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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (76663)	7/26/2008 5:07:13 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543095

I'll take your points one by one: 1. reverse Roe v Wade and, among some, put in place a constitutional amendment forbidding women the right to choose. I'm not arguing for a reversal of Roe V. Wade. I think women do have a right to choose whether or not they will get pregnant, but a human being is a human being and killing a defenseless one is murder. 2. Reverse all efforts at affirmative action. I focused on universities and colleges since I know something about it. But one could make the claim more generally. Affirmative action is only necessary if there is inequity in the rules applied to selecting candidates for jobs or in your case admission. I think the country is over the hump on that, at least in my experience. In fact, I've seen many inequities caused by affirmative action. Of course, if somebody doesn't feel that they are as qualified as another but still want preference for the job or admission, I can see why they would want affirmative action in perpetuity, even though the original reason for it is gone. 3. Oppose efforts to give gays and lesbians equal rights with heteros. Gays and Lesbians already have all the rights everybody else does. They want rights that other people don't have. That's the problem. I had an experience several years ago when employee groups working for my employer started organizing along preferences or attributes of one kind or another. One by one these groups applied for and received sanction which allowed them to meet in employer offices and communicate on employer systems. GLOBE, Gay Lesbian or Bisexual Employees, asked for and received sanction overnight. A group I was interested in, ACROSS, was denied recognition and fought for two years in court to get the rights that it deserved. Finally, the recognition was granted. But there was a bitter taste in my mouth because the discrimination was overt and energetic. ACROSS was the only group that allowed everybody in who wanted to participate. It was the only group organized to help others, not themselves. ACROSS stands for Association of Christians Reaching Out in Service and Support. It did not require that one be a Christian to join, just agree to principles that should have applied to all these employee groups. No founder was worried about something called an individual right of gun ownership. This is simply not true. Frankly, I doubt that the founders could see far enough ahead to recognize that people would try to destroy that right, but I can cite a number of quotations that show the founders were clearly dedicated to the principle embodied in the Second Amendment. People who want to destroy the Second Amendment are the very kind of people who think they know how the rest of us shall live and want to make sure we do it their way.

To: JohnM who wrote (76663)	7/29/2008 1:21:11 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543095

1. reverse Roe v Wade and, among some, put in place a constitutional amendment forbidding women the right to choose. The former isn't imposing a restriction on anyone. The later, is as you point out something that receives narrower support, and also is only a clearly unjustified restriction on freedom if you assume that there is no other human life that has natural rights and should have legal rights. In any case, if you take it as a clearly unjustified infringement on liberty, its isn't an idea that is going anywhere, so at least practically it would be much less of a danger than the infringements more associated with the left or the Democrats (I say "more associated", because they also get support from some Republicans) 2. Reverse all efforts at affirmative action. Redusing or eliminating affirmative action in public/government institutions can be looked at as an issue that doesn't involve liberty at all, or one that increases it. Eliminating government requirements for affirmative action in the private sector (whether they are explicit requirements, or laws, regulations, or tendencies in court decisions), increases liberty. And isn't imposing a social view on people, but is rather refraining from doing so. So they only area where you have any argument in this category is government requirements to eliminate private affirmative action. That idea isn't exactly a major movement, or a plank of the Republican parties platform. 3. Oppose efforts to give gays and lesbians equal rights with heteros. The only part that would amount to a large movement is opposition to government recognition of commited homosexual relationships as marriages, and giving them benefits as such. If that is considered problematic, it would be so in terms of equal treatment, not in terms of restricting anyone's liberty. As I replied to someone else on this issue - "A large movement that would not approve of government formally recognizing such relationships as marriages, or giving the associated benefits. An insignificant movement that would try to stop them from having some ceremony, living together, saying that they are married etc. "Stop pairs of adult citizens from marrying each other" makes it sound more actually stopping people from doing things, rather than not recognizing or supporting those things."