Jennifer Miller and True Conservatism

Jennifer Miller, the tightly-wound crusader from Mason, Ohio has rated a front page feature in the Cincinnati Enquirer. She is an education board member who attracted national attention a few months ago for going apoplectic over a couple of Muslim students at the high school who asked if they could spend their lunch hour in the media lab during the month of Ramadan.

Miller declared "We are a Christian nation, not a Muslim nation." The article also mentions her bona fides as a critic of school spending as an associate of COAST and CARE, two small but extremely aggressive activist groups that dispute tax levies.

Reading about this bewildering person helps remind me of my conservative values. Starting from the top, I suppose I'm an economic conservative first. Markets do not create universally fair outcomes, nor should they, but they provide opportunities for the bright and hardworking, and they create value in the form of jobs and prosperity. Second, I'm a foreign policy conservative. Despite errors by the "neos" I think liberalism is ill-equipped to tamp down many clear and present dangers. And furthermore, some societal systems really are better than others, and here I'm talking democracy, first amendment-type freedoms, open markets and pluralism - all of the things that folks like Islamic fascists, for example, resent and seek to destroy because they corrode their brutal autocracies.

But when it comes to the domestic culture war, as advanced by self-appointed conservative Christians like Jennifer Miller, I get off the proverbial bus. I'm firm in my belief that involved parents, coherent families, and strong communities are the antidote to many (if not all) social maladies. But this doesn't translate into using governments or education boards as a wedge to promote one group or exclude another. And as a Catholic my faith informs me we are much more than particles in the void, as my secular friends would like to insist. But I can't endorse the notion of making Genesis part of history class. This seems contrary to the aforementioned concept of pluralism, which has a rich and deeply rooted (if occasionally contentious) tradition in our republic.

The Democrat Party, at least, has been blessed to have a persona like Jennifer Miller out there railing away under the banners of "Christian" and "conservative". Because I think the ratio of support the Enquirer observed following the initial Muslim controversy (two thirds against Miller) is an accurate barometer of where middle America stands.