Wisdom you read, observations of society by current events and personal experiences in ones own life are not theoretical distinctions.
You don't understand what I am saying, apparently. IF you did, you wouldn't make ignorant comments such as this. Unfortunately, I doubt you are capable of understanding what I said, likely due to your ego once again keeping you from putting aside your own preconceived notions.
Observations in your personal life and in day to day news are anecdotal and do not directly speak to the broader patterns in society. Because of the sheer magnitude of social patterns, it takes a lot more then passing observations of current events to even hope to make logical sense of those broad social patterns from which reasonable policy is drawn from.
You clearly do not understand the type of "wisdom of experience" I am talking about even though I have tried numerous times to explain it to you.
The religious right's infiltration of conservativism and reliance on the wisdom of faith instead of experience is what drives my disdain.
To a point I would agree with you. However, the "religious right" is a vague term that simply serves as a bludgeon to demonize the entire conservative movement. The more accurate identification would the extreme elements of the paleo-conservative strain of conservatism.
They start at a very valid premise that it would be foolish to dismiss; that the less virtuous of a society necessitates external limits (laws) on appetites and desires to maintain a civil society.
Where they go to far is in not pointing out the limits to those laws; what are the trade offs and when do they become too great. When you move down the path of trying to
make society virtuous, after a point, you end up with the soft tyranny that Alexis De Tocqueville mentioned in the 19th century; something similar to Orwell's 1984.
Fortunately this extreme element is a profound minority. Not all social conservatives are of this stripe and this element has virtually no legislative presence outside of the state level.
Name one piece of Federal legislation (proposed or otherwise) that proposes the type of radical change toward some biblical ideal that would characterize this extreme element.
Attempts to define marriage through law are not "radical change" but simply an (ill advised) attempt to codify the status quo so as to close a legal loop hole used to force radical change on society.
The who focus on slow, considered change as opposed to radical changed is derived from a preference for the wisdom of experience. Creating radical change toward some ill defined biblical order is radical change and goes
against the core of conservatism.
It is very different to try and simply stop society's slow decay and encourage a change in course then it is to force a reversal society's decay through regulation.
