The other night, a friend of mine who is a perpetually angry liberal, was bemoaning the fact that others that share his faith often align themselves on the opposite end of the political spectrum. In doing so, he pejoratively used the phrase right-wing to describe those that don't share his political views.

Today I watched a video clip from CNN in which a reporter was on the scene and interviewing a participant in one of the many tea parties held yesterday. Not unlike some of the other on-camera and animated breaches in pretense of objectivity I've seen on CNN or other networks, this woman literally scolded a man for daring to protest the Federal government's recent and obscene spending, rather than allowing him to answer the question of, "why are you here?". She was quickly shouted down by the crowd before being permitted to complete her absurd defense of Obama's stimulus bill to this man. With that, she sent it back to the studio and cast the crowd as having been influenced by the "right-wing" Fox News Channel.

In the past, I've proudly accepted the term right-winger, or belonging to the right-wing, or even being part of the "vast, right-wing conspiracy." But lately, I've come to somewhat resent the term. Don't get me wrong – I am not at all ashamed of holding a conservative view. Far from it. It's what's implied by the term that's beginning to bug me.

The terms left-wing and right-wing have long been accepted ways to describe the political views of politicians and politically outspoken people. I think the mental image that one might conjure is linear in nature. The left side represents the views of bigger government and higher taxes. The right side represents smaller government and lower taxes. The further out on each side logically represents the more entrenched, pure, or "extreme" views of each side. The center, or mainstream then, is naturally the least extreme and most compromising view one could hold.

This is BS. The origin of these terms is from the seating arrangements in the French legislative assemblies of the 1700s. While the meanings of the terms have evolved, even within the scope of French and European use, they adequately represent the political spectrum in the French Revolutionary era. But we're not French politicians in parliament. This is the United States of America. Our forefathers, through unthinkable sacrifice and in recognition of the unalienable rights bestowed upon every man by his Creator, established this country on the very principles that are routinely cast as right-wing and extreme today. Our government and rule of law was brilliantly conceived to provide the best chance at preservation of these principles and unalienable rights. This is what has made the United States of America the greatest and most successful nation on the planet.

I'm not interested in squelching the voices of those who believe a permanent or even a temporary departure from those original, conservative principles are in order. You can't do that and be a true conservative. But conservatives should no longer accept that a desire for smaller government, lower taxes, and free market capitalism is anything but exactly what this country was intended to be. Conservatism is not to the right of the mainstream. It IS the mainstream!

Big government liberalism has strongholds in academia and media and is succeeding at redefining what is considered mainstream. Power-hungry statists are succeeding at not only governing apart from the constitution and it's founding principles, they are engineering the very tyranny from which our forefathers escaped – high taxes, income redistribution, and the current state religions of multiculturalism, environmentalism, and globalism. It's time for Americans to wake up and defend the only true rights that exist – the ones God gave us.