Leithart: The Great American Spirit

“My youngest son and I just finished a road trip,” says Peter J. Leithart in today’s column . ”I think it was somewhere between Wisconsin and Minnesota that it began to dawn on me that . . . in, with, and under the teeming diversity, we are one country.”

Social conservatives make both a substantive and a strategic error if we write off our opponents as un-American. It muddies the issues to suppose that the country is divided between patriots and traitors. The emerging divisions are in some cases far more basic than that, and we won’t understand where the battle lines are if we fail to recognize that gay pride and pro-family activism both have deep roots in the same American soil. We’re all children of the founding adventurers, and, like it or not, we all bear the imprint of that youthful and quite wondrous form of humanity known as “American.”

Read the full column here .