Uncommon Commentary #466: Gaping at a Gap in the GOP

(The pun in the title works only if one voices “GOP” as a word that rhymes with “hop”.)
Democrats often try too hard to imagine rifts in the Republican Party, but it seems to me (an unaligned voter) that there is at least a hairline fracture not only in the GOP but also in the political ideology wherewith it is largely conterminous, which is rather incorrectly known as either “conservatism” or “the right wing”. (See the entry for “retroversive” in the list of domanisms, below, and the last paragraph of UC #5.)  This potential schism is between “social conservatives”, i.e., persons whose primary policy-goal is to reverse our country’s passing into ethical oblivion, and those “conservatives” whose area of chief concern is instead either the economy or that of defense and foreign relations.  There is already some degree of disharmony, for GOP strategists have long deemed moral issues like abortion and “Gay rights” as ones to be avoided by Republican candidates for public office.  The US Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the sodomites may act as a catalyst for this latent development, because a significant and apparently growing number of persons who call themselves political conservatives approve of legalizing same-sex marriage, considering this trend to be perfectly consistent with the US Founders’ emphasis on “liberty”. (Unfortunately, their assessment is likely accurate.) It ought to be noted also that this cause is very popular with libertarians, who are essentially “conservatives” without traditional concepts of virtue and vice.  If our country continues to abandon Christian principles, and secular-minded patriots continue to justify this abandonment by appealing to “American” principles, my fellow Christians may see the truth of what I’ve been saying for years: that the USA’s national ideology is incompatible with Christian belief, and that we need to choose between the two.