re: #120 lostlakehiker

There’s a lot of room for interpretation in that statement.

One way to put it: You have to be a “SOCON” to be a fiscal conservative. Otherwise, we “conservatives” won’t recognize and respect your fiscal conservatism.

Another way: fiscally conservative policies are more feasible to the extent that the society involved mostly hews to socially conservative ways. If people are mostly thrifty and prudent, there will be less need for welfare, less need for ER visits, less need for bailouts and stimulus programs.

If most children are raised in nuclear families, one wife, one husband, same two biological parents cooperating to raise the kids, there’s a better chance the family can take care of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the rug rats, as well as teaching them some manners and some good habits, and maybe even teaching them how to count to 100, say the alphabet, and the sounds the letters make, before they hit the formal school system. Such parents can be helpful in teaching the kids to read, too.

All this can in principle be done by a harried single mom, if she’s supermom. Mostly she isn’t. All this can in principle be done by a polygamous family, assuming internal strife doesn’t tear it apart. All this can in principle be done in other childrearing arrangements. Like when A and B are partners and A is the biological parent of X and B is the parent of Y and then X and Y fight over you like Y better because you’re Y’s parent no I don’t yes you do etc. Social conservatives, small font not what Jim DeMint means by the term, are pessimists about how well things will go with the kids being raised by A and B. Not that it can’t be done. Millions of A’s and B’s valiantly overcome the inherent difficulties of the project and raise fine X’s and Y’s. But it’s kind of swimming upstream.

Adults do all sorts of adult things including affairs, divorces, love children, what have you. A socon world that enforced socon behavior norms would be suffocating. But the other pole is dangerous. Too many on the Left think of nuclear family America as the enemy, a fit object only for scorn and taxation.

“Too many on the Left think of nuclear family America as the enemy, a fit object only for scorn and taxation.”

Jebus Cripes, broad brush much?

And I thought it was suppose to be the rich that we saw as the enemy and saw fit only for scorn and taxation….