Ghost of Paul Weyrich in the Halls of Heritage
At least one of the reasons there has been a revolt at the Heritage Foundation has less to do with Tucker Carlson and more to do with a gentleman many young policy people will not have heard of, the great Paul Weyrich.
What many have forgotten is that Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation alongside Ed Feulner, with a generous grant from conservative beer baron Joseph Coors. Feulner went on to be the driving force and face of Heritage for the next several decades.
While Heritage was founded to promote anti-communism, smaller government, and business deregulation, a crucial internal debate centered on Heritage's stance toward social issues, also known as the Culture Wars. This tension over whether Heritage would support social conservatism, alongside national security and economic conservatism, led Paul Weyrich to leave just a few years after its founding.
Long-time Weyrich aide Connie Marshner points to the various Family Protection Acts debated in Congress in the late 1970s. She says, "[they] represented the first systematic effort across the pro-family movement (such as it was at the time) to assemble all the grievances against federal policy and attempt to remedy them." "Heritage wouldn't touch a social issue with a ten-foot pole," she says. And she is right. But Paul Weyrich would..........................
I
wonder
how
many
of
the
old
anti-communist,
small-government
crowd
at
Heritage
could
feel
Paul
Weyrich's
ghost
walking
the
halls
of
Heritage?
Kevin Roberts arrived, a Catholic warrior-intellectual who believes social issues are foundational to America's health. In recent months, under his guidance and with Richards and Roger Severino leading the way, Heritage produced the paper "Saving America by Saving the Family," which has pointed Heritage in a whole new direction and possibly caused some consternation in the building.
The Tucker Carlson issue may have sparked the initial revolt, but the real catalyst for some small-government advocates leaving has been the organization's new focus on previously forbidden social issues. This was not the Heritage they knew. The paper could have been written by Paul Weyrich in 1979.
The paper proposes using government power to encourage marriage between men and women, not same-sex couples. It supports tax credits for married men and women who have children, then more children, and so on. Some green eyeshade libertarians at Heritage opposed this....................