Mark sentences that describe conservatives and liberals. Try to identify examples in our contemporary context.
Answers
onservatives are fond of suggesting that liberals don't understand what they say, that they just don't get it. The conservatives are right. The ascendancy of conservative ideology in recent years and, in particular, the startling conservative victory in the 1994 congressional elections have left liberals mystified about a great many things. Here are some examples.
William Bennett, a major conservative politician and intellectual leader, has put a major part of his efforts into moral education. He has written The Book of Virtues, an 800-page collection of classical moral stories for children, which has been on the best-seller lists for more than eighty straight weeks. Why do conservatives think that virtue and morality should be identified with their political agenda and what view of morality do they profess?
Family values and fatherhood have recently become central to conservative politics. What are those family values, what is that conception of fatherhood, and what do they have to do with politics?
The conservative Speaker of the House of Representatives, embracing family values, suggested that the children of welfare mothers be taken away from the only families they have known and be placed in orphanages. This sounded like a contradiction of family values to liberals, but not to conservatives.
Conservatives are largely against abortion, saying that they want to save the lives of unborn fetuses. The United States has an extremely high infant-mortality rate, largely due to the lack of adequate prenatal care for low-income mothers. Yet conservatives are not in favor of government programs providing such prenatal care and have voted to eliminate existing programs that have succeeded in lowering the infant mortality rate. Liberals find this illogical. It appears to liberals that "pro-life" conservatives do want to prevent the death of those fetuses whose mothers do not want them (through stopping abortion), but do not want to prevent the deaths of fetuses whose mothers do want them (through providing adequate prenatal care programs). Conservatives se no contradiction. Why?
Liberals also find it illogical that right-to-life advocates are mostly in favor of capital punishment. This seems natural to conservatives. Why?
Conservatives are opposed to welfare and to government funds for the needy but are in favor of government funds going to victims of floods, fires, and earthquakes who are in need. Why isn't this contradictory?
A liberal supporter of California's 1994 single-payer initiative was speaking to a conservative audience and decided to appeal to their financial self-interest. He pointed out that the savings in administrative costs would get them the same health benefits for less money while also paying for health care for the indigent. A woman responded, "It just sounds wrong to me. I would be paying for somebody else."