What to Do When the Bad Guys Win

If you've been following my Facebook or Twitter updates in the past 24 hours, you probably learned something about a pretty inconsequential election happening among the Young Republican National Federation.

If you don't know the story. All you really need to know is that a 38 year-old woman named Audra Shay was in the running for today's YRNF chair election. It was found out that she had publicly condoned some racist comments and even made some racially insensitive remarks in the past herself. After this discovery, many decent people asked her to step aside for the good of the GOP. She refused.

She was elected chair today.

Her entire team of candidates were elected to support her.

You can read the whole story here.

Now people want me to move on for the sake of GOP unity and support the new chair.

No.

I don't make alliances with hate. I don't pretend that racism is a legitimate ideology. There is a truth that has to be recognized here. Although today's election was of little consequence to the GOP or the conservative movement as a whole, make no mistake. We are in the midst of a culture war within the GOP. The battle lines are not drawn over abortion or same-sex marriage. It isn't a war between young and old or educated and uneducated. It is a battle pitting racism and intolerance against acceptance and outreach. It is a battle of good guys versus bad guys.

We're the good guys and we don't make treaties.

To our opponents. When you lay down the weapons of hatred, we will accept you back with acceptance and forgiveness. We will gladly move forward with you as a part of our team. Until then, we will oppose you tirelessly at every turn. We will never join your team.

Hatred is an unsustainable ideology. Hate will not last into eternity. Love will. Hatred will only plunge you deeper into an abyss of darkness that will blot out your view of truth and goodness and beauty. As your minds are poisoned by intolerance and your circle continues to grow smaller and smaller, eventually you will turn on each other. Alliances will dissolve. You hatred will be directed inward. You will obliterate each other and fade into obscurity like all other failed ideologies.

And we will be there to advance the party. You will not steal our party or our movement.

Because conservativism isn't about hate. It's about ideals. It's about the timeless values of truth and beauty and goodness. It's about the sustaining convictions of human experience.

So you go ahead and spew hatred as far and wide as you see fit, but you don't get to take the word "conservative" with you. That's our word and you don't get to sully and dirty and cheapen it with narrowmindedness. It's our movement. And we will wear the label "conservative" with pride no matter your attempts to change it. We'll continue to teach people what conservative principles really are and how most of us live our lives by them.

But mostly, we will continue to oppose you. And we will win.

The steady drumbeat of history produces the rhythm of progress. Old, backwards views fade into the past to history books, the blights of human experience. Truth and goodness and beauty endure.

Love abides.

What to do when the bad guys win. Keep fighting.