The RNC Convention left me feeling great about our country’s future, IF Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are successful in November . . . but, at the same time, the frequent heavily Social Conservative messages I heard leave me feeling less than great about OUR personal futures.
Social engineering ‘in the name of God’ is still social engineering and when the prospective leaders of our country are the ones engaging in that social engineering, OUR personal futures are worrisome. The primary role of government is (or at least should be) to protect the rights of American citizens’ — those basic inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those right were not granted by the Constitution (they are “inalienable,” i.e., natural and inherently legal) and cannot be taken away by the government. Yet Social Conservatives have taken biblical moral imperatives and are attempting to fraudulently insert them into the Constitution.
My problem with Social Conservatism really has nothing to do with being an atheist (I am) — it has to do with the Social Conservative’s lack of respect for people who believe that their personal lives should be insulated from our government’s interference — interference by any level of government — as long as they are obeying existing laws. This level of ‘insulation’ is not a whim or even a personal belief; it’s specified in the Constitution.
The first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were written to protect the freedoms and liberties OF the people FROM government overreach. Yet Social Conservatives try to use part of the Fifth Amendment (“No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) as a legal justification for outlawing a woman’s freedom of choose to terminate a pregnancy. Properly stated, this phrase in the Fifth Amendment should read: ‘The government shall not deny it’s citizens the right to life, liberty or property ownership without due process of law.’ By trying to deny a woman’s freedom of choice in matters of abortion they are, in fact, denying that woman’s “liberty.”
Back To Religion
Social Conservatives are not only try to subvert the Constitution by denying the real purpose of the Bill of Rights (to protect YOU from THEM), they whitewash their real motivation to try and remove a woman’s freedom of choice; the real (and only) motivation they have is their personal and religious belief that abortion is ‘sinful.’
They might be right that every abortion is a ‘sin against God’ but that (fact or not) has absolutely no relevance to our laws — laws that clearly recognize every citizen’s right to manage his or her own body and it’s functions — law that, by their absence, do not make “sins against God” illegal.
From here the case against Social Conservatives naturally turns to their other pet “sin,” gay marriage. There are, no doubt, many bible verses that can be used to show that religions are justified when they call gay marriage an abomination — but there is not one phrase, in a fair reading of the Constitution, that outlaws it.
Could it be that Social Conservatives have edited their copies of the Constitution to include biblical admonitions?
The concept of separation of church and state may not be written into the Constitution per se but the spirit of that concept is very clearly embodied in that document.
My Views on Politics and Society 
When it comes to new ideas about expanding government, social conservatives are largely still quite reserved exactly because of their desire not to feed a bureaucratic beast likely to develop an agenda independent of its intended purpose. As a group, they would far prefer to see mediating institutions take on the great social reforms of the day, just as they would prefer to see the church return to a much more prominent role in addressing both the needs and root causes of poverty. Another issue that offers great promise for the relationship between social/religious conservatives and libertarians is school choice. Prior to September 11, the movement for school choice was gaining steam very rapidly. It was the rare initiative that seemed to fit libertarian purposes easily while simultaneously addressing the question of social justice. After September 11, the war on terror sucked all the air out of the room for creative social policy advances, and school choice moved well down the national agenda.