Reply #15: The author of the article made some great points about social conservatism

[theHandpuppet]

(Excerpt)
I have a theory: Social conservatives, more than liberals, tend to embrace myths and make-believe. They distrust realities that don't jibe with their fairy tales. They're more inclined to dismiss scientific evidence of evolution and global-warming. They're more inclined to see the world in simple terms of good and bad -- with no ambiguities -- just like in John Wayne's movies.

<snipping>
Social conservatives generally see the American flag as more sacred than the U.S. Constitution. That's because the flag is about emotion, while the Constitution is about complicated concepts that require courts to intepret. We get no freedoms from the flag, but we are supposed to treat it with almost religious reverence. We get our American system -- freedoms and all -- from the Constitution, but nobody's going to get upset if I carelessly throw a copy of it in the garbage.

In that same sense, the popular image of John Wayne is about emotion rather than complicated concepts. He seemed manly because he wasn't very complicated, at least in his roles on the screen. In his movies, he didn't play lawyers or judges or politicians or professors. Rather, he played cowboys and marshals and soldiers and other kinds of men who took no guff from anybody and didn't have to study legalistic footnotes to decide what was right or wrong....