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

To: Lane3 who wrote (94739)	11/8/2008 12:27:38 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541403

That's a suitable metric for evaluating the morality of something. We're not talking about morality, however, but about legality. Yes, Virginia, they are two different things. You are not differentiating between them. We make things illegal when there is a victim and we punish the perpetrator. When things are simply immoral, we turn up our noses but let god or karma extract the punishment. Your whole post was good, Lane. Voting on something like a Prop 8 does indeed come down to choosing between which of competing principles I, or anyone else, deems most important. So how we frame the issue does become a matter of choice. I also appreciate your comment on differentiating between legality and morality because that is, of course, the dilemma. It's the dilemma of abortion rights..the law has declared it to not be murder, even though it biologically is the killing of a human being and involves a victim, the fetus, who most likely would choose to live if given the choice. Perhaps the problem is in the word morality itself. Laws don't legitimize or delegitimize "morality". Laws determine behavior. The problem is that when behaviors are legalized, these actions end up creating a society's morality to some extent. Thus morality and legality aren't really mutually exclusive. I also want to comment about this. In our past theological/philosophical discussions, I've noticed a common thread in your posts which is the use of negative terminology....words like punishment, restricting, denying, forcing, as in forcing my beliefs on others, etc. This is no big deal and is the natural attitude, I think, for you to have. It's just that it misrepresents me. Please believe me when I say my motivation is that I believe there's such joy to be had from a life spent in the pursuit of all those basic religious virtues and in the avoidance of all those things considered to be sins, and I just wish everyone could have this, too. And this belief will always, right or wrong, shape my voting.