>They're entitled to live like that if they want, so long as it doesn't turn into socially and structurally coercing everyone else to live like that
Yet people routinely advocate for subsiding what we want and penalizing what we don't in damn near every other public policy context, transportation, energy, housing, etc, etc, etc.
So how do you reconcile this? Surely those people who want a conservative lifestyle have just as much right to try and get society to do what they want on the issues they care about as any (to pick an example) the people who want us to reduce outsourcing of manufacturing to countries with less environmental protections do?
It's perfectly possible to craft policy that makes life easier for households with one working parent and one stay at home parent without doing anything to specifically restrict women. Crafting policy in such a manner would be all but necessary since we live in an age where same sex marriage is widely accepted. Heck, it could be as simple as a well crafted tax credit.
What is far harder than crafting the actual policy is having a discussion about the policy without things devolving in exactly the direction you're bringing it.
Edit: Now that I think about it policy that promotes married couples with a single stay at home parent would likely go a long way toward un-screwing the people who've been screwed out of stable households for several generations due to welfare and state assistance rules that highly dis-incentivize marriage.
The social conservative positions I have seen in the US for the past few decades have been only about limiting women’s rights. I have not seen anything come out about helping families with one stay at home parent and one working parent.
Nothing about healthcare reform, minimum wage laws, or parental leave policies. You have to have two working parents to afford the volatility of income, which in the US was also tied to healthcare, and still is in some sense (until Democrats helped changed that with ACA, not the people that call themselves conservatives).
Reducing this volatility for families is not the “conservative” position in the US.
Yet people routinely advocate for subsiding what we want and penalizing what we don't in damn near every other public policy context, transportation, energy, housing, etc, etc, etc.
So how do you reconcile this? Surely those people who want a conservative lifestyle have just as much right to try and get society to do what they want on the issues they care about as any (to pick an example) the people who want us to reduce outsourcing of manufacturing to countries with less environmental protections do?