Ms. Mac Donald is a heroine to many in the conservative movement, in part because of her robust attacks on everything from feminist ideology (“lunacy”) to The New York Times (“a national security threat”).
She is also, not incidentally, a self-described nonbeliever.
“Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it,” she wrote in the Aug. 28 issue of The American Conservative. “They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.”
The article ignited a firestorm that continues to sweep across conservative opinion journals and Web sites. Pundits including John Podhoretz, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg have, to varying extents, made their disagreement plain. Philosophy professor (and Opus Dei member) Michael Pakaluk has complained that Ms. Mac Donald’s “mockery of common religious sensibilities … is so unfeeling as to border on the inhuman.”
http://www.observer.com/20060911/20060911_Niall_Stanage_opinions_wiseguys.asp