Withholding my upvote until you rephrase that. People can be highly intelligent and rational not "in spite" of being a conservative Christian...

Intelligent, yes, rational, color me extremely skeptical. My reason for the comment about Chesterton was also partly because the fence quote trips my "this sounds like someone trying to come up with a clever justification for their knee-jerk prejudices" alarm. Until the second paragraph, it seems a bit fuzzy on whether Chesterton acknowledges there are no good reasons for some social institutions.

And my model of an educated American Marxist would certainly have her dislike 1) liberals and 2) "truthers" of all kinds. I'm puzzled.

"US liberals" changed to "the American left," in recognition of the fact that "liberal" can be read as "left-of-center." But I don't know why you'd be reading me as necessarily suggesting overlap between Marxists and 9/11 Truthers. The idea is that Marxists can be found within the American left, and 9/11 Truthers can be found within the American left, while being non-committal about whether there are (many) Marxist 9/11 Truthers.