Why do these conservatives keep kicking me in my conservative nuts?

God's Lonely Man

As readers of the New York Times will know, I am a conservative who has run afoul of people who say they’re conservatives but aren’t really — for example, the MAGA movement and my fellow evangelical Christians.

And if you have read my dozens of columns about this, you will also know I have remained true to conservatism even as these other so-called conservatives denounce me and attack my family including our adopted black daughter.

I am here to tell you about these so-called conservatives’ latest outrageous conduct toward us. But first a bit of background:

One of the reasons I came to work for the Times is the paper’s tradition of being scrupulously fair to conservatives — not in its coverage of news events, which as a conservative I of course find liberal-biased — but to highly-paid conservative intellectuals such as David Brooks, Pamela Paul, Bret Stephens, and others.

Why, just the other day, when Republicans interrogated Dr. Anthony Fauci about the lab leak that, conservatives reasonably believe, caused COVID and was thus a Chinese bioweapon for which President Trump could not be blamed, the Times published a guest essay supporting that theory. Conservatives were very happy about this, if perhaps somewhat intemperate, and as someone who has been critical of Fauci myself (though temperately!) I think it shows just how right I was about the Times and conservatives.

And it’s not as if I don’t have impeccable conservative credentials. All my political positions are conservative — why, I have even come out against Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that legalized birth control nationally, and its — as I have written — “total absence of textual constitutional support.” I was even ahead of Clarence Thomas on that! (Though of course Thomas and I have always been in accord about abortion and so-called “gay marriage.”)

This is because I understand that while liberals claim rights are theirs just because they say so, as a conservative Christian I know that all rights come from God, which means things of which God disapproves, such as sodomy and feminism, cannot be rights.

This is why it’s so painful to me that, time and time again, I am not only assailed by MAGA people, who say they’re conservative but aren’t really, but also by religious leaders, including those of my own church, who also say they’re conservative but aren’t really. True, they were nice to me when I enlisted as an Army lawyer to help the United States pacify the Iraqi people — but what Christian wouldn’t approve of that noble crusade?

Yet in recent years a lot of my fellow churchgoers have been downright vicious toward me and my family. I have done everything I could think of to find harmony in the situation. I even wrote in The Atlantic (another fine, fair-minded-if-liberally-biased journal!) about how it was not just conservatives who were giving us a hard time about adopting a child from Ethiopia — liberals, I wrote, were also guilty, because Obama audited people like me who took the adoption tax credit, and some liberals also suggested the white evangelical adoption movement was weird. True, liberals weren’t the ones showing up at our church to scream at us about it, but that just shows how encased in their liberal bubble they are.

Now my church has “cancelled” me from a scheduled public appearance over my beliefs — yes, just like true conservatives such as myself are always complaining liberals do! If I were not so deeply devoted to conservatism as God has revealed it to me, I would be shaken in my faith and my ideology. But, as should be clear by now, there is absolutely nothing that can change my mind about either.

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