On the way to work, it occurred to me that the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to coercion is the essential form of the coercion itself, not where it is applied. Conservatives tend to prohibit people from taking an action, whereas liberals force others to do something. For example, conservatives support prohibiting homosexuals from getting marriage licenses (and the associated legal benefits) and support laws which allow employers to deny benefits to homosexual couples that are normally reserved for married couples. Liberals, on the other hand, almost always take stances that force employers and society in general to accept homosexuals, gay marriage, etc.
What makes the liberal coercion more morally repugnant is the fact that it forces people to violate their conscience or do something they wish to not do. People may get over being told that they cannot do something, and adjust their life around it, even forming groups of people who enable them to live as they wish. However, when people are forced to take an action, that is less possible because the alternative is usually possible; with conservative policies on gay marriage, it is at least still possible for gay couples to get married in the eyes of their peers and a religious body without coercing others.
Conservative acts of prohibition can certainly go off the deep end. The War on Drugs is the best example of that. Many conservatives treat drug use as though it were on par with an invasion from a terribly powerful foreign invader, justifying all manner of scorched earth and total war tactics. Yet, when one gets right down to it, this is more of an exception to the rule, than the rule itself.
What makes the liberal coercion more morally repugnant is the fact that it forces people to violate their conscience or do something they wish to not do. People may get over being told that they cannot do something, and adjust their life around it, even forming groups of people who enable them to live as they wish. However, when people are forced to take an action, that is less possible because the alternative is usually possible; with conservative policies on gay marriage, it is at least still possible for gay couples to get married in the eyes of their peers and a religious body without coercing others.
Conservative acts of prohibition can certainly go off the deep end. The War on Drugs is the best example of that. Many conservatives treat drug use as though it were on par with an invasion from a terribly powerful foreign invader, justifying all manner of scorched earth and total war tactics. Yet, when one gets right down to it, this is more of an exception to the rule, than the rule itself.
You could also view this on a spectrum of freedom wrt property, too.
Toward the most un-free end are the liberals, who, as you characterize, force another person to do something a certain way with their his own property.
In the middle, neither wholly free but certainly not un-free, lay the mainstream conservatives. They proscribe others from doing certain things with their own property. They don't say to one another: "you must", but rather, "you can't".
Then on the most free end are the Liberals, or the Radical Conservatives, who require only that people cannot tell others what they can and cannot do with their property, insofar as it doesn't infringe on another's right to exercise of his property.
Under this taxonomy, the Left remains the left, the Right becomes centrist, and the Libertarian becomes the right.
eople that they cannot force another to do something or not do something a certain a certain
Unfortunately, there is no clean way of describing this to the uninitiated. For the spectrum to truly make sense here, you have to have Communism on the one hand, and anarcho-capitalism on the other end because the ends of a spectrum must be irreconcilably different as they are in the EM spectrum in Physics. In politics, you would end up with similar results on both extremes: chaos. Either the bloody hand of the tyrant or the bloody hand of the armed mob.
I think this is where a healthy conservatism works best. Where conservatives have gone awry is that they have refused to check their own assumptions against reality. For example, conservatives rarely admit to themselves that they are undermining the very law and order they seek to foster through the War on Drugs. It is the very essence of such a prohibition that it multiples the natural inclination to that vice, and everyone familiar with human nature understands that fact. Likewise, it is also the nature of the government to go into mission creep, and a sober reflection on the state of marriage laws would force conservatives to admit that perhaps state licensing is ultimately a dangerous proposition.
Er, ignore that last line...I hit "publish" before I had a chance to clean up the leavings of my random thoughts.