A Gandalf moment

A previous supposition had been that politicians and judges generally left moral matters to the regulation of the community at large, meaning pastors, parents and the like. It was only with the school prayer decisions of the 1960s that government added moral and philosophical questions to its agenda.

You can see the problem. If politics indeed is the art of compromise, what does it mean when politicians address the moral absolutes, as with the matter of unborn human life? You compromise -- how? By making abortion sometimes illegal, sometimes not? And in the process outrage everyone? It is thus with gay marriage. Where lies the possible compromise?

Not that in some Ayn Randian prehistory, government viewed all such matters as negligible. States generally prohibited abortion and prescribed marriage as a rite for heterosexuals alone. Such judgments rested on the popular will -- revocable whenever that will should change. When such questions became national rather than local in character, local people suddenly became disenfranchised -- and so needed help in Congress and the White House. The "religious right" was born.

What social conservatives will do with their Gandalf Moment, 2006-07, we cannot know yet. Romney could sweep away all doubts, or a major nose-holding campaign could be in the offing. Whatever happens, all of America has a chance to confront the consequences of Big, Hungry Government, and not just the economic consequences, but also the moral ones -- bigger in their own way than all the rest.