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• Sunday, June 28, 2009 07:02 PM

  Hang on a second

  Wingnut, you completely ignored the entire substance of Joe V.'s question. Well, half of it, anyway; you did mention many policies (although if America's "center-rightness" means we're opposed to big government and find big government usually wasteful, it's a wonder that President Bush didn't save the country 10 trillion needed dollars from an already huge deficit, by doing away with Social Security and Medicare, post-haste).

  However, Joe explicitly questioned your equation of "Center-Right" status with values of "family, honesty and hard work." He wanted to know, wait a minute, who died, made the Right Wing God, and decided that esteem for family, honesty and hard work equals being Center-Right? You dodged it!

  You say:

  --More than a few of you were outraged by the idea that values like family and work should be considered center-right values when you yourselves believe in them and you consider yourselves liberal.

  --But consider "family." Is it conservatives or liberals who are engaged in an effort to expand or even rewrite the definition of what constitutes a family?

  So apparently, liberal acceptance of gay marriage means liberals are anti-family? This argument was made elsewhere, in The Economist, but since gays constitute a significant minority in this country and in the world, and aren't going anywhere, isn't denying them the right to have a family (i.e. marriage and couplehood) reducing the number of familial relationships, and arguably promoting rootless promiscuity by government or majority fiat? Therefore, isn't it the conservatives who are anti-family in this case?

  Nor did you properly address his question, are Honesty and Hard Work really to be considered "center-right"? Then the trades unions, and all the working-class socialist and communist movements throughout the years, were apparently either "center-right"? Or perhaps they weren't really hard workers, then; simply lazy members of the working-class?

  "Auto manufacturer talks broke down today; conservatives say the Center-right unions are at fault." I like that! Rolls off the tongue very nicely.

  —Villagejonesy Read Villagejonesy's other letters
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