Yet, for the sake of clarity, social conservatives are the bedrock of the conservative movement. Social issues define a culture. If a nation cannot rally around a shared set of commonly held social values, such as traditional marriage, then the claim to nationhood is tenuous at best.
THAT thinking is the entire problem we have with both parties and especially the conservative movement itself.
Our social fabric is not easily defined and our core values have not changed but how we define them has. The country social cores are not based on any defined principles like marriage but only freedoms and that is the only way we need to look at them. By defining what our social values are without considering that we are not a monolithic society chips away at the foundation of our entire country and the forcing of values to make one uniformed rule or law that applies to everyone makes the conservative movement as a whole the same as the liberal movement.
I would think that social conservatives would have learned a lesson by being defeated many many times and having new blood injected into the dying body of the movement via libertarian principles, they would have a new perspective on how to fight for their core issues they feel are important, which some are trivial at this moment. BUT alas, they haven't learned a thing and won't because their focus is skewed to making sure that their values are forced to be the nation's values which is not right to begin with nor will work.
No matter how you look at it, and as trivial as some of these issues are, the main issues that many who claim to be conservatives are not the main issues that the country is concerned about - the economy and jobs - because if the foundation of the conservative movement is and always will be the social segment, the people in the movement as a whole will always have to pandered to those who call themselves social conservatives and ignore real issues.
Commonly held mores and social values are the glue which holds a nation together. The quickest and surest way to kill a nation is for citizens to disregard bedrock principles. Those who wish the United States resembled Denmark should stop calling themselves conservative. Social libertines will never find a home in the conservative movement. Social issues trump all other considerations. Beware any who pretend otherwise.
While that is true to a certain extent, the morels and social values shift all the time and with time evolve, compare the 19th century to the latter 20th century - you will find a lot of things that you assumed didn't happen, happened. No nation has been killed in our lifetimes when they have shifted their core social principles from one side to another and they never will in our lifetimes. More often than not external forces are deemed to be the cause of any and all shifts in the social fabric of the country when it is not, blaming those without understanding or even caring where the changes are coming from. If we want to be run like a country by a select few who holds our values to the level of WASPs and have a homogeneous country with the same social rules for every and all occasions that failed in the 19th century, we should continue down this path of ignorance and use of resources to fight things that are not going to change overnight or maybe not change at all.
Social issues are the back ground issues, trivial in many respects to real issues that we face as a country. The economy trumps all, and second to that is our defense - not traditional marriage or abortion - which is all issues that have been and continue to be addressed in the court system but more importantly won't change unless it is through the courts. What matters for a strong country is not an amendment defining marriage but an amendment that defines the limitations of our government. What matters for a strong country is not whether or not lyrics of a song are damaging our children but that we can provide a path for them to have a good or better life than we have had. ALL of this is not happening because no one wants to put aside the idea that we need to control people to move the country forward and we keep electing people who are only promising things to groups of people and not to the country.
