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> To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fea

> To give an example, I can empathize with the problems many Republicans face: fear of a loss of quality of life, fear of loss of stability, fear of change, fear of changing classes, fear of losing your culture, fear of being left behind by society. I’m a republican-leaning independent, and what you write here strikes me more as stereotype of the right than actual concerns of the right. I don’t really worry about any of the things you mention.

aleister_777 7y ago
Agreed. These are not the values that make me. Many of the values that I represent will lead towards stability, however, it's not fear that I'm defined by.
StuffedParrot 7y ago
That may be true, I never claimed to be accurate (certainly not in a general sense), I am just conveying what I hear when I talk to people about what matters to them. Fear is certainly not a value, but americans rarely talk about values in any explicit way.
- garmaine 7y ago
  What I'm saying is that what you describe is the straw man caricature of the right that lefties like to dismantle, not how an actual right-of-center person would describe their political motivations. Take gay marriage. The left likes to lampoon the right for claiming that "homosexuality is against our values" or some such homophobic nonsense. But that's not why republicans are against gay marriage--because you might be surprised to learn that republicans are NOT against gay marriage! They're against the government defining what marriage is: marriage is a religious and/or cultural tradition and it's none of the government's damn business to define or restrict it in any way. Being right-of-center is more about preferring distributed, consensual, market-based solutions over government mandates and regulation, and staying out of people's lives. The obsession with "our values!" and fear response is a weird leftist caricature of the right, not reality.
  - StuffedParrot 7y ago
    A straw man implies I am trying to convince you of something. I am just sharing my perspective. “Market based solutions” is no more a value than fear is. You can’t evaluate its efficacy without having a value with which to measure. There’s really no point in discussing politics at all without values. Personally I think it’s fucked up that government recognizes marriage at all. The benefits have very little to do with the pluralistic definitions of marriage that exist around the world today—tax benefits & visitation rights are not closely related to tying family assets together OR romance. It’s abhorrent that these rights were ever denied to couples regardless of whether they married or not. Religious couples deserve these rights regardless of marriage too. It makes no sense to recognize marriage at the state level. As a gay man I have never nor will ever have any ambitions of marriage, but these rights are still denied to me. I hope you can see through this that the policy and dialogue championed through partisanship is divorced from values that I hold dear, though I emphatically do not begrudge the gay couples that did find a victory through the policy.
  - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    I would wager that people who vote Republican and oppose gay marriage do so for a variety of reasons, not just the one you stated.
  - rfrey 7y ago
    Honest question from someone who knows nothing about American culture except what the media chooses to tell me. Wouldn't the position outlined above lead to preferring policy that: 1. In the best case, removed all government recognition of marriage: e.g. remove all differential tax treatment, remove marriage licenses, remove any recognition of marriage whatsoever from government documents 2. In the case that (1) is not possible or complete, ensure that what regulations do exist make no distinctions at all between "types" of couples that marry - e.g. no distinction or restriction between same-sex marriage, cousins marrying, more-than-two-partner marriages, etc. That seems to me to follow logically, but also does not seem to be the position of the Republican party, at least the parts of it I read about.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago

aleister_777 7y ago

Agreed. These are not the values that make me. Many of the values that I represent will lead towards stability, however, it's not fear that I'm defined by.

StuffedParrot 7y ago

That may be true, I never claimed to be accurate (certainly not in a general sense), I am just conveying what I hear when I talk to people about what matters to them. Fear is certainly not a value, but americans rarely talk about values in any explicit way.

garmaine 7y ago
What I'm saying is that what you describe is the straw man caricature of the right that lefties like to dismantle, not how an actual right-of-center person would describe their political motivations. Take gay marriage. The left likes to lampoon the right for claiming that "homosexuality is against our values" or some such homophobic nonsense. But that's not why republicans are against gay marriage--because you might be surprised to learn that republicans are NOT against gay marriage! They're against the government defining what marriage is: marriage is a religious and/or cultural tradition and it's none of the government's damn business to define or restrict it in any way. Being right-of-center is more about preferring distributed, consensual, market-based solutions over government mandates and regulation, and staying out of people's lives. The obsession with "our values!" and fear response is a weird leftist caricature of the right, not reality.
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  A straw man implies I am trying to convince you of something. I am just sharing my perspective. “Market based solutions” is no more a value than fear is. You can’t evaluate its efficacy without having a value with which to measure. There’s really no point in discussing politics at all without values. Personally I think it’s fucked up that government recognizes marriage at all. The benefits have very little to do with the pluralistic definitions of marriage that exist around the world today—tax benefits & visitation rights are not closely related to tying family assets together OR romance. It’s abhorrent that these rights were ever denied to couples regardless of whether they married or not. Religious couples deserve these rights regardless of marriage too. It makes no sense to recognize marriage at the state level. As a gay man I have never nor will ever have any ambitions of marriage, but these rights are still denied to me. I hope you can see through this that the policy and dialogue championed through partisanship is divorced from values that I hold dear, though I emphatically do not begrudge the gay couples that did find a victory through the policy.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  I would wager that people who vote Republican and oppose gay marriage do so for a variety of reasons, not just the one you stated.
- rfrey 7y ago
  Honest question from someone who knows nothing about American culture except what the media chooses to tell me. Wouldn't the position outlined above lead to preferring policy that: 1. In the best case, removed all government recognition of marriage: e.g. remove all differential tax treatment, remove marriage licenses, remove any recognition of marriage whatsoever from government documents 2. In the case that (1) is not possible or complete, ensure that what regulations do exist make no distinctions at all between "types" of couples that marry - e.g. no distinction or restriction between same-sex marriage, cousins marrying, more-than-two-partner marriages, etc. That seems to me to follow logically, but also does not seem to be the position of the Republican party, at least the parts of it I read about.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago