Tuesday February 16, 2010
Conservative Leaders to Unveil Mount Vernon “Manifesto”
By Kathleen Gilbert
Correction: This article originally stated that the Mount Vernon Statement would be signed on Wednesday at the Mount Vernon Estate. This was incorrect. The Mount Vernon Estate is not associated with the document. Instead the document was signed at Collingwood Library and Museum. We apologize for the error.
MOUNT VERNON, Virginia, February 16, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Prominent conservative leaders announced this week the advent of a new manifesto defending conservative Constitutional values against left-wing political trends – and rooting those values in God, natural law, and human virtue.
Leaders expect to unveil the “Mount Vernon Statement” Wednesday at Collingwood Library and Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. The statement, they say, is modelled off the Sharon Statement, a landmark document widely considered to have helped launch the modern conservative movement in the 1960s.
The leaders who drafted the statement include: Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, Media Research Center leader Brent Bozell, ConservativeHQ.com chairman Richard Viguerie, and American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, among others.
An excerpt of the Mount Vernon statement the leaders released in advance reads:
“In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.
“Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?”
The document concludes that the true change needed “is not movement away from but toward our founding principles.”
“At this important time, we need a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” it states.
“The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.”
The signing of the statement at Collingwood Library Wednesday was scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the largest national gathering of conservatives, which will open the following day in the nation’s capital.
Meese characterized the goal of the document as “reminding economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership in the world,” reports Politico.
American Spectator Publisher Alfred Regnery, another drafter, said the document was also intended to respond to the notion that the conservative movement “needs to become more mainstream.” “This was a reaction to that to some extent, that we thought we could stick to our guns pretty well,” he said.
According to The American Spectator’s W. James Antle, the conservative framework proposed by the document is also intended to “[inform] conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.”
Former Congressman David McIntosh, a leading participant in the Conservative Action Project, told TAS that the leaders hope the document will help sharpen the principles that already unite grassroots conservative activity in America. Such activity has become eminently visible in the enormous Tea Party movement, which sprung up spontaneously over the past year in opposition to the big-government policies of the Obama administration.
“We’re hoping this will be picked up by the Tea Party activists as a framework,” said McIntosh. “To have an impact, it must come from the people.”