“Rubio Touts American Exceptionalism” is how the American Spectator summed up a well-received speech by senatorial candidate Marco Rubio at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference.

Rubio, who is running against current governor Charlie Crist for the Republican nomination, told the audience that his parents came from Cuba with “no English, no money, and no friends.” He spoke of “hearing [his] father’s keys in the door as he returned home from another 16-hour day at work.”

His family’s story taught Rubio that America is “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from . . . the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed,” and the “one place in the world where the individual was more important than the state.”

(Where does Rubio think that the Founding Fathers got their ideas about the relationship of the individual to the state? Does he know that British history is filled with stories about families climbing the socio-economic ladder thanks to their “better ideas” and “strong work ethic?” Has he read Jane Austen or any other 19^th century British novelist whose stories frequently depict the contempt that the “well-born” have for those who have succeeded in “the trade?” Has he ever heard of Nicholas Sarkozy? His father was also a refugee who fled communism and his mom was Jewish. Being the child of outsiders didn’t stop him from becoming the president of France, which even Jonah Goldberg would probably admit is a bigger deal that being a candidate for your party’s nomination in a senatorial race.)

At the same time Rubio was addressing CPAC, Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in National Review, called exceptionalism a defining part of what it means to be a “conservative.” According to them, the belief that the United States is “special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary” is what conservatives seek to “conserve.”

All this talk of a “unique role and mission,” especially when couched in religious language, such as “missionary impulse” and “economic gospel,” was too much for some folks to bear: at Mere Orthodoxy, Matthew Lee Anderson worried that Lowry and Ponnuru’s language can be “off-putting to those who worry that the virtues of the American political order can be over-emphasized.” He insisted that “any claims to American exceptionalism has to be tempered and chastened by our own social evils, chief of which is abortion.”

As Lewis Carroll might have put it, the story of the ten Americans detained in Haiti while attempting to leave the country with thirty-three Haitian children keeps getting “curiouser” and curiouser.”

Mind you, it was more than a little curious from the start: ten American evangelicals from Idaho, according to their stated plans, intended to fly to the Dominican Republic; hire a bus; gather up 100 Haitian orphans; take them back to the DR, and house them in a leased hotel pending the construction of a permanent facility.

They got as far as gathering up thirty-three Haitian children, reportedly with the assistance of “Jean Sainyil, a Haitian who pastors Gospel Assembly Church in Gwinnett, Georgia and [who] returns to Haiti regularly as a missionary.” Then things went south: traveling without proper documentation or written permission to take the children out of the country, they were stopped at the Haitian-Dominican border; and upon their return to Port-au-Prince, they were arrested and charged with kidnapping and criminal association.

There’s adding insult to injury and then there’s what happened to a sixteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh. Last April, she was raped by a man whom, according to her family, had previously been harassing her.

Fear of shame and being ostracized kept the young woman from reporting the rape. Her family unknowingly married her off to a man from a neighboring village. The marriage only lasted a month because, as it turned out, she was pregnant with the rapist’s child.

If you’re thinking that things couldn’t get much worse for the poor girl, think again. In mid-January, village arbitrators sentenced her to 101 lashes for her “sins,” and fined her father the equivalent of $160, what the average Bangladeshi makes in three months. An additional fatwa stipulated that the family was to be ostracized until the fine is paid.

“U.S. Exports Cultural War to Uganda” was the headline of a recent National Public Radio story. The particular “export” being discussed was a controversial Ugandan bill that would punish certain homosexual acts by imprisonment and even death. As the lede put it, “the battle over the Bible and homosexuality has torn apart Christian churches and entire denominations in the United States. But what happens when that culture war is exported to other countries? Ugandans are finding out — with potentially deadly consequences.”

First the slave trade, then colonialism, and now this!

One of the chief exporters of our cultural unpleasantness is apparently Scott Lively of Defending the Family International. According to NPR, in a March, 2009 trip to Uganda, Lively told Uganda’s Family Life Network that “the gay movement is an evil institution,” and that its goal was “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”