Word: custer
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...many of the new young conservatives smash these ideological bins. They define their conservatism on an issue-by-issue basis. While they care deeply about abortion, for instance, few students at the conference mentioned gay marriage. Roger Custer, the 22-year-old conference coordinator who graduated in May from Ithaca College in New York, illustrates this cafeteria-menu conservatism: he favors the Iraq war but thinks Bush should have treated our allies better; he wants abortion outlawed but backs civil unions for gays; he would abolish the Department of Education but would rather balance the budget than cut taxes. Custer...
...what binds the new young conservatives? What links the urban libertarians, the exurban social conservatives and the kids like Custer who can't easily be labeled? After interviewing dozens of young conservatives over the past five months, I think the glue is more cultural than political: paradoxically, these kids see themselves as campus rebels. They believe they are "the new counterculture," as YAF official Patrick Coyle says--ridiculed by liberal professors, shouted down by student leftists and betrayed by a Republican Party afraid of alienating moderates...
...outside the radical pocket of that department, the Ithaca College Republicans--with YAF help--have begun to change the campus in the four years since Roger Custer founded the G.O.P. organization. "They are the most visible group on campus now," says Braeden Sullivan, a former co-president of one of the college's gay groups, BIGAYLA. "They don't have the biggest group of people"--in fact, only about 15 students regularly go to Ithaca College Republican meetings--"but they are definitely the most visible group, and that's a big change from a couple years...
...Custer, a blond, round-faced Californian, first attended a YAF conference in 1999, when he was still in high school. Afterward, he followed the organization's playbook to the letter. During black-history month his freshman year, for instance, he brought black libertarian Reggie Jones to campus. Barlas perfectly played her role by refusing to help fund the hip-hip promoter's speech, even though her department was paying for other black-history-month speakers. Her reasoning was that Jones "does not, from all appearances, support ... the vision that gives this month its political meanings." Custer was then able...
DIED. VINE DELORIA, 72, sardonic scholar widely regarded as the century's most influential Native American thinker, writer and activist; of complications from an aortic aneurysm; in Denver. In more than 20 books, most famously the 1969 manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins, the Standing Rock Sioux debunked stereotypes and articulated the legitimacy of Native American intellectual and spiritual beliefs, once noting, "We have brought the white man a long...