So said the bumper sticker in big, black, block letters on the pickup truck. (The gun rack in the rear window of the cab sent the same message to anyone paying attention, I suppose...)
A dear friend grew up in the town of Liberal, KS, which is not--and probably never was--politically left-of-center. The name came from the fact that, among the villages along the trail to the southwest frontier, this town was "liberal" when it came to sharing its water with travelers.
That is the essential meaning of "liberal": that we are generous with the resources with which we have been blessed. The opposite of "liberal" is not "conservative", but "miserly", "parsimonious", or "stingy". Because the modern face of conservatism has become the latter three, they do not "conserve" the essential foundations of our egalitarian society, but slash and burn them with reckless abandon.