the people that buy that, they fail to note that Huckabee suffered and still suffers from anti Evangelical prejudice. I was not the only Catholic to note that. I guess as a former Southern Baptist I get the slams more than others. The Catholic Online News Service noted it big time in an article that I am sure will make some Catholics uncomfortable. I hope it does.

Go see Guest Editorial: Some Catholic Pundits and the Huckabee Campaign. I don't think the conservative talking heads ,and their legions of bloggers and others that follow them, realize that this was noted by many Evangelicals. The Catholic Online piece is hard hitting. Here are some parts:

Above all, my sadness stems from the fact that I see reflected in these reactions to the Huckabee campaign by Catholic pundits some very uncharitable attitudes toward our Evangelical brothers and sisters in the USA, unexamined prejudices which poison our relationships with them at the very time that we are most in need of their help in the great cultural struggles we commonly face. I know these prejudices only too well. I found them first in myself, when I began teaching at an Evangelical University just a few years ago. .......

Mr. Huckabee represents a new generation of Evangelical leaders who are tired of being taken for granted by the Republican establishment. This is not “populist manipulation”: it is a demand for respect and fairness. In short, the Huckabee candidacy is a good opportunity for Catholics to examine their consciences with regard to their relationships with their Evangelical brothers and sisters in Christ. Ms. Noonan’s unfair article, like the response of so many Catholic political pundits to the Huckabee campaign, actually reveals something “unsavoury” on our side: some deep prejudices—especially about southern Evangelicals—that we need to face.

Thus, Rush Limbaugh spoke not just of disagreeing with Huckabee on some issues (which is fair enough) but of Huckabee’s “dumbing down” of conservativism (those southern Evangelicals, after all, are so dumb and unsophisticated). What is really “dumb” is that we northern and eastern Catholics have evidently never made a serious effort to understand them, even though on many vital social issues they are more our allies than our adversaries in the political arena. Huckabee has struck a chord with many young Evangelicals.

Let me say I agree with that a hundred percent. What was shocking was many Catholics and other conservatives so fell for it.

The above link I started this post out with The Elephant in the Big Tent is a prime example. I am at least glad that some Catholics realize this. He says in part(the bold is all Mine):
McCain is exactly what a GOP that treats the natural moral law as negotiable deserves. The natural law is the philosophical core of conservatism. Any party that abandons or downplays it becomes just another species of liberalism. Most "conservative" positions today are little more than the liberal positions of yesteryear, from Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy to No Child Left Behind -- a PC conservatism that Mitt Romney and McCain perfectly embody.

It tells you a lot about the state of the establishment conservative movement that in the end, given a choice between a (basically) red-meat conservative from the South and a recently pro-abortion moderate from the North, it chose the latter. The savaging of Mike Huckabee has been
highly revealing, betraying more than just personal distaste.

Amongst not all but many of his critics, there is at work a basic contempt for natural law conservatism, which came out most vividly in the sputtering over Huckabee's references to amending the Constitution in accordance with "God's standards."

As the good Enlightenment liberals they have become, some modern American conservatives are naturally horrified by such a statement: How dare that hick suggest touching a venerable man-made document (never mind that the founders, being deeper and more thoughtful about these matters, put an amendment power in their Constitution for the people to govern themselves according to God's standards).

HUCKABEE, FOR ALL of his glibness, is striking much closer to the bedrock of philosophical conservatism than his critics. If conservatism is not about conserving principles that originate in reality -- a reality that comes from God and is made known to man through his reason -- then what good is it?

A conservatism without the natural law is simply willful liberalism in a more respectable guise, moving more glacially than the left's transparent one, but essentially agreeing that man is the measure of all things and political disputes, no matter how obviously they bear upon the God-given nature of man, are to be resolved by power and man's desires.

Both reason and bitter history should tell conservatives that sawing off the natural law leg of its stool makes the whole thing collapse. Without principles rooted in reality upon which to deliberate about the size of government proper to human beings, economic conservatism evaporates and foreign-policy conservatism turns hubristic.

If McCain isn't sitting on a three-legged stool, that's because GOP activists threw it away a long time ago. They set up in its place a Big Tent and McCain crawled into it. Their whining is a generation too late.

He is of course referring to Huckabee comments that were in reference to the Human Right Amendment. Now as soon as Huckabee said this I knew what was coming. I am a former Evangelical so I understood what he was saying However I was not prepared for the dishonesty among conservatives on this.

Now lets say this. What if Huckabee had not broached this topic first at a Evangelical Church. Let us say he broached this topic in front of the Knights of Columbus, or at the University of Dallas or Notre Dame.

Instead of talking the bible, and God's standards, he would have talled about "Natural Law" the writing of John Paul the II, the "culture of Life" and Thomas Aquinas. The reaction would be quite different. This conservatives and I hate to say some Catholics would not have off on gone shrill cries of Theocracy!!! I would feel better if I thought this was just sheer ignorance. However I was noting who was using this against Huckabee and they know better.

Huckabee is not going to be talking about Natural Law in terms of John Paul the II, and Thomas Aquinas in front of a bunch of Evangelicals. He is talking to them in the language they understand. It is sad that people knowing this used this against him.