Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, FloydReports.com

The American Conservative Union (ACU) and the granddaddy of all conservative conferences, CPAC, are endangered. Many of the traditional sponsors that supported the conference through thick and thin years have abandoned ship.

The issue over which the Media Research Center, Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, and others have left the room is CPAC’s insistence that GOPProud, an organization of homosexual self-proclaimed conservatives, be given a booth inside the conference. For many conservatives, including us, this recognition of GOProud signifies an acceptance of the open promotion of the gay lifestyle inside the tent of conservatism. As a director of ACU, Floyd is acutely aware of the power struggles this controversy has unleashed inside the organization’s boardroom.

Donald Devine, in an excellent essay available on the ACU website under the title, “Why We are Conservative,” lays out the framework of ideas that built ACU and the modern conservative movement. Devine, a professor of political science, former Reagan administration official, and longtime director of ACU harkens back to the editorial debates at a small publication named National Review in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

Devine writes, “Before the 1950s, there were no conservatives. There were traditionalists and libertarians who opposed the dominant welfare state liberal ideology, and there were Republicans who were ‘do it slower-than-the Democrats,’ moderates. But there were no conservatives in the modern sense. Modern conservatism was invented at National Review magazine in the mid-fifties, primarily by editors, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Frank Meyer.”

And then Devine shares the brilliant nugget of compromise that launched the movement and helped it rise to prominence….

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