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Pastimes : Impeachment=" Insult to all Voters" -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (1288)	1/5/1999 4:59:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 2390

Well gee Chris, I guess we disagree a little in regards to "laws" that dictate personal behavior. I'm not sure we do disagree about the Laws themselves. I have long advocated scrapping a whole ton of laws that regulate personal behavior. I don't see what business the government has in saying what you can smoke or imbibe in your own house as long as you don't then go and do anything nasty to somebody else. I fail to see why, for example, consensual nonexploitive prostitution should be illegal, or consensual nonexploitive pornography (except child pornography which can't be truly nonconsensual IMO), etc. I think laws should address negative impacts to nonconsenting people or to common resources (like the environment), and may sometimes be needed to limit exploitation (some of the labor laws, for example), but we have WAY too many laws. I've said so for years. But where we may disagree is in the RESPONSE to laws we don't like or believe are morally or ethically invalid (such as, in my case, the Jim Crow laws which I deliberately violated in various sit-ins in the South back in the 60s.) IMO, if we accept the option that a person is entitled to ignore laws they don't agree with and try to get away with it if they can (which is what I believe Clinton did), we lose our right and opportunity to insist on the enforcement of laws we want enforced. (There are prsumably people who would, if they thought they could get away with it, violate many laws, such as environmental protection laws, which they don't personally approve of but I want enforced.) In order to insist that the laws I approve of be enforced, I believe I have to either a) obey the laws I don't approve of until I can get them changed, or b) openly and publicly violate the law I disapprove of with the intent of bringing attention to them as wrong laws which need to be changed and with a willingness to accept the penalty until they are changed. (The tactics of Gandhi, King, etc.) Simply breaking laws I don't approve of and trying to get away with it if I can is, IMO, putting myself in the precise same position as any criminal, and is not an ethically or morally supportable position unless one is ready to return to a totally lawless culture. What I'm saying is of course, nothing new; go back to Plato's Crito for perhaps the first exposition of the theory. But the point is to separate the areas where you and I agree or disagree with the CONTENT of the laws from any disagreement we may have on the correct RESPONSE to laws we disapprove of.