Wow.

The first and second installments in this series created a much larger uproar than I expected. And that’s OK. Dialogue is healthy, even uproarious dialogue.

However, given the uproar — the pro-and-con opinions, impressions, and misimpressions recorded in the comments section of the first installment — I’ve decided to expand the series, adding the third installment here, and moving the originally drafted third installment to fourth place.

Let’s start with some background. I’ll try my best to make this brief.

I was raised in a Fundamentalist Christian Republican home. Before names like Falwell and Dobson became nationally known, I knew them, and fully intended to follow in their footsteps.

I announced at age 14 that I sensed the call of God to enter the ministry and eventually become the Pastor of a church. At age 15, I delivered my first sermon to a congregation of several hundred people … and, at age 16, my last. As I’ve written before, “The curiosity of the teenage mind had all-too-quickly vanquished the clarity of childhood,” and thus started the years of doubts and questions that took me through atheistic and agnostic phases before I later made my peace with Christianity, albeit in a different, modified, and (I think) more compassionate form.

My political evolution followed a similar path.

In the decade between my late 20’s and late 30’s, as my income expanded and I fought professional wars to enhance and defend the business prospects of various titans of industry, my Republican affiliation likewise strengthened. I continue to be stridently pro-business/pro-market, but the social foundations of my political leanings began to shake as I approached and crossed the 40 mark, until the questions of middle-age — prompted by the struggles of my only child, the lives of my friends, and the civilizing influence of my wife — conquered the callous, self-centered clarity of the yuppie-years.

One of the outcomes of that evolution was to declare myself a political Independent and eventually launch Central Sanity, which in turn led to an invitation to contribute here at TMV. In the several months since, this evolution has accelerated, with a serious of flip-flops in between, until I realized (not more than a few weeks ago) that I didn’t need to abandon the mantles of either conservative or Republican, anymore than I needed to abandon the mantle of Christianity. Instead, I needed to re-affirm what I felt was right and good about those belief sets and work from within them to modify if not eliminate what I felt was not right and not good.

And so, when I wrote about cruel conservatives yesterday, it was from a deeply personal base of experience and motivation. I have been one of those cruel conservatives … not one of the Haters, but definitely one of the Self/Other Mades who looked askance at the Non Mades and deeply suspected that their lack of privilege was largely due to a deficiency in their work ethic and/or character.

In that sense, I was probably more callous than cruel, and perhaps callous would have been the better adjective to include in the title of this series, from the beginning, since it is the callous conservatives (like I have been) that I am ultimately calling on to (1) exile the truly cruel/hateful from the movement and (2) think beyond their jaded views and modify their callousness, if they have not already done so, with a dose or two of genuine compassion.

Are the terms “conservative” and “liberal” too broad, too ill-defined, too misused and corrupted to stand for something meaningful in this discussion? Not necessarily; not if we take their prevailing street definitions for what they are, and dismiss, for now, the debate about whether those definitions are right, wrong, historically accurate or not. In short, I think there are many aspects of these labels that are still serviceable; that still help us make sense of political camps.

Are there haters among the liberals? Yes. But they are not my concern; they are the concern of the liberals who are not haters and who want to reform the representative bodies of their own political inclinations.

Is there ultimately more compassion in the tough love of conservatism than in the blind love of liberalism? No. The types of love from the two camps are equally valuable, neither superior to the other. The key is to blend and apply them in the most productive combination.

Here, I’m reminded of an analogy that others have suggested: In many respects, today’s conservatives are much like Dad and today’s liberals are much like Mom. For discussion purposes only, let’s take that analogy and apply it to a hypothetical scenario suggested by one of yesterday’s Part I commenters, jwest (who also suggested we title this third installment, “Why do Conservatives Hate Puppies?â€?). Elements of jwest’s analogy are probably fair, others are not, but let’s consider it anyway, because frankly, it helps illustrate the point …

If someone was walking along, fell down and broke a leg, the liberals would treat the symptoms.

They would try to make the person as comfortable as possible, cry with them in empathy, perhaps do an interpretive dance to warn others of the danger of walking and make provisions for their long term care because their misshapen leg will be an inspiration to the greater community of walkers.

They would re-engineer the city streets to prevent walking hazards, pad the curbs and outlaw fast walking. Walkers would be educated, tested and licensed so as not to be a hazard to others.

Conservatives would give the person a piece of rawhide to bit down on while they set the bone. As they walked away, they would turn and say “be careful next time�.

Jwest then asks: “Does the conservative approach seem cruel to you? Which method would be best for the victim and society at large?”

Again, my answer is that (ideally) we need a combination of those approaches, just like ideally, it’s good to have a blend of Dad and Mom approaches to raising children. The child needs both a mother’s doting sympathy and protecting wing, as well as a father’s tough, linear thinking and stern admonitions. And the child would benefit even more, if we imbedded a little of Mom’s approach in Dad’s approach and vice versa.

Few people would consider my wife and me traditional, but when it comes to our son, she does tend to be more sympathetic and Mom-ish than I am, and I do tend to be more stern and Dad-ish than she is. Not always, but often. And while our son would confirm that we have not always been great parents, we have at least tried to learn and emulate elements of each other’s style, to provide our son a healthy balance.

And so, to take this analogy to it’s ultimate conclusion, all I’m asking is that my fellow conservatives — be they dead center, right of center, or right of right of center: (1) replace their oil-stained wife-beater shirts with clean polo’s, and (2) start being a tad more maternal in how they think about, talk about, and act on their tough-love inclinations.

If they do, I think we’ll see the day once again, when conservatives (and their Republican manifestation) are once again respected, much like they were during the days of the soft-spoken but solidly strong Ronald Reagan.