Belkira the Tulip wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Conservatives believe that government shouldn't be telling people how to live their lives.
I've never understood this.
That by and large, this is the underlying principle of conservatives? Or is it that you can find examples which appear to violate this, and thus you think it's not true? I'll assume the latter. ;)
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Seems to me like telling people they can't marry who they want and that they can't get an abortion if they choose to is the very definition of telling people how to live.
I said it was the "simple" explanation. As I point out whenever we go down this path, conservatives recognize that some rules and infringements of liberty are necessary for a society to exist (I'll pull out the quote from Locke explaining this if you want). What we believe is that we should infringe the minimum amount of liberties necessary to protect the remaining liberties.
Having some sort of rule to pressure heterosexual couples into marrying rather than producing children without adequate private (ie: not government funded) economic support falls into that "by infringing this liberty a bit, we prevent a larger infringement if government has to step in to care for too many of our children" category. But you make the mistake of defining the issue in your terms instead of conservative ones. A conservative views the governments involvement in marriage as an infringement it places on the people. We pressure heterosexual couples to marry (in one way or another).
Viewed that way, it makes sense to limit this infringement to the smallest group possible. Of course, liberals view this as a benefit to the people, and thus see it as "unfair" that only one group gets to have the government apply pressure on them to change their behavior. Let me tell you, from a conservative point of view, that bit is a hoot! I'm always amazed at how hard groups of liberals will fight to have their government infringe their liberty...
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Granted, forcing people to buy health insurance is the same thing, but I would say, over all, that a social liberal viewpoint keeps the government from telling peopel how to live their lives while a social conservative viewpoint forces people to live according to some strict set of guidelines.
You couldn't be more wrong. Social liberalism is entirely about using the power of the government to intrude into people's lives. You've just been taught that if the intrusion is framed in a positive way, that this makes it "OK". You see actions to control people with positives as "good", and those either denying those positives, or providing penalties as "bad". But both of those are "liberal". It is only when the government steps out of the way and lets the people live their own lives that we are following a "classical liberalist" approach (aka: modern conservative).
Classical liberalism defines liberties as things we are not compelled to do in any way and that we should seek the maximum liberty for all individuals in society. Social liberalism believes that having the freedom/liberty to do something is of no value unless the person has the ability to do that thing as well. Thus, one seeks to use government to make society "better", while the other believes that by doing this, we're only making it "worse". One seeks to balance out the scales of equality, while the other believes that to be the wrong objective. How often do you hear an argument from the left based entirely on whether something is "fair"?
Religion is slightly different, but not much so. It still believes that society should be changed via some sort of semi-authoritarian methodology. The degree to which it attempts to use the government to do that is what determines whether it is liberal or not. I'll also point out that the degree to which we grant powers to the government also determines the degree to which those powers may be used to push for social changes which religion cares about. That's what we talk about when we say that such things are bad in the long run. It doesn't matter what wonderful things you're going to do for people today, at some point the power you have to grant to the government to do that will be used for something you don't think is so wonderful. Conservatives believe we should avoid doing that to begin with.
