Two Conservatisms

Rod Dreher takes issue:

There are basically two kinds of people in this country who identify as conservatives: libertarian conservatives, and traditionalist conservatives. This reader (and Andrew) hail from the libertarian wing of conservatism. We traditionalists might be vile Christianists, to use Andrew's pejorative term, but we are certainly conservatives. What unites libertarians and traditionalists is, broadly speaking, suspicion of the accumulation of power, especially in the hands of the state. What divides us are matters of culture, authority and morality. To put it broadly, for libertarians, the good life consists of a state in which individual liberty is maximalized. For traditionalists, the good life consists of a state in which free people behave virtuously.

Who doesn't want to live in a state where "free people behave virtuously"? But what if they don't? Rod wants the law to direct people's moral choices and forbid some. I'm more skeptical of government than that. Rod's second formula also begs the question of what "free people" are. Most of the "virtue-promotion" among traditionalist conservatives is really about sex: forbidding it, stigmatizing it, restraining it, hiding it, fearing it. It's about controlling sexual freedom by law and the police. I think people's sex lives are their own business. And I think that's a more authentically conservative (and Christian) position. It's Chapter Three in "The Conservative Soul": the case against Christianist prohibition on abortion, end of life issues, and procreative sex.