Just a month before the 2008 election, I gave a speech at a local Rotary Club. The choice of topic had been left up to me.

Two things I'm often asked to address -- the state of the news business (hemorrhaging) and its alleged liberal bias (duh) -- had merged to create an industry death spiral on full display during the Obama-McCain contest.

I decided to opine on all the whole shebang -- from a conservative viewpoint, of course. That means I was observing, at least as polls would have indicated back then, from a minority position -- politically, professionally and generationally.

During the Q&A afterward, a listener cut right to the chase: "Why are you a conservative?" It wasn't a hostile question -- this was the Rotary Club, after all -- but it was an invitation to summarize what I just spent a half-hour building.

"You should write that down," my questioner said, but I forgot about it until recent political battles brought it powerfully back to mind. Here's what I said, more or less.

Many adults seem to adopt their politics without much scrutiny. They either embrace the worldview of their family, or they rebel and move to the opposite stance. But the person who must say "no" is no freer than the person who must say "yes." Either way, such politics tend to be more emotional than rational, more motivated by identity than by ideals.

Another major factor in shaping political sensibility is the cultural landscape we encounter through our formative years and into early adulthood. For instance, children of the Great Depression grew up to be "the Greatest Generation," shaped by circumstances to be economically cautious at home, noble and self-sacrificing abroad. By contrast, the baby boomers they gave birth to are notable for their self-absorption and smug rejection of their parents' limited horizons. The peace and prosperity their parents secured for them gave them this luxury -- a debt they have only slowly realized.

I was born between the baby boom and Generation X. Jimmy Carter was president while I was in high school. During my senior year, classmates were burning the Iranian flag, not the American one.

Whatever the powerful conditioning of family input and generational drama, if we are to live examined lives, our principles must be tested and prioritized to meet the challenges of our time. The vast majority of Americans share ideals -- freedom, justice, equality, opportunity, compassion, self-determination and more -- but the order in which we rank these ideals will determine where we stand on the issues of the day.

Above every other consideration, the American experiment has been about securing liberty in a world that tends toward tyranny. We pledge ourselves to fight against tyranny from within -- whether it's slavery, segregation or Big Brother government -- and to fight it from without -- whether it's Nazi national socialism, Soviet communism or Islamic terrorism.

The syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, the quintessential baby boomer, retired this month. In her final column, she asserted that members of her generation were "the change agents for civil rights, women's rights [and] gay rights." She's correct on the last item in her list but no, the struggle for civil rights and women's rights was a very, very long one. Her generation just happened to arrive on the scene, flush with the arrogance of youth, when more than 150 years of toil reached its fruition.

What's more, for many decades a majority, though by no means all, of those striving for abolition, desegregation and women's suffrage were the evangelical Christians whom today's "progressives" by and large despise. In the past, then, religious conservatives -- my people -- were social radicals, seeking massive cultural change through political movements and even war.

Once the full enfranchisement of all American citizens was achieved (very early in my lifetime), the domestic fight against tyranny shifted battlefronts. Beginning in the 1960s, the drive to secure basic constitutional rights morphed into an ever-expanding agenda of extra-constitutional "rights" -- efforts to enforce equality of outcomes at the expense of true liberty.

Hence, conservatism.

At a wedding a few years ago, I met a new member of our extended family. "What do you do?" he asked me, in true American fashion. But he was born in a country that's a former enemy of the United States and that owes its current prosperity and safety to our nation's post-war magnanimity.

A columnist? Where? What are your politics? "I'm a conservative," I replied.

"A conservative!" he gasped. "What is there worth conserving?"

Sadly, he wasn't kidding. Against such ingratitude, forgetfulness and folly -- the handmaidens of tyranny -- we must fight, if we wish to remain free.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.