seretogis

Notice: There is no link, this is an email that was forwarded to me on a mailing-list.

Ordinarily an email like this would just find its way silently into my mailing list archive but I thought that the polarity of responses from various gay / "anti-violence" groups was too interesting to not display here. It seems that the response from these groups is either a reasonable "Bush/Cheney is not practicing what they are preaching" statement, which I completely agree with, or ridiculous assumptions and outright lies like, "The NRA and its members represent the devaluation of human life on a number of levels."

You can definitely tell -- from these statements -- which groups are genuinely concerned about civil liberties of all citizens, and which are merely concerned with those who pay membership fees. It's unfortunate that some of these groups are willing to hold up a negative stereotype of an organization like the NRA while condemning (and simultaneously living up to) negative stereotypes of themselves.

P.S. How many of you were about to ask that this be moved to Wayside or TFM, from the subject?

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seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

nanofever

I advocate owning small arms and people uniting with whomever they choose as consenting adults ("marriage" is not a state issue). Anything less would impose on other people's lives, and I don't see how I have the right to live other people's lives for them.

I honestly don't understand why everyone isn't a social libertarian. You live your life and I live mine, everyone stays happy.

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"Yeah, the problem with the world is the stupid people are all cocksure of themselves and the intellectuals are full of doubt."

FoolThemAll

Because the purpose of government is to promote the good life. Or because societies have rights and must be protected by the government. Those are two lines of reasoning I've heard.

I don't really consider state-sanctioned marriage to be a right. But yeah, it should be legal for teh gheys.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

OFKU0

I know this is a heated debated in the U.S (and in Canada also, albeit gays rather than guns (( Canada has strict gun contol laws))) but I have to laugh when shooting a gun is entrenched constitutionally by law and shooting your wad at the same sex isn't.

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Lebell

Good post.

As I've said before, this is a part of my political dilemma.

I fully support gay rights (which the Republicans do not) while I fully support gun rights (which the Democrats do not).

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seretogis

Libertarians fully support both, and would love to have you, Lebell.

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seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

irateplatypus

you're over-simplifying the issue.

i fully support gay rights, but i do not support the redefinition of the institution of marriage. it isn't a "right" for two people of the same sex to be married. heck, it isn't even lawful. lumping support of gay-rights and support of gay-marriage is, i believe, an imprecise way of discussing this issue.

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If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

analog

Same here. I have several opinions that are just like that. Oh well.

seretogis

I think that same-sex marriage is more an issue of what the scope of government should be, rather than gay rights. Do you believe that the federal government should be able to define something like marriage (a social institution?)

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seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

Publius

Good God NO! Doesn't anyone read Locke, Hobbes, Jefferson, Madison, or Hamilton anymore? The soul purpose of government is to protect our rights, period. We agree to live under such government because we wish to leave the state of nature (Hobbes about the state of Nature, "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".) In so doing, we agree to turn certain rights over to the government for safe keeping so that we can better secure others (we turn over the right of self inflicted retribution for crimes committed against oneself in order to secure ones right to a fair trail and equal treatment under the law.) The purpose of government is not to promote the good life, rather, it is to secure a stable environment such that society can prosper and survive. The difference between these two definitions is that in the later, government in not an active participant in the promotion of the good, merely a guardian thereof. Even a socialist form of government can be justified under this definition because it is simply doing its job in stabilizing society so that it can continue to grow and prosper. Nevertheless, no matter what form of government a society chooses, its primary function must always remain to be the protection of the rights of the individual. What everyone always overlooks when we start talking about constitutional rights is that there are many many rights that we have that are indeed protected by the constitution that are not enumerated therein. Let me refer you to amendment 9, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”. As a matter of fact, many of our founders, including Madison, were against the Bill of Rights altogether, not because they didn’t believe that the people had these rights, but because they believed that by listing these rights on paper that over time any right not contained therein would be disregarded and argued not to exist. Returning to the present discussion at hand, one the one side we have a right of gun ownership specifically guarded by the 2nd amendment, while on the other we have the right of gays to marry, which is not enumerated but could be implied by the 9th amendment. The question really should be, which of these rights would the individuals have in the state of nature and did they surrender these rights by joining formal society? The I think that answer is clearly that individuals had the right to both in the state of nature and should surrender neither in agreeing to join formal society. By the way, I am not a libertarian in case you were wondering, but I do seem to agree with them on this particular issue. Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter.

FoolThemAll

Whoa, Pub. Well, I wasn't referencing Locke, Hobbes, Jefferson, Madison, or Hamilton, I was referencing Socrates. Or Aristotle, one of those two, I forget. Secondly, I'm sorry, I should've made it clear I didn't believe that the purpose of government was promotion of the good life. So yeah, I pretty much agree with you. Sorry to draw that long paragraph out of you.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

Sparhawk

It's the legislating of discrimination that bothers me. It really boggles my mind that in America there are folks who are denied rights that others possess. What's the difference between this and whites-only restaurants and bars?

Now, if it was the individual churches that were denied the right to refuse to marry gay people, that is different in my mind, and I lump that into the same pile as, say, private clubs.

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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)

FoolThemAll

"I just hope our country isn't overrun by gangster-controlled gay-easies" - Jon Stewart

Eloquent epic post.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

seretogis

[broken record]
It isn't the government's place to force its views on the populace, be it by defining marriage or trying to force the boyscouts to allow gays into their organization.
[/broken record]

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames