re: #834 Hanoch

Any enactment of law restricts individual liberty. But people accept such restrictions to further ends which they deem to be more important. Thus, for example, when a municipality enacts laws restricting the locations “adult” businesses, the liberty of some (particularly the proprietors) is restricted. But that is deemed by the majority to be an acceptable trade-off to advance other goals deemed more important. Conservatism does not stand for the proposition that any restriction of personal liberty is bad.

The primary agenda items of the religious right in recent times have been abortion, gay marriage and human embryonic research. If you disagree with the religious right on those issues, that is your right. But to suggest that the religious right is, by taking their positions on these issues, effectively looking to “to toss individual responsibility - and individual freedom - on the trash heap” is way over the top.

But abrogating certain personal rights and individual freedoms is precisely what they are striving to do by politically campaigning to legislatively forbid all abortions and gay civil unions. You may favor such abrogations (I do not, since I consider them to be unwarranted governmental intrusions into peoples’ personal and private lives), but it is clearly untrue to say that if the socons succeed, that these particular personal rights and individual freedoms will remain unabrogated.