Comments Posted By Bob808
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ARE THE RIGHTROOTS MORE CONSERVATIVE THAN REPUBLICAN?
The right hasn't done its intellectual homework. When you try to isolate patriotism and fiscal responsibility from moral issues, you cut off their conceptual feet. Fiscal rsponsibility does have moral content, especially at the level of public policy, where decisions are debated and made deliberatively.
Comment Posted By Bob808 On 5.12.2008 @ 05:41
Most conservative positions are fundamentally tied to a concept of a human person that includes freedom of will and some sort of creative spontaneity that is capable of initiating (at least marginally) some behavioral causation from within. A being that is entirely determined by nature or nurture can not be said to be "responsible" for his behavior in any meaningful way. Personal moral conduct and fiscal responsibility are tied together by their dependence on a usable notion of "responsibility". The left works with notions of "human person" that are either reduced to materialist biology and mechanical, esxternal causation, or that undercut the possibility for responsibility with postmodernist, subjectivist skepticism, which treats personhood as having no access to truth or knowledge, and hence, without a means to get traction in a real world that enables behavioral initiative.
(It should be remembered that forgiveness, toleration, and redemption, in their AUTHENTIC forms, are creative responses that run contrary to the left's notion of personhood, which is why the left waters down "forgiveness " to something like forgetting or exonerating, and "toleration" to something like embracing. The left seems to have forgotten that a forgiven wrong remains a wrong, and that something tolerated is not something embraced or sanctified, and through their control of media and education, they have managed to nudge conventional usage of these terms toward their limp, edgeless interpretations.)
Consider the issue of whether to allow gays to marry. Even on the left coast, the public passed a measure designed to keep "gay" and "marriage" from being legally confused. The issue, though, has been framed in idiotic ways by the left, and the right has largely accepted that framing. The left claims that homosexuality is inherited, and as an inherited characteristic, it deserves to be treated as a definition-criterion for a rights-worthy minority. Yet the evidence that gays' brains are differently formed from heterosexuals' brains is qualified by a weak correlation on one hand, and by the fact that the brain is a plastic structure whose form isn't entirely determined by genetics. To the degree that homosexuality has an environmental component, on another hand, it becomes a valid question whether it is to be encouraged or not, whether styles of parenting and elementary education should be examined for their likelihood of increasing the incidence of homosexuality. Third, many individuals, especially among women, drift in and out of functional homosexuality, and demonstrate thereby that there is a component of personal choice involved. Undoubtedly, many gays can have no reasonable expectation of controlling their sexual orientation, but the issue is too causally complicated to treat gays as genetically determined in the way that gender or race are genetically determined. And this affects the validity of gay-rights advocates' claim to rights IN EXACTLY THE SAME MANNER as genetically-determined groups.
Marriage isn't entirely comprehensible as a "right". It is many things, a fundamental institution in human civilization that has some of the aspects of rights, but also some aspects of responsibility, of privilege, and of sanctification. And there's a metaphysical component, too. Despite a few holdouts for the view that the sexes have no meaningful differences, that view is dying out; men and women are different, however variably and subject to socialization. An intimate heterosexual relationship unites the two halves of the most meaningful division of the human race, and confers a kind of metaphsical completeness that is lacking in other relationships. It isn't just about affection and sentimental gratification, though romantic love is the dominant notion of love in our time. This has bearing for parenting, for a heterosexual family provides children with intimate connection to a same-sex and an opposite-sex parent, and a more complete opportunity for social development, including development at the unconscious and intuitive level. And it affects personal development, because one has to learn to cope with fundamental differences between oneself and one's opposite sex partner in a way that outstrips our capacity to understand. Marriage is the paradigm case of toleration.
Marriage has been a special relationship throughout history, even when not sanctioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition-- preserving marriage is not creeping theocracy, as the left presents it. The sanctification of marriage is not only a religious recognition of its importance, but stems from something fundamental, primitive, and ineffable, and religions have merely tried to give good guidance on how to participate in that sort of relationship. Homosexual relationships have been part of many societies, but never as a SUBSTITUTE for marriage. There's something more narcissistic and solipsistic about the very nature of homosexuality, and saying that a well-formed gay relationship is better than the worst-case examples of bad marriages doesn't alter the fact that gay relationships do not offer some of the most valuable possibilities that come with real marriages. Now feminism's assaults on marriage have undermined it for the decades leading up to this controversy, so that the benefits of marriage temporarily appear all the weaker in the comparison to gay relationships, but judging from the data of our own era exclusively skews the basis of the comparison. Things are not always as they might appear in the problem-riddled world of 2008, especially when our problems are more often problems of the human spirit, and not problems of technology or the material sciences. (I'm not saying, BTW, that some of feminism's adjustments weren't positive, only that they were carried out in a disruptive and undermining way, and that the institution of marriage hasn't fully recovered.)
As it stands now, those who support the preservation of marriage have to rely on rather vague notions and traditions to justify their positions, and the right's failure to do its intellectual homework puts them at a disadvantage. Conventional-wisdom academics have aligned themselves with the view that marriage is entirely reducible to a right, that it is something fully comprehensible by them (in their intellectual arrogance), and that homosexuality is just another rights-worthy biological variation in the same manner as gender or race. Yet even in California, the vague resistance to so-called "gay marriage" was enough to motivate the majority of voters in a high-turnout election to support the preservation of marriage. So one shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss the preservation of marriage as a valid conservative issue. What conservatives need to do is to validate their side with some better intellectual support, so that marriage-supporters aren't left twisting in the wind of the public discourse, feeling a bit stodgy and behind the times, may a bit reactionary. Having good reasons to support one's position enhances one's confidence on one's intuitive inclinations.
An authentic notion of toleration would not seek to eradicate homosexual behavior or to harrass homosexuals, but neither would it conflate homosexual relationships with marriage. Social conservatives shouldn't commit the same sloppy-thinking error by conflating homosexuality with rape, or by denying that homosexual relationships can have many of the socially-valuable aspects that heterosexual relationships can have-- just not all of them. The support of marriage is a lot more attractive when it's shorn of the bigotry that often accompanies it. One can recognize the shortcomings of homosexual relationships without exaggerating them or making them the occasion for gay-bashing. Marriage isn't just a recreational activity that everyone has a right to, indifferently, and withholding that degree of sanctification from gay relationships isn't intolerance for gays. Toleration is a virtue; the problem with its current iteration has to do with the way the left has watered it down to something meaningless. We tolerate others' behaviors, some of which we find repugnant, because none of us lack repugnant behaviors (or sins), and because there just isn't enough time in the day to try to eradicate allthe less-catastrophic human foibles. Gay realtionships may not get as close to the ideal significant-other relationship as marriages, but we all fall short of that ideal in some way or another. Conservatives need to understand how the left has made "toleration" an unattractive and edgeless concept, reclaim it, and actually DO IT, if they are to regain the moral high ground. This is a part of the conservative fundamentals that is often omitted. Discipline in general requires intellectual discipline.
