Publius

LOL actually I was just using your quote as a jumping off point to get around to what I wanted to say, its something that I often do when posting, but since I haven’t been very active here until recently I wouldn’t expect you to know that about me yet. I will agree with you that Socrates (Plato) argues that the goal of government is to promote the good, but after having read The Republic and other books Socrates (Plato) never gets around to defining what the good is, only what it is not. Anyway, the point of my epic post is that government has no business medaling in personal freedoms and rights because this is not its duty. It should only concern itself with how best to protect peoples rights and once it begin to define or take away right then it is bad government and, according to our founders, should be replaced. Fortunately in our country we have the right to revolution through the ballot box so that we need to have violent revolution every time we get a bad president (dictator).

One more point I would like to make about our constitution and the various amendments. Our constitution, as it stands today, contains no ‘negative rights”, that is to say that there are no rights that are strictly forbidden by the constitution. We experimented with “negative rights” once in our history with the 18th amendment (prohibition) and this turned out to be such an utter failure that it took the 21st amendment to correct it. Bush’s plan to introduce an amendment to prohibit gay marriage is an attempt to introduce “negative rights” to the constitution. I believe that this in and of itself is an abomination and, no matter which side you come down on the argument, it should be obvious that this is not the sort of precedent that we should be wanting to introduce because once we start down this path, what other rights can the government decide that they want to take away from the people?

Good discussion so far though, lets keep it going.
Cheers.

(Hmm again another epic post. Just seems to be how I function)