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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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As others have said, the classical conservative idea of liberty is liberty towards something. In a Christian context, this is liberty towards love:

For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

What you are thinking of is often described as license, or unlimited ability and right to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Liberty is quite distinct, and in fact many conservatives argue that the highest forms of liberty and freedom are liberty from the flesh, or liberty from our own addictions and negative inclinations.

This is entirely consistent with restricting porn. By watching and becoming addicted to porn, you are actually putting chains on yourself and reducing your liberty, since your compulsion begins to take control over you. That's the line of thinking, anyway.

Why stop there? If we prescribe what people are allowed to eat, we could liberate them from being overweight. If we restrict what people can read, we could liberate them from dangerous ideas polluting their minds. If we institute a draft, we could save people from becoming aimless drifters.

Under that Orwellian definition of liberty, Saudi Arabia would score much better on liberty than the US.

Lol, very fair! I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with the definition, but it is a more coherent philosophical point than most think.

You have to subscribe to the Christian worldview to agree with it though by and large, although I think there's truth even outside that framework. But Christians imposing Christian morality on non Christians via the law is not a good idea imo.