Here:
"If you don’t believe there is any cosmic order undergirding the visible world, and if you don’t believe that you are obliged to harmonize your own behavior with that unseen order (the Tao, you might say), then why should you bind yourself to moral precepts you find disagreeable or uncongenial? The most human act could be not to yield to nature, but to defy nature. Why shouldn’t you? Or, to look at it another way, why should we consider our own individual desires unnatural? Does the man who sexually and emotionally desires union with another man defying [sic] nature? Well, says Hart, it depends on what you consider nature to be."
In the final analysis the struggle for conservatism in America is the struggle for America, the struggle for the priority of what Russell Kirk called the permanent things, for what Plato called the ideas, for what Moses called the words written by the finger of God on the holy mountain, for what Paul claimed was written on every Gentile heart, perhaps even for what the Confucians called the mandate of heaven, and surely for what George Washington called an indispensable support: the religion and morality we all once shared, "with slight shades of difference" he said.
It is fundamentally the struggle for the priority of a transcendent moral order which cannot be derisively swept aside as passe "social issues." Neither "fiscal conservatism" nor liberty can exist without "Thou shalt not steal." There can be no rapprochement with libertarianism, not even as a private matter, and the First Amendment must be rescued from those who insist its intent was inspired by the ideological thinking of the Enlightenment's atheists rather than by the progress of specifically Christian weariness with internecine warfare over religion.
