Subject:
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Re: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 23 Jul 2004 03:11:43 GMT
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Viewed:
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1678 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
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So, “don’t ask, don’t tell”? “Ya I smoked pot but I didn’t inhale”? That sort
of thing? Is that the moral creed you espouse?
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No, I just think it’s brainlessly stupid to walk around crowing about how you’re
committing some crime. There’s a difference between being willing to be
arrested and actively campaigning for it.
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Further, was Rosa Parks right or wrong?
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From what she’s said, she was just tired. Regardless, pretending for the moment
that she was making a political statement: morally right, legally wrong. Which
gets us back around to what I said before. If you brag about breaking the law
in an attempt to convince the public to repeal it, public opinion can turn
against you and your standpoint. People will view you as a criminal more than
an activist.
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How do you feel about civil disobedience as an instrument of change?
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As long as it doesn’t involve breaking the law? Not a problem. If it does
require breaking the law, the offense had better be so egregious that you’re
willing to lay down your own life in protest.
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How about economic boycotts? (what actually brought down segregated buses)
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Wow, did you pull any muscles while stretching for that one? When has is it
ever been illegal to boycott in the US? The capitalist market is built around
the very idea that you can refuse to buy anyone’s product for any reason. As
the customer, you can refuse to do business with someone because you think their
ads are annoying, because the “stars aren’t correctly alligned”, or because you
flipped a coin 20 years ago and it came up tails. The boycott is one of the
most politically powerful tools available to the public.
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So marrying 2 wives (15” away from the curb) is OK but marrying 20 (15 feet
from the curb) isn’t? I’m not seeing the analogy, sorry.
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No, but bigamy, while illegal in many states, is rarely enforced anywhere
(though it serves the worthwhile purpose of giving justification for divorce
without having to pay alimony to your cheating spouse). And as long as they let
it stand at bigamy in the public eye, there’s not much likelihood of conviction.
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Further, is it true that you support the notion of having laws just so it’s
convenient for the police to harass you, so that they have some excuse,
regardless of whether it makes sense or not?
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I support the notion of letting cops decide that a given violation is so
insignificant that they don’t need to enforce it in the absence of any member of
the public voicing a complaint. I also support the DA’s right to decide that a
crime isn’t worth prosecuting because there’s not enough evidence to result in a
conviction. I don’t support the idea of making breathing illegal so you’ve got
grounds to arrest anyone at will. But if you don’t like a law, change it.
Don’t break it.
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Reasonable and prudent speed seemed to be working OK for Montana.
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I’m sure even they won’t let you drive 90mph through an urban residential area,
and they’ve got a high enough land/car ratio that you’re not likely to be
dodging hundreds of cars along the way, much less run into a cop who could pull
you over for speeding.
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That’s as may be but I’ve always stated that I think if you don’t believe in
a law, show some backbone and say so, don’t sneak around.
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Again, there’s a difference between standing up and decrying a law and bragging
about how you’ve broken it already.
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Na, I won’t. That’s a straw dog as far as what I’ve said here,
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I think you meant straw man.
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because I’ve never been in favor of coercion when it comes to setting up
contracts. I’m not seeing informed consent in that case, are you?
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That’s exactly the problem. Polygamy as it stands in Utah has led to a
disturbing level of wife and child abuse by people who think they’re buying
their way into heaven by peopling the earth (and yes, that’s exactly what the
Mormon justification for polygamy). It’s led to so much inbreeding that the
birth defect rate has noticably increased.
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That sounds like an argument against welfare, not an argument against
polygamy.
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Polygamy is leading to a need for welfare. I mean, think about it. You’ve got
one guy working, he’s supporting over half a dozen wives, they can’t work
because they’re each raising over half a dozen kids, many of those kids are
pulled out of school at an early age to help raise the younger kids, they end up
missing out on the basic high school education that’s supposed to be guaranteed
to everyone, they end up getting low-paying jobs, and then they end up raising
their own 50-person families on paychecks that can barely support one person.
It’s a social disaster. And it was outlawed forever by the Utah constitution as
a requirement for statehood.
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