Stephen Stone column

Stephen Stone is the President and Editor of RenewAmerica — a conservative media site dedicated to restoring respect for America's founding principles.

This purpose includes not only respect for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as written, but for the Creator and His laws.

From the time he was a teenager, Stephen has considered himself a born-again Christian. Since then, he has devoted his life to pursuing life's questions and challenges through seeking to know the mind and will of God, and through seeking the ongoing sanctification of His Spirit.

As a result, Steve has become somewhat of a religious philosopher — one committed to defining the truth of any subject (as well as applying it) by the clear standards of God's Word.

His religious testimony can be found in "What does it mean to be converted to Jesus Christ," a position statement he wrote for RenewAmerica... (more).

Christ alone

Raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Steve has long remained independent of the norms and traditions of the church — choosing instead to center his beliefs in an objective study of the scriptures. As a result, he believes — as the Bible teaches — that salvation comes through relying alone on Jesus Christ, no matter one's professed religious affiliation.

He is currently unaffiliated with any denomination, having been removed from the LDS Church for refusing church leaders' demands that he quit working for national pro-life leader Alan Keyes.

Political advocacy

Stephen's deeply-held faith in Christ led him years ago to become a strong advocate of moral conservatism, and an equally avid opponent of all forms and degrees of humanistic socialism. As an outgrowth of this commitment, he and his wife of 41 years, DeeAnn, homeschooled all eight of their children from birth to adulthood — through nurturing continual learning and family-centered dependence on God.

Steve has been active in Utah and national politics for over 30 years. Among other things:

• He and another family laid the groundwork for what became the Utah Home Education Association.
  
  
• He once extemporaneously debated the state's governor — during a buffet luncheon — over the inadvisability of the governor's plan to raise taxes for public education by the largest increase in state history.
  
  
• He led the fight to overturn an oppressive 40-acre zoning requirement in his county — persuading public officials to adopt a 5-acre zone in the county's unincorporated area that gave farmers reasonable control of their property and resulted in the creation of a fast-growing major city called Eagle Mountain (the third largest in the state based on land area).
  
  
• Shortly after the above zone change, he and a colleague wrote the initial brochure for a newcomer to politics who was seeking a vacant seat on the county commission. That candidate (who won, by the way, and who over the years has become a close friend in the political arena) is now the governor of Utah.
  
  
• He has served on the state GOP's Central Committee and been a delegate several times to county and state conventions.
  
  
• He and his family ran a gubernatorial campaign for a conservative candidate who lost to eventual winner Jon Huntsman in 2004.
  
  
• The family created Alan Keyes' website (and did extensive writing and research) when Keyes ran against Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 2004.
  
  
• Steve was CEO of Keyes' 2008 presidential committee — overseeing such things as the campaign's finances, logistics, organizing, and website.
  

Steve and his family first became involved in the work of Alan Keyes during the 2000 presidential election, and after helping Keyes gain his best showing of the GOP primaries — 21.3 percent in Utah — they joined the candidate's national staff. Steve and his daughter Stefani represented Keyes at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia that year.

Steve founded RenewAmerica in 2002 to lend support to Keyes' live MSNBC TV show "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense," and RenewAmerica.com has since grown to over a hundred contributing writers and been named by the New York Times Company's About.com as one of the top ten conservative political websites in the U.S.

Additional facts

Prior to RenewAmerica, Steve was an educator. He loves teaching, and for years he taught writing at a large private university, where he became — in the words of his immediate superior — the school's foremost authority on tutorial education. This tutorial background led him to take the reins of an innovative private school called Family-Centered Learning, which he directed for many years. Previous to teaching college English, he served briefly as a religious educator, and before that, as a bread delivery man, his first "real" job.

He's never worked in the public sector (except when he was a teenager working on a summer street crew in his home town) — and he characterizes socialism as little more than "everyone working for government," something to be carefully avoided in any form that goes beyond selfless public service, in his view.

Over the years, Steve has undertaken a variety of challenging entrepreneurial pursuits in seeking the American dream of liberty, independence, and personal responsibility, and he and his family have succeeded in building a home by themselves on a farm they own debt-free.

Stephen Stone

October 1, 2012

One of the great things about America is the opportunity for open, sincere debate by all interested citizens about what should be public policy. During this . . .

Stephen Stone

September 24, 2012

The 2012 presidential election is like no other in our nation's history. In view of the public record, the election features the most powerful communist in . . .

Stephen Stone

September 17, 2012

Those who find themselves with seemingly no choice this presidential election do in fact have a choice they might not immediately recognize. It's called . . .

Stephen Stone

September 10, 2012

I'm deeply sympathetic to those millions of conservatives who feel they have "no choice" but to vote for Mitt Romney this November. I appreciate their view and . . .

Stephen Stone

September 3, 2012

One valid definition of "demagoguery" is the intentional use of emotion to sway people's thinking. Suppose a speaker wants to convince an unsympathetic . . .

Stephen Stone

December 28, 2002

As is well known, one of the knocks against conservatives is that they tend to let their enemies define who they are and what they believe. Rather than define . . .

Stephen Stone

November 27, 2002

"Education is primarily a local responsibility." We heard that comment many times throughout the 2002 election season. Years ago, I encountered those very . . .

Stephen Stone

November 21, 2002

The "American Dream" is one of the most commonly misunderstood ideals in American culture. The term is used loosely to mean just about anything from the . . .