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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (80793)	6/25/2004 5:41:57 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

"But there is no right of others to demand that you pay them" Sorry. Being paid is a property right. "If you force someone to hire you, you are not being protected" Of course, you are. You are being protected from mistreatment and abuse. And your rights under the law are being protected. I don't understand the difficulty you are having with these ideas. Perhaps you can help me to understand better what is troubling you about people being granted their legal right to protection under the law. "We got rid of slavery long before we instituted anti-discrimination laws." That does not change the truth of my statement. The right to keep slaves was the most extreme case of discriminatory violation of human rights. The laws that have passed since are just fine-tuning of the principle. Clearly when I speak of laws against discrimination, I include the Emancipation Proclamation and everything pertinent thereafter. Let us try to stay on track, please. "and they themselves could discriminate in similar ways the would have equal rights under the law." And that argues what? If the only law in existence was "KILL OR BE KILLED", we would all have equal rights under the law, too. "Refusing to hire, sell to, ect someone is not abusing them. To abuse them you would have to do something to them not just refrain from interacting with them." ABUSE: "1 : a corrupt practice or custom" m-w.com You said yourself in another post that it could be considered "vile". So, yes...you are acting for the right to be abusive...and yes--it is WITHOUT RATIONAL CAUSE. If you can explain to me a rational reason why a person is less deserving of enjoying an equal legal right to goods and services by virtue of their skin colour, then I will reconsider my opinion that it is "without rational cause". If you can show me how "vile" is not similar to "corrupt" then I will use a different word than "abuse". But the thesaurus lists them as synonyms so... m-w.com "but if you think the law does and should allow for such unequal treatment then you are saying that there is neither a natural or legal right to demand equal treatment." NO. I am saying that the law allows for a degree of prejudice (the right to love whom you will) and disallows certain extreme prejudice (the "right" to keep slaves, the "right" to refuse a bus ticket or airline ticket to a citizen because she is a Christian or a Jew or an atheist...or for any other irrational reason). Just as the law allows degrees of mistreatment. I may burn your food, but I may not poison it. "Apparently you consider the absence of such laws an uncivilized value but do not consider the presence of such laws to be "a requirement for or a necessary consequence of civilization."" It is just that I get annoyed arguing the obvious or the irrelevant. What is a civilized value in an old civilized culture would be different than a modern civilized perspective. There are many aspects to "civilization" as I am sure you know. I am not going to call the most moral country in the world (this is a hypothetical) UNcivilized just because in the opinion of those few who are wiser and more noble...they hold one or more UNCIVILIZED values. Anyway, I have wasted enough time on that. If we reserve the usage of "civilized" to apply only to a perfect society without spot or blemish, then the word is a misnomer and may never be properly used. "Civilized" is always used in a relative sense--except by PERFECT people who never use it at all.