Bill Lee: “I am a Republican because I am a conservative. I am a conservative because I believe the Constitution and the ideals…”

“I am a Republican because I am a conservative. I am a conservative because I believe the Constitution and the ideals that it asserts on behalf of the American people are worth protecting, worth defending, even when they are untimely, even when they are unpopular, and especially for the vulnerable, for the marginalized, and for the forgotten among us. Equal rights, equal opportunity, equal justice under the law, equal dignity under God--we fail as Americans when we violate these ideals, when we neglect them to whatever degree, when we exclude some number of our neighbors from their God-given share of our common inheritance, when we declare in the interest of expedience and in defiance of our own national creed that some people somehow are less equal than others. Such was the cruelty of our Nation through our laws, long-visited on African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and ethnic minorities, on women, on the disabled, and on religious minorities, including religious minorities like my own forebears as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Happily, this is no longer the case. Happily, all of these groups-- who, taken together, comprise the vast majority of all Americans--were at different times in our history affirmatively brought under the protection of our laws.…”