Decimator wrote:Abortion is different, because the two sides of the issue are basically it's murder/a bundle of cells. If it's murder, then the government should definitely be preventing it.
Homosexual and pornography laws, however, are not something the government should be messing with, not least because they're utterly impossible to enforce without a significant intrusion into the daily lives of the populace.
Why can't homosexual people legally marry in the states? Why are child pornography, beastiality, and other pornography laws enforced the way they are? The conservative right in the states believes they need to save people from themselfs, and at the more extreme level, save society from deviants. It's an extreme example, but in Hitlers right wing germany, an offshoot of fanatic conservatism, he imprisoned and killed people based on their race, let alone sexual preferences. Now, I'm not trying to draw parallels, hitler's conservative government was fanatic, and pretty much evil in alot of ways. But fundamentally, true conservationism is a free market, restricted personal freedom governmental system. Forb is right that pure libertarians tend to focus on isolationism and decrease the size of the military and police forces with the government decrease, but there's middle ground between the two as well, and that middle ground isn't "conservatism".
Forb's arguing that the wiki definition of conservatism is wrong, I disagree, forb's definition of conservatism is actually conservative libertarianism. I'm not trying to say they don't exist, or that they aren't right/wrong, I'm just saying that forb isn't a perfect fit for the people group he's trying to identify with. Many conservatives do believe that pornography should be illegal, and homosexuals should be imprisoned, as well as a range of other socaital norms, should have legal status, like the christian religion. Some with varying levels of extremism. But they are still valid conservatives. I'd define the most extreme as "religious conservatives" but the more moderate are at the same middle point as their atheist and loosely libertarian counterparts.