But that was my whole point, you just threw a pile of all kinds of topics into a massive vanity, and said, 'discuss', they are all hot button issues, some of them of serious disagreement her, yet you mashed them all into a single vanity and say, 'have at it boys'.
By the way, I'm a terrible and lazy writer, so my posts seem harsher than if I was talking to you, I admire that you are such an engaged writer and thinker with your FIL, and I'm excited about your political growth, I do wonder if you are going to become a conservative, or split the difference and choose to stop between conservatism and radical leftism, by switching to calling yourself libertarian.
It's a good question. There are a couple of places where I seriously part with libertarians. I don't think it came through in this post as much as my last one, but I have no patience for any thought of appeasing radical Islam. I think it's absolutely the current-day equivalent of the Nazi movement in the 1930's, and we made a big mistake being "isolationist" then, and I don't think we should do the same today. Wherever on Earth they stick their heads up out of the ground, we should act as quickly as possible to cut it off.
I also split with most libertarians on abortion. Social issues where we are talking about consenting adults doing X, Y, or Z voluntarily, and nobody is directly affected, OK, those I'm probably more libertarian. But abortion is the taking of an innocent life, and it is the first priority of government to protect human life.
I do think that Judeo-Christian ethics and morality are the foundation of civil society and our legal system, but only at the more abstract level. When you start getting into more detailed interpretations of religious views, I'm not sure that encoding those interpretations into law is a good idea.
Oh, and I’m not quite ready to say that the government should not provide any sort of social safety net. Ideally, nearly everyone should be taken care of by a good economy, strong families, and charity, but realistically, there might still be those who fall through the cracks, and in a modern, relatively affluence society, I don’t think they should be left for dead. Now, that’s nothing similar to the Democrat policy of basically bribing as much of the population as possible with social welfare programs in order to create an ever-growing class of permanent Democrat voters.