On the Square Today

In his latest On the Square column, Joe Carter discusses what conservatives should mean when talking about limited government :

There’s an old Cold War-era joke about an ex-Communist who gets into an argument with a young man newly infatuated with Marxism. After the youth repeatedly attempts to explain why Marx and Lenin had all the right solutions, the exasperated old man finally retorts, “Son, your answers are so old that I’ve forgotten the questions.”

In many ways we conservatives are like the young Marxist. We tend to be more familiar with conservative solutions than we are with the questions they were meant to address.

Also today, George Weigel brings to our attention a martyrdom in Pakistan :

A lot of the history of the last six and a half decades has at least something to do with the failure of British intelligence to figure out that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a man whose time was running out just as the British Empire was preparing to divide its crown jewel at Jinnah’s insistence—including the personal history of Shahbaz Bhatti, who was born a generation after Jinnah’s will created Pakistan.

The 42-year-old Bhatti, a Catholic and Pakistan’s federal minister for religious minorities, was murdered—or, to be more precise, martyred—this past March 2 while being driven to work. His murderer left a note in which he explained that Bhatti had to die because he opposed Pakistan’s blasphemy law, a crude attempt to impose a form of Islamic sharia on the country.