Thinking aloud

Thinking aloud can be dangerous. I’m going to do it anyway. (Oh yes, living on the edge!)

Why the snide tone for social conservatives, Paul Wells (and Chris Selley)?

As the inimitable Chris Selley put it, “Attention social conservatives: You’ve been had. Again.” But of course, social conservatives like being had and, now that they’ve been informed they’ve been had, will get mad at the Citizen and probably Selley and me for pointing it out. Not at the prime minister of Canada for playing them like a cheap fiddle.

After all, at what point has a voter not been had by an elected official? Aren’t we all cheap fiddles? Has any party fulfilled their promises in recent memory? Are we not all faced with a pretty sad specter of look-alike parties that say one thing and then do another?

If they’re going to come down so hard on so-cons I’d like some concrete action items on how to approach this.

I questioned my initial reaction to Chris Selley’s commentary after a white-haired savvy so-con wrote me to say she never had any trust in Prime Minister Harper on abortion.

And I realized, I’ve been on the record saying the same thing. As have others.

It didn’t mean that when the Conservative government did the right thing by refusing to fund abortions overseas, that I didn’t support that. I did, and I did so publicly. Of course I would. I am a woman of principle and if that were Jack Layton’s new policy, I would have supported him publicly.

I call myself a robust and very much small c conservative, for the record. I’m pro-life. I’m in favour of smaller government, lower taxes (we live in Canada, for the love of the saints!) and the right of families to have fun events on their own property.

Other people call me so-con, and since that tends to annoy all the right people, I go with it.

The people we ought to be challenging are the politicians, not a group of voters who have no representation anywhere, but do get a better hearing with the Conservatives. I’ve known long time Liberals to leave the Liberal fold over the life issue. There’s no pro-life party in Canada by a long shot, but you go where you get the better hearing, and that just makes sense. How is it that they are supposed to change? By voting for the Marxist-Leninists? Spoiling ballots?

So-cons make an easy target. The media enjoy holding them in derision. For the most part, they avoid so-cons scrupulously, the nice, normal ones and focus on the dull windbags, subsequently making commentary that either doesn’t ring true or is blatantly false, all because they couldn’t bring themselves to stretch out a hand across the aisle.

That said, I’m pretty sure many so-cons will indeed stay home come the next federal election. Perhaps we’re having successive minority governments precisely because of that.

Here ends the rant.

by