Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, is one of the few contemporary conservatives who acknowledge the history of conservative opposition to emancipation. Where other conservatives like to lay claim to the abolitionist or civil rights mantle, Gerson admits that “honesty requires the recognition that many conservatives, in other times, have been hostile to religiously motivated reform” and that “the conservative habit of mind once opposed most of these changes.”79 Indeed, as Samuel Huntington suggested a half-century ago, saying no to such movements in real time may be what
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