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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (453)	2/3/2005 12:38:17 PM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Marijuana is legal in Canada even for non-medical reasons? If true that would surprise me and would be one specific example where Canadians are more free I believe it is already decriminalized (i.e. no prosecution for small amounts destined for personal use) and Canadian senate recently recommended legalising it altogether. >>>Homosexual Canadians can legally marry each other, as the state recognizes their equality with heterosexual persons. Are homosexual Americans as free?<<< This is not an issue of freedom. I've stated why on this thread and a few others. I have not followed your posts on the subject. And sorry, but I do find marriage to the person you want to be a right, and its restriction a stiffling of freedom - not only on social and legal aspects based on equality, but also the right to happiness, to be able to choose one's partner in life. Whether or not you accept marriage to be a right, I suppose you would agree that this means homosexual Canadians are more free to do what they want without hurting anyone else than their American counterparts. American citizens cannot marry a person of their sex, however much they want to, but Canadians can. Therefore Canadians are more free in this respect than Americans. It is pretty straight forward, imho. >>>Canadian citizens or other legal residents cannot be locked up by the state and forgotten<<< American citizens are also entitled to a trial. There was some effort by the government to get around this but it was struck down. Yes, after American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi spent three years in prison without charges, he was released through court orders and deported. I think American citizen Jose Padilla spent more than two years in prison, and he is STILL detained at some navy brig. "In 2003, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ordered Padilla freed unless the government charged him with a crime. The U.S. Supreme Court, without ruling on the merits of the case, decided the circuit court had no jurisdiction and the case was refiled in South Carolina." dfw.com How free were those men when detained and locked away for years without their day in court? And how free is Jose Padilla, right now, from wrongful imprisonment, do you think? If it can happen to Padilla, it can happen to another American citizen. Therefore, American citizens are not as free as Canadian citizens (or even citizens of pretty much any functional democracy on this planet) from wrongful imprisonment with no right to their day in court. By the way, I had also mentioned "legal residents". Legal residents in the US can be detained and locked away without their day in court under the PATRIOT Act. There are currently a significant number of immigrants rounded up and locked away, never to be heard from again. We don't know their names. We don't know why they are still imprisoned. They had no chance to challenge their accusers nor prove their innocence in court. "The Justice Department is demanding close to $400,000 from a public interest foundation before honoring its request for information on a lingering mystery of Sept. 11 - the secret numbers of immigrants who were rounded up after the terrorist attacks and never heard from as their court records were sealed." iht.com this really isn't about comparing freedom in the two countries I may have misunderstood. From the post I replied to initially, it looked like you were indeed making that comparison.