The Arlington Group, a powerful association of the Christian Right is, to borrow from the author of the Book of Virtues, picking a (presidential) pony. Some, ponies, like Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee, just don’t look like they can make it to the final stretch. But Fred Thompson, on the other hand, could go the distance. The problem is, to this key group is, he’s a “federalist.”

A fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, Fred Thompson seems poised to take the fight to Iran, if elected. But Iran isn’t on the Arlington radar while the “sanctity of marriage” is.

Here a President Thompson would be a problem for the Arlington agenda—not because of his apparent aversion to covenant marriage, but because he is a federalist, at least when it comes to the “gay marriage” question. In an interview with NRO‘s Jim Geraghty, Arlington member Gary Bauer put it plainly:

“Many of us are intrigued and excited by Thompson, but we have great concerns about his advocacy of federalism in dealing with the issue of protecting the sanctity of marriage, and that is certainly an issue we want to discuss with him further.”

What does “federalist” mean in this context? When it comes to abortion and “gay marriage,” Thompson wants the states to decide. He has called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and he supports a constitutional amendment that makes the definition of marriage a state issue.

But, as an Arlington source tells Geraghty,

“There is concern that the federalist constitutional amendment that he leans toward on marriage just wouldn’t work. How can you have a couple married in Massachusetts and then, when they move to Tennessee they’re not married anymore?”

Admittedly, that is a legitimate concern, and an unavoidable one
whenever government takes it upon itself to “define” something that
simply exists apart from the realm of politics, something “defined” by ancient tradition and custom. But that problem is not resolved by the Arlington agenda: It is, instead, made much worse.

Geraghty’s source continues by saying that

“It just seems to our legal people that America is going to end up with one definition of marriage. That’s what we want, actually, and we want that definition to be the traditional one . . . We hope to convince all the candidates that on this issue federalism is a not as high a value philosophically as making sure marriage has traditional
configuration.”

Given Washington’s track record, are Christian Right leaders really
so naive as to think that the institution of marriage could somehow be “protected” by a federal marriage amendment? Apparently, they are. Is federalism a mere “philosophical” value that has no practical bearing on the protection of America’s culture, traditions,
and moral values? Apparently, the Christian Right thinks so. And this only underscores what the late conservative political theorist Samuel Francis wrote in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture over a decade ago:

“The real problem with the religious right is that, in the long run, its religious vehicle won’t carry it home. If it ever ended abortion, restored school prayer, outlawed sodomy and banned
pornography, I suspect, most of its followers would simply declare victory and retire. But having accomplished all of that, the Christian right would have done absolutely nothing to strip the federal government of the power it has seized throughout this century, restore a proper understanding and enforcement of the Constitution and of republican government, prevent the inundation of the country by anti-Western immigrants, stop the cultural and racial dispossession of the historic American people, or resist the absorption of the American nation into a multicultural and multiracialist globalist regime.”

That the Christian Right has little regard for federalism (or
traditional conservatism), then, isn’t breaking news. What’s changed is that they’re now saying it out loud.

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Aaron D. Wolf is the associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of
American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute.