It only matters if it impacts me personally

       I thought of this once again yesterday when Rep. Jared Golden from Maine said that he was changing his vote from defending gun rights to supporting a ban on assault weapons.  Apparently, the mass killing in his home state of Maine brought the problem close enough to him personally that he now saw it as a problem.  The mass killings in other states were not a problem unless it came home to him.  This reality that conservatives only feel empathy when it personally impacts them is a defining quality of conservatives.

     I have a couple of other examples of this reality with conservatives.  The first is how the Administration of Ronald Reagan proposed a 23% cut in grant funding for the National Institutes of Health but after Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease Nancy Reagan became an advocate for more funding for research into the disease.   The second example is when conservatives opposed same-sex marriage until a relative came out as being gay.  The best example of this is when Vice President Cheney's daughter came out as being gay. 

    As I have repeated once again, the defining characteristic between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives need to experience an issue personally before they develop a social conscience.