| Leadified said: In many societies alignment with a social conservative ideology tends to be linked to religiosity or to typically patriarchal traditional values. So I am curious to know, but what motivates you to describe yourself as leaning towards social conservative viewpoints? |
That's true in this country as well overall. Generally speaking, you can rate someone as a mono-culturalist to the extent that they're super-religious and multi-culturalist, conversely, relative to how many college degrees they have. The more college degrees, the less religious someone will tend to be and also the more socially liberal. There's a relationship between those two things. There's also a question though of whether and to what extent a society run by the latter group actually understands the needs and interests of other, less privileged people than themselves on the ground.
Well anyway, I'm not religious at all myself. In fact I tend to fear the idea of religion becoming too influential in society for a thousand obvious reasons concerning who I am. I would not exactly benefit from that. And I consider myself a feminist for sure. Like to be clear, I'm pro-choice, I support marriage equality, I'm against the death penalty, I don't believe anyone should be in prison for smoking pot, I'm in favor of doing more to protect the environment, I'm for comprehensive immigration reform, support reasonable gun control policies, and favor of criminal justice reform that includes an end to qualified immunity for cops and for an idea of racial justice that includes reparations payments for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Just to be clear about all that.
The areas where I think of myself as maybe subjectively right-leaning are mainly public security issues. I'm in favor of increasing funding for both the military and police departments, for example, in addition to expanding the social safety net. I'm afraid I'm cynical enough to believe in the peace-through-strength argument, for example. In foreign policy, a strong deterrent works better than the alternatives, I think. I mean I know you hear differently often from ostensibly more pacifistic people in western Europe where they may spend less per capita on their own armed forces and whatnot, but in reality they're just lazily depending on our military to prevent Russia from just invading and overrunning them. Without our armed forces there to keep them democracies, they'd likely be toast. I feel similarly about policing. Like clearly there needs to be more accountability for cops, but at the same time, when I hear about ideas like ending cash-bail and scaling back funding for police departments and stuff like this...you know, I've just gotta point out that exhausted, overworked officers without back-up are probably going to make worse and more rash decisions, NOT better ones, and it's very clear to me moreover that some (often poorer and less white) parts of the country could also use faster response times, not the absence of a department in their area. As to that question of whether our sentencing for crimes is generally too long or too short, my opinion is mixed. I think rapists, for example, should serve longer sentences than they typically do and that, conversely, nobody should be in the prison system just for smoking weed.
Other "conservative" opinions I have are related to concerns for the safety, the mental and physical health and well-being, of girls and women in particular. Like you absolutely cannot call yourself a progressive today unless you support legalizing prostitution and maintaining the relatively unregulated status of online pornography, for example. To object to these things is considered a form of hate (you hate "sex workers") because the progressive left views these things as labor issues rather than as women's issues; issues that affect all women, not just those in the trade. I just completely disagree with that logic, as frankly so do most people in general I think you'll find. I have similar opinions about stuff like commercial surrogacy that liberals and progressives invariably support and demand the legality of today. My negative opinion of transgenderism is guided by similar concerns about the real-world harm to women and girls in particular that can be done if public policy reaches a place of ignoring people's biological sex. (Illustration of what I mean.) Speaking of that, I'm also concerned about the politicization of what speech is permitted and not. (Example.) So I mean a lot of my so-called "right wing" opinions are in fact motivated precisely by an aversion to tolerating male violence and sexual exploitation as a price for some warped idea of social inclusion.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 29 November 2021
