liberal ←→ conservative…

The way I see it, the biggest difference between the conservative and the liberal is the desired end result. The former wants everyone to believe in one way with no freedom of choice or free will. The latter wants everyone to believe in freedom of choice and free will with the ability to make personal decision.

Thus, the liberal will leave the conservative to believe and act in any way that he/she wants as long as no one else is harmed or has his/her personal rights in any way infringed and everyone has the ability to make the decision for him/herself.

The conservative, on the other hand, wants to dictate what everyone can believe and how they can act based on the conservative’s interpretation of his/her view of the world.

[A caveat - I realize that this does not speak for all conservatives nor all liberals. There are those on the conservative side that are more centrist and left of center and those on the liberal side that are more left left-of-center who agree that everyone has freedom of choice and will.]

The problem is that the right right-of-center conservative and ultra-right conservative are the most vocal and feared at the moment and the ultra-left of center liberal is jealous that he/she perceives having almost no voice right now.

The talking point for the last several years, because of right-wing conservative hegemony, has focused around same-sex marriage and freedom of expression. It’s obvious, through various polls, that the majority of U.S. citizens have become tired of this continuous harangue and want it over and done. Unfortunately, politics is keeping it mainstream and it rears its ugly head whenever there is an election. Case in point, Bush’s Monday media event pandering to the right and christianists. Even after his wife Laura's exhortation not to make it an election issue and Mary Cheney's recently published book.

Now, I have written before that I’m against same-sex marriage in the religious sense. That’s a belief system concern. In the legal sense, everyone should have the same rights as everyone else. [Yes, I am a liberal.] There are many opposite-sex relationships that don’t have the protections that laws guarantee married couples. They need to be protected also. There needs to be a revision of the laws to reflect what is actually happening in civilization and society. We are told this is what a living breathing constitution is meant to do. The right insists on strict-constructionism based on what was happenig at the end of the 18th century when the Constitution was adopted.

This isn’t the first time there has been a shift in contemporary thought on marriage. In ancient Greece, marriage was for the continuance of the society. Love was not thought of very highly because the philosophy of the time believed it was a sign of insanity. People in love did insane things. At the same time, love was believed a transcendental experience that only two men could appreciate.

In ancient Rome, almost the same circumstance surrounded marriage with it being a contractual union of powerful families and arranged for political and economic advantages and reasons. The family was fluid because it could change at any time with divorce, adoption, re-marriage, etc. Love was usually something achieved outside of marriage and accepted as long as scandal and loss of prestige was avoided.

The Middle Ages followed the same contrivance in marriage, usually with an economic tone. Even the lower classes in each of these societies married for economic and power reasons. Almost every marriage was arranged. The church even recognized droit du seigneur - the right of first night – "a widespread popular belief in an ancient privilege of the lord of a manor to share the bed with his peasants' newlywed brides on their wedding nights." [Doesn’t that break the seventh commandment?]

The last major change was at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century. In the Edwardian and Victorian Eras, marriage was strictly a contractual agreement, again with parents choosing children’s partners. Love entered the picture with marriage in the bohemian movement and the post-World War I expatriate world. There was a distinct liberal drive to connect love as a necessity to secure a successful long-term married relationship and, more important, to fulfill the completeness of the human psyche. Before this, most marriages only lasted until one or the other spouse died which was maybe for their entire lives! Except in ancient Rome, divorce was considered an evil, and even in Rome it was not considered lightly. There could be too many entangling-alliances and pacts that could upset the balance of power - literally!

There were always romances and romantic overtures but usually not with one’s spouse. Society, with religion at its core, began to take a dim view of infidelity because of the construct of core beliefs that suddenly became tantamount to more vocal segments of the population who sensed a loss of influence due, again, to a perceived loss of power and economic strength.

The same situation is happening again. Segments of the population feel a loss of influence and a loss of economic advantage and a greater sense of powerlessness. Instead of everyone believing the same things, there is a great secularism and diversity in the world. The sphere of influence is no longer in the neighborhood. There are outside pressures that come from the other side of the globe 12,000 miles away, and we boomerang our own interpretations and influence right back over those 12,000 miles.

The historical result is happening again - reactionary, xenophopic, bigoted hyperbole - to stem the tide of the inevitable. The Stoics tried it in Rome; the Church tried it with the Inquisition; the post-Civil War South tried it with miscegenation for over a century; the "self-appointed" border patrols are insuring it by fighting immigration policy change; anti-alcohol leaders wrote Prohibition in the Constitution; and, finally, the right christianists are attempting to write discrimination and fear into the Constitution about same-sex marriage.

All of these were/are conservative based enterprises. The basic definitinon of a conservative is a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes. The one historical lesson conservatives have never learned is that the attitudes mentioned in the previous paragraph along with all others have failed. The Stoics no longer exist; the Inquisition ended in scandal; miscegenation is a thing of the past; writing morality into the Constitution with the Prohibition Amendment was a huge societal failure; and, finally, the constant pressure for the FMA is tiring the general public.

There is no way to predict what the final outcome is going to be, but if you follow, historically, what has always happened in the battle between liberal ←→ conservative, neither side has actually gotten everyting they want.

and that's the beauty of a democracy built with check & balances, a separation of church and state, and a system that was created to modify with the times.