One of the programs that has a nice fit with President Bush’s faith-based initiative is the promotion of responsible fatherhood, and one particular organization, the National Fatherhood Initiative, has done a good job of leading a movement toward restoration of traditional concepts of family, marriage, and fatherhood. Recent U. S. Census statistics reflect that one-third of American children live apart from their biological fathers, 83% do not see their fathers more than once per week, and 40% have not seen them in at least one year. Frightening, and consistent with Daniel Moynihan’s famous 1965 report: “A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos, and it is richly deserved.”

Bush has committed significant resources through grants to community and faith-based organizations whose mission includes promoting responsible fatherhood. It is emblematic of our times that his nominee to lead the initiative, Wade Horn, is being opposed by feminist groups because of his outspoken advocacy of traditional marriage and fatherhood. And it is instructive that in a recent interview, when pressed, Patricia Ireland, President of the National Organization of Women, wouldn’t answer the simplest question about the preference of marriage between a man and a woman over other family structures. Census figures show that fewer than 25% of American households are comprised of a married couple with children and that this percentage has been steadily declining. Should we care? Should we support public policy that favors family structures that are in the minority? It is well understood by leading family sociologists that fathers bring cultural influences to families and children more than mothers, whose biological commitment is more compelling. Consequently, the involvement of fathers must be supported and influenced by laws and societal norms. Traditional marriage is the most basic public institution of a self-governing society. It changes goals, behavior, obligations, and priorities in ways that enhance civil society and make the good society possible. Studies show that the leading indicator of family and child dysfunction and poverty is the absence of a father. Moynihan also said “…politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Traditional marriage and fatherhood should hold a privileged place in our public policy and our politics.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has been roundly criticized editorially for several of his vetoes of legislation passed in the recently concluded legislative session, none more vociferously than his rejection of a bill banning the execution of mentally retarded murderers. Some suggested that this adds to Texas’ image as a callous and cruel place. But, in fact, it should enhance its image as a place that respects the role of juries in the American Constitutional system of justice, a role that, properly understood, gives juries much more authority in applying the law than most judges, lawyers, and our political class want to admit. To reduce determination of the capacity of the accused at the time of the crime purely to narrow legal definitions adds to the procedural complexity of applying justice, which should be, as one letter to The Houston Chronicle noted, “to balance the spirit and the letter of the law.” William Saletan, writing in “Slate”, makes the analogy of the death penalty debate with the abortion debate in the sense that, he says, both have a pro-life side and a pro-choice side, and he alleges that abortion “pro-lifers” are mainly death penalty “pro-choicers”, particularly when it comes to executions of the mentally retarded. Considering the drastic moral differentiation between abortion and execution, this analogy is a huge reach for all but the political demagogues who want to govern by polling and anecdotal reference to high profile case.

The debate in Congress on the Patients’ Bill of Rights legislation sent me back to my notes on a Rice University lecture series of several years ago on ethics in today’s society. The subject then was “Hillary Care”, but the questions remain. The most basic one is “is there a right to health care?” You may suggest that the American people have already answered this question in the affirmative. I’m not so sure. A corollary question railed in our lecture group was “of all the unfortunate circumstances in the world, which ones constitute unfairness and generate a set of rights, therefore claims on society?” After all, you can’t have a right without a legitimate and enforceable claim to satisfy that right. The rights that our founders believed government were instituted to secure included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the latter generally considered to include property rights). They were also very clear about the source of these rights (“endowed by our Creator”) and they agreed with President John Kennedy who said, “The rights of man come from the hand of God, not the state.”

So how have we arrived at this notion of a right to health care? I suggest that this perversion of the Constitution began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union message, in which he proclaimed a second bill of rights because, he said, the original set “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” These new rights included “the right to adequate medical care…” which, of course implied a claim on society. I mention this because I believe it is important to have more of a national dialogue on these philosophical questions before we proceed to adopt universal health care. And make no mistake: Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy have every intention of succeeding with incrementalism where they failed with the comprehensive plan in 1994.

In my view, the pending legislation (as I write, it has just been approved by the Senate) is a good place to start refocusing the dialogue, with a veto by President Bush. Then we can get on with the business of transforming health care policy by empowering individuals with Medical Savings Accounts, making insurance premiums tax deductible by individuals, providing for coverage portability, phasing all employers out of the health insurance business so that the insured own their policies, and returning individual responsibility and cost/benefit considerations to the system. Health care is a contractual relationship between providers and consumers, not a right.

In November 2000, I wrote that, in spite of incremental improvement in some areas, the public school accountability measures adopted around the country over the past several years will never be enough to truly transform public education. The problem is incentives and what passes for accountability. The only real accountability rests with customers (parents) who are empowered to exit the system if it isn’t producing the desired results for their child. This provides the only incentive that school administrators will ultimately respond to. If there is no meaningful threat to funding and job security because of poor performance, there is no accountability. This raises another question: what constitutes poor performance? Again, there should be institutional standards and plenty of testing, but parents are the ultimate judges of failure. There is clearly evident moral hazard in permitting the school bureaucracy to define what constitutes acceptable performance while also controlling the evaluation process. Any education reform package that does not recognize that parental choice is the key to accountability is not worthy of the name. That is the big disappointment in what became of President Bush’s education bill and what happens when a “bipartisan” bill-signing ceremony takes priority over a principled fight that should have had at least equal priority with the tax cut.

My instincts, political and otherwise, have been conservative for as long as I can remember (Goldwater ’64, etc.), although, at least until lately, my definition has not always been as clear as I would have liked. For me, conservatism consists in dispositions and habits of mind and heart encompassing the accumulation of experience and wisdom over many generations, enlightened and guided by God. What is it that this conservatism wishes to conserve? Many tried and true virtues and traditions, but mainly self-governance, both individually and institutionally. Why has this been so difficult? Because the competition with self-governance in its several facets is so fierce. There are many competing options that are attractive to human nature in its fallen state. In spite of the competition, and an almost complete lapse into statism and relativism over most of the past century, I believe that self-governance, conservatively understood, is in ascendancy. In preparing this essay, however, I was struck by two pieces in the Wall Street Journal written about ten months apart by Shelby Steele. In August 2000 he announced that, for the first time, American conservatism is going on the offensive in the culture war through “compassionate conservatism”(a term I have always thought redundant; conservatism is compassionate by definition). In June 2001 he writes that the greatest limitation on conservative political power in America is a gap in moral authority, primarily on the issues of poverty and race. The left, he says, has failed miserably in addressing these issues, but retains the moral high ground because it took responsibility for them in the 1960’s and it will retain it until conservatism takes the same moral risks in addressing them soon. We conservatives know that our principles, properly understood and applied, are clearly superior and have stood the tests of generations, but it’s difficult to argue Steele’s point that more principled boldness and political risk will be necessary to capture the moral high ground from the left.