Posted on 12/16/2006 11:22:33 AM PST by Blackirish
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney's pregnant lesbian daughter Mary will make a "fine mom," President George W. Bush said, sidestepping his past comment that a child ideally would be raised by a mother and father.
Mary Cheney, 37, and her longtime partner, Heather Poe, are expecting their first child, which would be the sixth grandchild for the vice president. Cheney was hired last year as an executive for America Online.
"I think Mary is going to be a loving soul to her child. And I'm happy for her," Bush said in an interview with People magazine.
Radical homosexual activists may be trying to get oppressive laws passed. There aren't very many of them, however. Only about 2% of the entire population is homosexual and a tiny, tiny minority of them are *radical homosexual activists*.
But that is NOT what you said. You said that no one has the *right* to do wrong and you define *wrong* via the Bible. You were talking about the ACLU and that things that ARE legal in this country - are by your beliefs - *sins* and as you have said - people have no *right* to sin.
You were NOT talking about *radical homosexual activists* you were talking about anyone who you believe is *sinning*.
Such an absolutist assertion I believe to run counter to the principles of the most competent systems for ensuring liberty in our civilization. I am thinking more Burke and de Tocqueville and I believe your assertion is ala the flawed John Stuart Mill.
Don't get me wrong. I would definitely advocate against, and vote against, in my state, such things as sodomy laws. And if I found myself at the wrong end of a ridiculous law restricting an activity vital to my existence, I would be justifiably angry and the second amendment would be in my thinking.
But it is impossible to eradicate moral judgements from law. Certain attempts to do that impossible thing fuel judicial activism which threatens liberty. I call the fight to prevent rule by judges a generational imperative.
Just as I think that the kind of authoritarian thought that is thrown around re: Homosexuals should be part of that imperative.
It isn't only judges who can trash someone's liberty, an elected legislature can do the same just as easily.
Answer the question posted on my #549 EV...and while you're at it, expound on your ideas on how to keep homosexuals off the public square.
I'll wait.
In 1999 David Walsh, a Christen writer, wrote the following for First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life.
"Wherever the exercise of self-restraint begins, it has the inestimable value of forcing the recognition that we live within an order of limits. Our rights are not a poisonous brew destined to subvert any sense of difference between good and evil. We may not be able to define to our satisfaction where the line is to be drawn. But we can discern clearly its outer limits. The unambiguous recognition of such boundaries is an indispensable element in preserving the awareness of a moral order beyond our construction. Without that awareness we would eventually cease to regard respect for an order of mutual rights as itself something right.
An order of rights without right is simply that. Only if we recognize this do we have any chance of retaining contact with an order of right beyond rights. What we have a right to do may not in fact be right to do. The difference is crucial and it must be embedded in the law itself, because only then can we prevent the collapse of the morally right into the legally right.
Acknowledging the limits of the law is indispensable to preserving the recognition of a moral order beyond it. Conversely, relieving legality of the burden of moral rightness is also indispensable to its preservation. The legal and the moral must remain distinct if they are to perform their roles of supporting and facilitating one another"
Can you tell me what point you think the writer is trying to make?
It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved. Instead of any diminution, there is need of a great increase of disinterested exertion to promote the good of others.
But disinterested benevolence can find other instruments to persuade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the literal or the metaphorical sort. I am the last person to undervalue the self-regarding virtues; they are only second in importance, if even second, to the social. It is equally the business of education to cultivate both.
But even education works by conviction and persuasion as well as by compulsion, and it is by the former only that, when the period of education is past, the self-regarding virtues should be inculcated. Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. They should be for ever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading, objects and contemplations.
But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own well-being: the interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.
The interference of society to overrule his judgment and purposes in what only regards himself, must be grounded on general presumptions; which may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases, by persons no better acquainted with the circumstances of such cases than those are who look at them merely from without. In this department, therefore, of human affairs, Individuality has its proper field of action.
In the conduct of human beings towards one another, it is necessary that general rules should for the most part be observed, in order that people may know what they have to expect; but in each person's own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to free exercise. Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others; but he himself is the final judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.
John Stuart Mill
What flaw?
My question to you guys is real simple... What's in the best interest of our nation, to move away from this, or to move toward it?
Why should anyone accept your premise that every public policy is either moving toward Sharia or away from it? The violent punishments are unjust, and anathema to Western way of thinking. We are very far away from anything like that. No topic on this thread about American laws and culture, can be compared to that. To assert such is an attempt to demonize those who disagree with you.
For example, it is not "like Shari" to resist PC laws. Laws that would force, at the point of a gun, public acceptance of non-traditional coupling as equal to marriage. (E.G. enforcement that the owner of an inn must accomodate openly gay couples.)
The thing is, such relationships are not "equal" to traditional marriage from the point of view of the culture. From the point-of-view within such a relationship it may be the same, but it is unsustainable for a culture to try to "level" everything.
The same flaw as Michel Foucault when he cannot talk about marriage without railing against the tyranny of monogamy. Everything is reduced to what the majority is proscribing the individual from doing. Mill can never recognize that a majority "prejudice" is often indistinguishable from the moral strength in a culture that makes a taboo of infanticide (for example).
At the same time, I am in strong agreement with much of the gist of the words you quoted. They are platitudes - I don't mean that in a bad way.
I'm not asking about every public policy, I'm asking about public p[olicy toward homosexuals, which s what's being discussed here.
"The violent punishments are unjust, and anathema to Western way of thinking. We are very far away from anything like that. No topic on this thread about American laws and culture, can be compared to that. To assert such is an attempt to demonize those who disagree with you."
I beg to differ...the demonization is being carried out by the same people who pointed out that at the time of the Founders, sodomy was punishable by death, and they indicated that this in line with conservative thinking.
Who is forcing what at the "point of a gun"?
Such drama!
Here's a thought for you...what we are experiencing now with same sex couples demanding the right to be married, is the end result of government getitng into the marriage business.
Now, let's hear your ideas on how to keep homosexuals from the public square.
So, you are from the Rosie O'Donnell wing of the Republican party?
I don't particularly care for her but she's probably more fun at a party than you would be.
Well, birds of a feather...
No, just telling the truth. Of course, to you, truth is cheap...
They are the new Rosie O'Donnell wing of the Republican party who equate Christians with the Taliban. They are cultural Marxists...
One thing they always claim is that they don't want the government in their bedrooms, but marriage is a public act that invites the government in... they want public money for their private proclivities...
The Bill of Rights, to them, includes the *right* to abort babies, euthanize the elderly and infirm, publish and propagate porn, make merchandise of women's bodies, erase the borders, fill our young people's bodies with drugs, keep felons free to spread mayhem, theft of the people's substance through every conceivable means of taxation, etc...but never can it be read to include the right to religious speech or even thought, political speech or activism that doesn't agree with their marxist agenda, self-protection, property rights, or the right to life.
The druggies, like the sex perverts, can only perpetuate an ever increasing market for their filth by molesting the minds and bodies of the young ones.
It is cultural Marxism.
Marriage is a PUBLIC act that requires a statutory license... and a practice of religious rite...
No man has the right to become a law unto himself under the guise of freedom of religion. We do have the right to regulate practice, not belief...
Some of these liberal-tarians forget, it is THEY who advocate “separation of church and state.” Let me cram it right back down their throats...
It was landmark U.S. Supreme Court precedent Reynolds v. United States in 1878 that made “separation of church and state” a dubiously legitimate point of case law, but more importantly; it confirmed the Constitutionality in statutory regulation of marriage practices.
Now, it ain't so palatable to them, is it? They are the ones here bashing the religious folks, now they want to claim some mercurial, ever changing definition of freedom of religion? I'm not going to live in their hell...
If I cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater, I don't think someone should be able to light one with a U.S. flag and call it “free speech.”
Of course, a lot of these traitors to the United States would also whine if we wanted an Amendment to ban homosexual marriage or flag burning, wouldn't they?
There are doctrinaire, myopic cultural Marxists whose only purpose here on FreeRepublic is their polemic need to do anything contrary to the Christians. You will find most of them on the homosexual issue threads, the evolution threads, drug threads, genetic engineering threads or any other issue involving a perversion of, or attack on the Judaic book of Genesis.
Feminazi and Gaystapo are very close to the reality of the situation.
Some of the Bozos out there can't get past that word “God,” so they would just piss the entire country away and join the enemies of America; all because they have this polemic need to bash the Christians and do everything in contravention to them. I say screw them and the filthy practices they want to live by. My children are not going to inherit their squalor if I can help it.
Of course, what a lot of the leftists and misguided, myopic liberal-tarians don't want to admit is that Christianity (and they do hate Christians) is just their politically correct proxy for their war against what is written in the book of Genesis (which is a Jewish doctrine). This is exactly what the National Socialists were at war with, especially if you consider their eugenic breeding programs that is no different than this fetal stem cell debate.
They will jump up and down and snivel about the Ten Commandments and Christians; but the reminders that Moses was not a Christian, that Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy are Jewish literature really sticks in their craw.
There are actually cultural Marxist trolls here on FreeRepublic who cloak themselves in liberal-tarianism and attack anything related to Genesis...
I could give you quite a list of their user names. They can be found a lot on the evolution, drug, genetic engineering threads, and have been bleeding over into the marriage issue threads. Their only purpose is to wage a psychological warfare on conservatives.
Marriage is a PUBLIC act that requires a statutory license... and a practice of religious rite...
No man has the right to become a law unto himself under the guise of freedom of religion. We do have the right to regulate practice, not belief...
Some of these liberal-tarians forget, it is THEY who advocate “separation of church and state.” Let me cram it right back down their throats...
It was landmark U.S. Supreme Court precedent Reynolds v. United States in 1878 that made “separation of church and state” a dubiously legitimate point of case law, but more importantly; it confirmed the Constitutionality in statutory regulation of marriage practices.
Now, it ain't so palatable to them, is it? They are the ones here bashing the religious folks, now they want to claim some mercurial, ever changing definition of freedom of religion? I'm not going to live in their hell...
If I cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater, I don't think someone should be able to light one with a U.S. flag and call it “free speech.”
Of course, a lot of these traitors to the United States would also whine if we wanted an Amendment to ban homosexual marriage or flag burning, wouldn't they?
There are doctrinaire, myopic cultural Marxists whose only purpose here on FreeRepublic is their polemic need to do anything contrary to the Christians. You will find most of them on the homosexual issue threads, the evolution threads, drug threads, genetic engineering threads or any other issue involving a perversion of, or attack on the Judaic book of Genesis.
Feminazi and Gaystapo are very close to the reality of the situation.
Some of the Bozos out there can't get past that word “God,” so they would just piss the entire country away and join the enemies of America; all because they have this polemic need to bash the Christians and do everything in contravention to them. I say screw them and the filthy practices they want to live by. My children are not going to inherit their squalor if I can help it.
Of course, what a lot of the leftists and misguided, myopic liberal-tarians don't want to admit is that Christianity (and they do hate Christians) is just their politically correct proxy for their war against what is written in the book of Genesis (which is a Jewish doctrine). This is exactly what the National Socialists were at war with, especially if you consider their eugenic breeding programs that is no different than this fetal stem cell debate.
They will jump up and down and snivel about the Ten Commandments and Christians; but the reminders that Moses was not a Christian, that Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy are Jewish literature really sticks in their craw.
There are actually cultural Marxist trolls here on FreeRepublic who cloak themselves in liberal-tarianism and attack anything related to Genesis...
I could give you quite a list of their user names. They can be found a lot on the evolution, drug, genetic engineering threads, and have been bleeding over into the marriage issue threads. Their only purpose is to wage a psychological warfare on conservatives.
Imagine that you posted it twice...
Lighten up Francis.
It is not my software...
I did notice you had nothing intelligent to say otherwise.
Why bother posting at all here? Especially when D.U. is where you came from?
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