“[R]epressive of sexual non-conformists” sounds like a bunch of swingers forced to be discreet. The reality is more like girls and women having to chose between keeping their babies and being allowed to stay in the family, women and girls ending up in sex work because they are unemployable in any other way, families having to shun errant children to provide an example for the others, marriages created in haste that become deeply unhappy and abusive with no real remedy, etc., etc. The cost to society is very, very high, but it’s concentrated into fewer people, people who made mistakes, so it’s possible to frame them as deserving their fate. Whereas the cost of more liberal sexual mores are more diffused.
Never underestimate the ability of people to rationalize things in their favor. Conservatives seems particularly good at it.
I’m in my 40s and have never been married. Can’t say avoiding “fornication”* for my entire life would have done my mental health much good. The stress might even have turned me toward criminality and, in turn, poverty. But at least I would never have caused conservatives to gasp and clutch their pearls by having sex with another consenting adult.
- That word is in quotes because I’m unable to take it seriously. It’s such an outdated concept, and I’m surprised on the vanishingly rare occasions I hear anyone actually use it.
Cite? Might be hard to find, since there have been no societies where this is the case. Our society, with increased rates of sex outside of marriage, has reduced crime rates - not that they are connected in anyway.
Conservatives real view of this issue is shown by their continued support for the most blatant adulterer ever in the White House. Others have done it - both Republicans and Democrats - but only Trump brags about it.
Were they really the norm, or were they just what people expressed through fear of condemnation? Censorship in the media contributed to a lot of this. Real married couples did not sleep in twin beds no matter what was shown on TV. There was plenty of porn circulating (nothing like today, of course, but still plenty,) plenty of adultery, plenty of sex before marriage. Back then nearly everyone but Lenny Bruce was a hypocrite about it, now only conservatives are.
Yeah, let’s go back to the good old days of 500 years ago when the Pope had 10 children and a mistress or two. Give me that old time religion!
Just picture the flags as red, white and blue.
Perhaps I should have said “current conservative political views on sexuality”. Remember, it was a remarkable event when Reagan, a divorced man, was elected president. Twenty years early that would not have happened. Sure, there was plenty of extra-marital and pre-marital sex before 1960, but it was generally viewed as scandalous. The idea of gay marriage was unthinkable.
If I understand Jonathan Haidt correctly, he seems to say:
-
Morality is not a single unit, but a number of categories.
-
If you give people questionnaires where they have to make moral judgments about things in the various categories, conservatives mostly view all the categories as having about the same importance as each other, while liberals strongly rank the categories, giving much more weight to some categories and much less weight to others.
I’m not sure whether that explains the idea of being more concerned and less concerned about specifically other people’s moral behaviour.
We, as a group, are not. It’s only the religious whackjobs that are.
Totally
But everybody (well, everybody sane) cares whether the other guy is allowed to murder.
It almost seems like, aside from bestiality or other paraphilias, open non-monogamy is actually the biggest taboo in this society (America.) I think we are likely to eventually have a female president, a gay president, a Muslim president (most likely in that order too) but I cannot conceive of an America that would elect someone President who was openly in a relationship with more than one person. Again, let me repeat openly - we’ve obviously elected men with mistresses and who have engaged in affairs. But it seems really, really remote that we’d ever elect a person who was in an ongoing, continuous, publicly-acknowledged relationship with more than one other person. I realize this is a really niche lifestyle so it’s probably just not represented enough among the electorate to be relatable to most voters.
Related, I find it a bit hard to trust polls about how religious Americans are. I can see a major influencer being the respondent thinking “Y’know, I probably should be more religious, but I just can’t find the time, so I’ll respond to this poll by saying I go to church weekly like I should, instead of once or twice a year, which is what I actually do, but feel guilty about.”
Similarly, it’s easy to feel like one should care about banning abortion and gay marriage so one pays lip-service to the idea when in reality has never really cared about nor, aside from casting a Republican-ish vote now and then, done anything about either one.
If anything positive comes from the Trump administration, it may be that sex scandals become irrelevant, as they should be and should always have been. It’ll become a little harder to care about the next president banging a secretary when this one turns out to have multiple porn stars under his belt, as it were.
I respectfully and in all seriousness state that an “Old Testament Christian” is a contradiction in terms, and is not a possibility either in theory or in practice. Being “Old Testament” inescapably means being without Jesus.
Different Christians have varying ideas about how much of the Old Testament is relevant - I don’t think it’s possible to make a generalization like that.
Edit - I don’t think many people, if any, would actually refer to themselves as “Old Testament Christians”, I think it’s something that last poster was using as a figure of speech.
Ah, I think I understand - I had never heard that term.
In my opinion morality based on obedience, such as murder being bad because your priest says your bible says your god says so, is no morality at all. Persons who believe that morality exists only in the form of orders from above have no morals at all.
Such people seem to be pretty uncommon, though. Most people have cobbled together a basic morality just due to having and applying empathy. But if such morality is subject to being overridden by deferring to obedience (like say on the subject of whether gay people should be persecuted) then its not much of a moral system at all.
(I actually have some experience in this - I was raised in a religious household, and when I accepted that I was an atheist I realized that I had been given literally no moral training or guidance at all. It took me some work to figure out actual morality on my own, once “because god said not to” stopped being a factor.)
I’m going to take a step back to a look at a definition of what conservatism is. One of the issues, IMO with conversations about liberals and conservatives is vague definitions that lead to people talking past each other. I’m going to use Karen Stenner’s (Behavioral Economist with a PhD in Political Psychology) paper “The Three Kinds of ‘Conservatism’” as that basis.
Stenner refers to that last type as authoritarianism later in her paper. She seems to work into using it because of the emotional load attached. I’ll use it but she specifies that their main driver is about preferring sameness. Authoritarian structures just tend to be the natural result of trying to achieve their goals.
It’s pretty easy to discount the laissez-faire type for this discussion. It’s also not hard to see how those who prefer stability and limited social change aren’t happy about pretty big social changes in the US that have happened during their lifetimes. The authoritarians, favoring oneness and sameness over diversity, have a pretty clear motivation to be more than a little uncomfortable with celebrations of diverse expressions about one of the strongest human drives. We just went through a period where social attitudes on sexuality changed significantly and there was a theme to the messaging about those changes celebrating differences.
It’s not surprising to me that those who value stability and/or oneness often wrap their opposition to things that threaten what they value in the US’ dominant religious tradition, Christianity. Religious canon tends to change slowly and homosexual behavior is still dominantly a sin in most Christian denominations. That’s attractive to those most disposed to value the status quo… An authoritarian gets an omnipotent, omniscient deity prepared to punish threats to sameness with eternal damnation. IMO that’s more packaging for what the major drivers actually are. Letting ourselves get too hung up on specifics of the religious argument distracts us from that root cause.
All that’s still in the realm of framing the problem to answer something at least close to the OP’s question. Why are those two strains of conservatives motivated more by preferences for stability/sameness versus what others in society are motivated by? A good chunk of the answer is that they were born that way. The same as liberals and atheists owe a lot of those dispositions to being born that way.
Study on twins suggests our political beliefs may be hard-wired
As far as the religion that a lot of the arguments are wrapped in, that seems to have a strong heritable component too.
The religious right, short of something extreme like an active eugenics program, is part of what we are as a species. Those who want, at most, tiny changes made at a glacial pace will naturally come into conflict with those who want massive changes yesterday. People who most value our differences will clash with those who are most disposed to value our areas of sameness. Homosexuality is just the latest proxy war, IMO.
I agree, but such people exist. And they are some of the ones regarding whom it’s important to society that there are laws in the first place.
If it were up to me, there would be a test for the belief “morality equals orders given from above” that would exclude people who hold that belief from even running for office - after all, they have defined themselves as incapable of the job. But it isn’t up to me. 