Will Bramnick, Bergen, and other NJGOPers embrace Fidelity over Pride?
/By Rubashov
With Republican primary elections over, we can expect to hear the word “conservative” used a whole lot less by candidates supported by the state’s GOP establishment and various interest groups – like unions supporting Joe Biden and pro-transgender “women’s” groups. Now the word will disappear from campaign flyers and media – tucked away until the next time it is needed.
But that doesn’t mean that conservatives will go away. They are a mighty large portion of the electorate, even if they aren’t fully embraced by a major political party. The conservative tradition is a philosophy, a thinking tradition, and more than just a word used in advertising to get someone to buy a particular product.
Robert George is an American legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual who serves as the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He lectures on constitutional interpretation, civil liberties, philosophy of law, and political philosophy. He is the Herbert W. Vaughan senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Ronald Reagan Honorary Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Nootbaar Honorary Distinguished Professor of Law at Pepperdine University, as well as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
This being the month of June, we expect to see a multitude of Republican-controlled county and local governments – as well as GOP institutions like the Republican State Committee – falling over themselves to declare this “LGBTQ+ Pride” month. By doing so, they will be formally aligning themselves and the GOP with this relentless ideology in its attempt to sweep away all other traditions before it.
Professor George has a better way. He has called for the month of June to be recognized and celebrated as "Fidelity Month." Instead of the “Pride” bandwagon, the New Jersey GOP and towns and counties controlled by elected Republicans can declare June to be “Fidelity Month – a month dedicated to the importance of fidelity to God, spouses and families, and our country and communities.”
Professor George points to a decline in Americans' beliefs and values pertaining to religion, family, community, and country. He has suggested that it is time for traditionalists to act to correct this decline. He told the National Catholic Register:
Recent polling data put out by The Wall Street Journal showed that there has been a very precipitous drop in Americans’ understanding of the importance of faith, of family, of patriotism. And I cannot help but draw the inference that this drop is both a cause and an effect of our current social ills: crime and delinquency, drugs, alienation, failure of family formation and family disintegration. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. The mental-health crisis among young people cannot be attributed primarily to COVID-19 and the lockdowns because all the data show that this crisis was well underway before COVID-19 was on anybody’s radar.
But will bodies like the Morris County Commissioners and the Morris County Republican Committee – deep in the heart of “Christieland” (as in presidential candidate Chris Christie) – act? And what will all those candidates who were loudly proclaiming how “conservative” they were just a few days ago do? We will be reporting on it.
This is part of a national movement by conservatives to ask organizations, public officials, legislators, religious leaders, and others to celebrate the new designation. Professor George was asked if he was “concerned that some might frame your campaign in a negative light — as something opposing ‘Pride Month’?” He replied:
It’s a free country. People are entitled to their beliefs and to express their beliefs. They can celebrate them by focusing on a day, a week, or a month. But nobody gets a monopoly on a particular day or a particular month. As a Catholic, I think of June as the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I don’t think by designating June as Fidelity Month, I’m interfering with or detracting from or making some statement about the Sacred Heart. Catholics can observe June as the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with their fellow Catholics and Fidelity Month with everybody else. If someone wants to observe their favorite cause and also observe Fidelity Month, I’m fine with that. The more the merrier.
Now that seems to be a compromise that even Jon Bramnick could live with. But will he propose a legislative resolution naming June “Fidelity Month”? We will just have to wait and see.
FOX News reported: "Professor George, along with Deacon John Barry of Top Dog Design Studio, decided to use the myrtle wreath to represent the proposed holiday, as myrtle symbolizes fidelity. They also included other elements to symbolize God, family and country..."
“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed. If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
Micah Rasmussen
Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell
