Three lofty words, I suppose.
According to a fellow named Jonathan Haidt, current darling of the conservative and libertarian crowd, these are the watchwords of conservatism.
You aren't allowed to quibble with the word "loyalty". Either you are or you aren't ... loyal. No mixed loyalties allowed. It smacks of treachery, ugh, disloyalty.
Um, authority. It seems that it might be allowable to:
Question Authority!
Often attributed to that acid freak Timothy Leary, "Think for yourself and question authority".
But, given the current rightward turn of things maybe not.
Then, there is holy sanctity. One may think of Ric Santorum. One may not. It depends.
But, the three words. They make me think of Penn State and the Roman Catholic Church.
Loyalty. Loyalty to football. Loyalty to the team. Loyalty to the coach. Loyalty to Penn State.
Why the hell why?
Same thing for the rising hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrines, from lowly unquestioning parishioner and child to the Pope himself.
And the churchly authority. And the authority of the coach become Godlike, and his acolytes.
The word sanctity rings rather hollow. Sometimes it stinks.
I do not like those three words: loyalty ... authority ... sanctity.
They do not ring my chimes.
Better I like caring, like for others, fairness and freedom or liberty, the supposed values of the Occupy forces. Jonathan Haidt ... and colleagues ... found much to tsk, tsk about that:
My colleagues and I found that political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. They are very concerned about victims of oppression, but they rarely make moral appeals based on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm but much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation.
Maybe we need a new way of defining things.