(01-20-2010 12:23 PM)DrTorch Wrote: (01-20-2010 12:19 PM)Rebel Wrote: On the governmental plane, I view social conservatism as tyranny. It's not the government's job to run people's personal lives.
I understand that. But given economics is a social interaction, it's impossible to have "social liberalism" with "fiscal conservatism".
But "liberalism" in social liberalism means the generally the same thing as "conservatism" in fiscal conservatism. The labels are flipped, but the meaning is the same.
The founding fathers were almost universally considered to be (classic now) liberals, not conservatives. Appeals to maximizing individual freedom & smaller, Constitutionally limited government, though mainly coming from conservatives now, are appeals to return to our classic liberal roots. It's the labels that have changed, not the meaning.
As for Jefferson, GGniner, absolutely he was a tyrant, at least in some aspects of his life. It is entirely possible for a person to by tyrannical in one aspect of his life and not in others. And anyone who believes that he has the right to own another human being is a tyrant, at least in my book.
As an aside, according to Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson thought the same. Not that it really matters because, as with anything else, it's the quality of the thought that matters, not the quality of the thinker. It's always disappointing to be reminded of how clearly he recognized the evils of slavery yet lacked the courage to do the one thing that was entirely within his power and free his own slaves. But it was a different time and he was just a man, as flawed as the rest of us.
Of course, if the prevailing punishment for homosexuality was death (in my two minutes of research it looks like that may have been the case), Jefferson might have been doing the best he could to mitigate the tyranny of others, making incremental progress instead of attempting to fix it in one fell swoop. So perhaps this is an example of his tyrannical attitudes, or perhaps this is actually an example of his liberal pragmatism, or possibly somewhere in between.