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[mainiac]

I think issues should be reworked.  For instance, many liberals these days like nuclear energy.  While they'd want safe regulation, that could easily fit into industrial regulation.  But ideological issues like immigration and welfare don't feature in.  So for example:

Immigration from C+ to L+
There is no legal immigration and the border patrol shoots to kill
Naturalization is biased, expensive and restrictive with low quota's
Naturalization is humane and immigration quota's are high
There are no immigration caps and immigrants are only documented for law enforcement purposes
Open borders

And changing the laws would be
"securing our borders" or
"reforming immigration" respectively

Welfare
The poor are advised to turn to Jesus
The welfare system provides benefits in some cases
There is a societal safety for those who can't work
The government takes care of all citizens whether they work or not
The welfare system shows that there is such a thing as a free lunch

Changes would be
"Reforming the welfare system"
"Insuring the welfare of the needy"

Religion
The first church of Jesus McChrist is the state religion
The government promotes christian morals
The government funds a few faith based charities
A secular, tolerant society is promoted by the law
People don't bother with religion too much

Changes:
"ensure a moral society"
"ensure separation of church and state"

[E. Albright]

Immigration in particular would be good; it would allow more your illegal immigrants a chance at amnesty or at least dodging deportation when arrested.

Your welfare scale seems a bit too Liberal though.

• Corporate workhouses help the degenerate poor pull themselves up by their bootstraps
• The poor are guided to Jesus by 1000 points of light
• A minimal welfare system provides temporary benefits and rigorously searches for fraud.
• There is a societal safety net for those who can't work
• The government takes care of all citizens whether they work or not / The welfare system shows that there is such a thing as a free lunch

And if we were to go for religion, I'd scale the last two back a bit (in line with the gay rights, flag burning, and abortion issues; they don't go all the way up to mandatory gay abortions for everyone, after all  ):

• The government is strictly neutral in religious matters, though popular culture has a Christian bias
• All religions are freely tolerated

Hmm. Might want to throw in "Only True Christians can hold office" onto C, too.

But generally, yeah, seeing more issues can only be good, and IIRC has been discussed as Something Coming Down the Pike (eventually).

[Capntastic]

Having secularity promoted by law is a totally conservative notion- its a mixture of church(lessness) and state that just ain't cool.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

More ideas (just ideas!) on a religious issue

You lose:
- The world derisively refers to the country as "Jesusland".

Don't forget this one! There's a game over screen with an ultra-arch-conservative results for everything if you aren't dead or in prison when you lose the game. Normal arch-conservative should be deep in it but not irrecoverably.

Otherwise:
- Encouraging religious faith is a major goal of public policy.
- Public schools include organized prayer and study of creation beliefs.
- Religious charities and private schools may compete for public funding.
- Government is prohibited from supporting religious organizations.
- Purely faith-based viewpoints are irrelevant to public policy.

Maybe the more Conservative the religious issue, the more people are created with skill levels in Religion?

[E. Albright]

That religious scale looks good, tho' I'd personally throw in a reference to religious tests to hold public office towards the more conservative end of the spectrum (I'd put it at C+ on the scale JSF outlined). As for the bad ending, a more descriptive one might be better, e.g.: "Church and state are seamlessly melded, and hunting permits are issued on atheists and infidels."

[E. Albright]

Having secularity promoted by law is a totally conservative notion- its a mixture of church(lessness) and state that just ain't cool.

OT, but this only holds true for the American multicultural conception of social liberalism. There are other conceptions of social liberalism that hold monoculturalism to be an ideal state, with the notion that all members of the society should create a public sphere where their private beliefs are not forced upon others, and/or a homogeneous front is presented to reduce prejudice. Examples of such civic secularity would include France and Turkey. Now, both of these examples are not without their problems. France has the problem that its "secular" civic ideology tends to include a default Gaulic cultural stance (including Catholicism), which in practice generally marginalizes non-Western immigrants. However, the "adopt-all-OUR-values-to-belong" problem notwithstanding, this framework provides for a civic body that ascribes to the same universal values regarding the role of church and state, the value of democracy, civic duty, respect for other's private beliefs (in principle at least, and as long as they don't invade the public or civic sphere), etc. A multicultural society doesn't impose these values, and leaves large chunks of the populace wholly free to want and encourage the imposition of state religions, want to expel non-members of a given chunk from the polity, and otherwise encourage sectarianism and intolerance. The notion of homeschooling as it currently plays out in the US would in particular be anathema to French monoculturalism, because it allows parents to choose to instill whatever civic values they please in their children, with no consideration of how this will affect the children's future interactions with society at large.

Both conceptions of liberalism have their flaws, and both demand a certain amount of misty-eyed idealism regarding widespread dissemination of fundamental values, either universal tolerance amongst the whole of the body politic, or strict unbiased neutrality on behalf of members and employees of government. However, again, this is off-topic. LCS focuses on the American conception, so a government that encourages secularism instead of striving for simple neutrality is encouraging irreligion over religion, and that violates American liberal multicultural values.

[Gantolandon]

About the religion issue, I'm not sure... wouldn't that stack with some other ones? Or, in some cases, even collide - imagine a fully religious country which supports free abortion and gay rights. Maybe it would be a good idea to use the church just as AM Radio and Cable News - to convert the people again to Conservative point of view.

The immigration policy could solve the sweatshop workers' problem. As for now, its too easy to grab some from the Garnment Maker. They bring a huge amount of income, and if the're arrested and deported, you can always get more.

Having secularity promoted by law is a totally conservative notion- its a mixture of church(lessness) and state that just ain't cool.

I thought that LCS is about American view about Conservatism and Liberalism. It would not be very compatible with other countries... for example in my country free market believers (C+ people in case of working rights, corporations policy, etc.) are not always very religious people - sometimes even atheists. Devout catholics seem to be extremely Conservative when speaking about abortion and gay rights, but they usually don't trust capitalism ("civilisation of death" and so). All of them agree that it's "better dead then read" though... It's hilarious to watch them quarreling who is a worse commie.

[JT]

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that Liberals want neutrality of church and state.  The idea of separation between church and state is to encourage that decisions are not religiously motivated, but rather are societally motivated.

Liberalism is definitely not about neutrality, but rather about weakening government control over freedom.  Religion in government is about having power to influence the law with motives that are not always parallel to promoting good for everyone (e.g., the Taliban), and any truly liberal person would generally want to undermine any grip that religion has on the law.

The idea is not to prevent the leader from being religious, but rather to force his decisions to be based on society as a whole (Communism) rather than personal conviction (Capitalism).

[Gantolandon]

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that Liberals want neutrality of church and state.  The idea of separation between church and state is to encourage that decisions are not religiously motivated, but rather are societally motivated.

Usually they want. Christianity and liberalism, regardless of what more tolerant priests and religious liberals say, don't really get along with each other. Besides the fact that their opinion about some issues is extremely different, many priests  don't agree with humanistic point of view. They regard placing people above the God as hubris. It's more than abortion, it's a difference in very principles. So the priests seem to like more the conservative point of view, and liberals usually don't get overly religious. And they try to bar each other from the politics.

[E. Albright]

Maybe the more Conservative the religious issue, the more people are created with skill levels in Religion?

Hmm. Like this notion. On a related note about something I can't recall, do random conservatives on the street start packing heat when gun control dips low enough? If they don't, I'd think they should, especially with the whole "(liberal) criminal( squad)s want guns outlawed so only they'll have guns" notion that was raised in the Organizations thread.

[a1s]

they do. and I think it's not just them (I think alienated people will pack heat too, but don't quote me on this).
with C+ levels, you can expect civilians to even carry sub-machine guns on rare occasions!

also, I'm not sure if they should have *more* levels in religion. They are probably believers, but not theologians by any measure. maybe they should all have one level.

[Nonanonymous]

• The government is strictly neutral in religious matters, though popular culture has a Christian bias
• All religions are freely tolerated

Hmm. Might want to throw in "Only True Christians can hold office" onto C, too.

But generally, yeah, seeing more issues can only be good, and IIRC has been discussed as Something Coming Down the Pike (eventually).

This makes me want to point out how odd it is for someone with the codename 'Dispater' to mutter things about Jesus when wounded. 

[John Hopoate]

Associating conservatism with hardcore Christian fundamentalism and liberalism with atheism isn't realistic but this game is a parody so it'd work pretty well.

[Alaern]

Liberals are already associated with Greenpeace radicalists, with all their protests against nuclear energy, genetically altered food and dissection of small fluffy animals in the name of science. So why conservatives shouldn't be associated with Inquisition?

[mainiac]

What about the issues besides religion though?  I think immigration in particular belongs in the game.