Not real sure how that article ended up on HuffPo. The incongruity is jarring. Thanks for that post.

That may be the first time I ever read something on that site and it didn't feel like someone was pounding a nail into my brain.

Fundamentally, as Onkar Ghate noted, conservatives must distance themselves from Ayn Rand's atheism. That was why Paul Ryan stabbed the Atlas Society in the back after touting himself for assigning "Atlas Shrugged" to his staff.

From that follows a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. Catholic scholasticism recognizes that the actual life of the mother supersedes the potential life of the unborn child. However, the extent to which a woman's life and happiness are threatened by the unborn child is not solvable within that tradition - or at least has not been. So, conservatives are stuck with a weak position and no way to advance it, i.e, no way to gain greater understanding or insight.

The other issues are racism and immigration, which as noted in the article come from traditionalism. For liberals, ethnicity is a matter of culture, entirely. Conservatives (including many libertarians and even Objectivists) still cling to the _genetic_ arguments for "race" and therefore for "racial" differences from which cultural differences derive. Thus, they oppose open immigration, rather than insisting that a consistent legal structure based on property rights and absent welfare would solve their problems regarding open immigration.

I am not sure about Onkar Ghate's point regarding freedom of speech. So-called "political correctness" motivates many progressives to advocate the suppression of freedom of speech. The Tea Party movement pretty much took conservatives today into the arena as advocates of protest and petition. So, they seem less worried about political speech. However, for conservatives, pornography is still the elephant in the room, the one thing they cannot get over or past and cannot discuss at all, apparently.

As for political correctness, the Supreme Court did articulate a "fighting words" doctrine. Not every declamation or exclamation is harmless opinion. Personally, if I were at the state capitol grounds here in Austin and saw a crowd with signs denouncing "Wetback Invaders" I would be more concerned than if they were protesting "Fascist Bureaucrats." Seen from inside the building, those two might be equivalent. It would take an actual event and a real jury considering the "reasonable person" to decide. But I agree in the main that the "Fighting Words Doctrine" does limit freedom of speech. In particular, that freedom is guaranteed with regard to the government, not individual persons. You have a right to protest the fascist bureaucrats in the government. You do not have the right to stand in front of the _home_ of a government employee and denounce them, or to follow that person to and from work.

The basic truth about "a liberal Ayn Rand" is that she always admired the liberals, such as Adlai Stevenson, for their _intellectual_ approach to political problems. They sought to identify problems, formulate questions, and seek solutions based on reason and evidence. Conservatives have only tradition and she lampooned them as folksy rustics sitting around the crackerbarrel in a country store.