In a column at FoxNews.com, Lee Edwards of The Heritage Foundation says:
Wishful thinking liberals have tried to interpret the 2006 elections and the ensuing lively debate among conservatives about the future as signs of a conservative crackup or breakdown. But intense uninhibited debate is a sign of intellectual vigor, not decay.
I predict that the current debate among conservatives will lead to a renewed fusionism of the major strains — traditionalist, libertarian, neoconservative — of conservatism. It will be a fusionism based on the ideas of limited government, the free market, individual freedom and responsibility, a balance between liberty and law, a belief in a transcendent moral order, and a commitment to virtue, private and public.
These are the core beliefs, bounded by the Constitution, on which American conservatism rests and by which its most successful leaders have sought to govern.
I hope he is right, and I hope we can find more of those successful leaders that will govern based on his ideas — because liberals are moving out sprightly. They are gearing up to increase government involvement in the workplace and to further criminalize speech and attitudes:
The president of the largest national gay-rights group, Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign, said he has high hopes for two long-pending proposals that failed to get through the GOP-controlled Congress. One would outlaw employment discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender people; another would include them among the groups protected in federal hate-crimes legislation.
This is from an article at MSNBC titled, “Liberals aim to ram measures past Congress.”
I’m not aware that our constitution says anything about “gay-rights”. I don’t think it says anything about straight-rights either. It does say quite a lot about human-rights. If a person is treated unfairly in the workplace, for any reason, there are laws and mechanisms to deal with it. When a crime is committed there are laws that provide for punishment without having to account for the social attitude of the perpetrator.