LAST evening, at the last possible moment, I decided to bike the quick mile from my house to hear Newt Gingrich speak at the University of Iowa. I was hesitant to make the trip because I've been bored by Mr Gingrich before, and I agree with Time's Michael Crowley that Mr Gingrich's "continued campaign against what appear to be very long odds...seems consistent with someone looking to sell a bunch of merchandise ."

The prospect was sweetened by the sponsorship of the Family Leader, the right-wing group headed by social conservative gatekeeper Bob Vander Plaats. A familiar pious presence here in Iowa, the Family Leader recently achieved breakout nationwide infamy for its "Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon Marriage and Family", which did then did not include a passage suggesting that black children were better off in two-parent households under slavery than in single-parent households in these latter days. Moreover, Mr Vander Plaats and Mr Gingrich make an odd couple; Mr Gringrich's history of philandering and serial marriage may have put him on the wrong side of the "Marriage Vow"'s fidelity provision. It might be interesting, I thought, to see the former speaker share a platform with the unimpeachably upstanding Mr Vander Plaats. Maybe someone would ask the Family Leader leader his opinion of Mr Gingrich's flight from his first two wives.



Well, no dice. Mr Gingrich only took questions submitted in advance. One did concern how his "experience, both good and bad," might be deployed to "lead the country regarding the importance of marriage and family", as if the president were pastor-in-chief. Mr Gingrich rehearsed his stock statement about having done things he isn't proud of and having asked God for forgiveness, and then made haste toward the "family" dimensions of tax policy.

In the place of a credible commitment to family values, Mr Gingrich throws social conservatives hunks of red meat about American exceptionalism and the theological underpinnings of limited government. The virtue of Mr Gingrich's version of this common conservative argument is that he makes it more or less explicitly, which makes it easier to explain what is wrong with it.

Mr Gingrich recurs constantly to the Declaration of Independence's premise that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights". Sometimes he uses it as a shibboleth of Americanism.

The reason American exceptionalism exists is one phrase—it's not because we're bigger, not because we're stronger—it's one phrase: "we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights". Now why does that matter so much? We are the only society in history which said the power comes from God to each one of you personally. You are personally sovereign. The centre of the American society is the citizen, not the government. Which is why Obamacare is profoundly unamerican. Because it centres power on the bureaucrats when in fact power should be centred in the patient and the doctor. I think ultimately the core question for 2012 is going to be very simple: Do you believe this is still a country where your rights come from from your creator and you are the centre of the society, and you loan power to government? Or do you believe in this Obama model, in which power is centred in government, and government defines what you're allowed to do. And from that everything else derives. Because you can only have a family-oriented society if you have sovereignty in the citizen. Otherwise we're all subordinate to bureaucrats.

Sometimes Mr Gingrich pushes deeper and explicitly attacks the secularism he sees lurking behind the "Obama model". "Secularism", Mr Gingrich maintains, "describes a worldview in which you're randomly gathered protoplasm" temporarily inhabiting a soulless world where there is no reason not to visit evil or universal insurance coverage upon your fellow sacks of protoplasm.

Of course, it's not true that sovereign citizens are necessary for family-oriented societies. Mr Gingrich is quick to traduce our globe's Islamic theocracies, but they are nothing if not family-oriented societies. And as a bright undergraduate who has read Plato's Euthyphrocan tell you, it's not so easy to get moral mileage from divine commands. Anyway, as Mr Gingrich himself implicitly acknowledges, the mere fact of divinely-endowed rights gets us nowhere. It's the widespread belief in rights that really constrains the power of government. It would seem, then, that a conception of rights acceptable to believers and sceptics alike offers a bulwark against tyranny superior to a vision of rights attractive to believers alone. At the very least, it seems plausible that an account of rights based on a grasp of the empirical conditions conducive to fair, mutually-beneficial social cooperation offers an equally sturdy basis for effective limits on state power. As evidence for this proposition, one might point to countries such as Denmark, which are far more secular than America, but whose citizens are at least as free as Americans.

Moreover, Mr Vander Plaats' crusade against the right of gay Iowans to legally wed points toward the fact that religious conservatives have often resisted the idea that citizens ought to be equally sovereign. It's not so clear that secular liberals are the enemy of the sovereign citizen. One might even argue that citizens suffering from poverty and illness are not self-sovereign in the sense that matters. Indeed, this is what liberals do argue, constantly. Obamacare, whatever its faults, is not an attempt to empower bureaucrats at the expence of citizens. If Obamacare is misguided, it is also a sincere, morally-motivated attempt to ensure that all Americans are in a position to meaningfully exercise their self-sovereignty, to guarantee the worth of their rights.

Sometimes Mr Gingrich uses his favourite passage of the Declaration to bludgeon public figures for heresy against his personal construction of the American catechism. For example, last night Mr Gingrich railed against Texas district judge Frank Biery (not by name), who recently ruled that a public high school in San Antonio must not include opening or closing prayers, or even the words "invocation" and "benediction" in its graduation ceremony. Mr Gingrich referred to the decision as "speech dictatorship by one radical judge seeking to impose his radical anti-religious views on the American people". The judge, Mr Gingrich argued, deserves to be unseated. Why?

Somebody who is that anti-religious, that anti-prayer, that anti-God clearly does not represent America. How do you explain the Declaration of Independence? We're endowed by our what? According to him, there would be a blank word. So I think this is going to be a serious part of the 2012 campaign. Do you believe in the Declaration of Independence? Do you believe our rights come from our creator? If you do, what are you going to do about judges?

Note well that Mr Gingrich does not contest Mr Biery's establishment-clause jurisprudence. He demands instead that judicial rulings comport with with the spirit of his favoured interpretation of a single line in a document meant to announce and justify political secession, not to create law. Mr Gingrich went on to argue that the judiciary's consistent failure to rule in a manner adequately reflecting the belief that "our rights come from our creator" justifies a congressional usurpation of judicial power. That is, Mr Gingrich argued that Congress ought to override judges who, when interpreting the establishment clause, fail to rule as if dicta in a strongly-worded letter to King George III had established an official American political theology. The mind boggles.

American politics is not, as Mr Gingrich would have you believe, a Manichean struggle between devout, liberty-loving champions of heaven-kissed inherent rights and amoral bureaucratic predators ravening for power. Of course, you knew that. It's sad to think that the folks Mr Gingrich persuades to non-ironically pony up $19.95 for "A City Upon a Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism" don't know that.

I'm sorry I left the house.