You have the ACLU's vision of what liberty is.
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.
Arguing with them is exactly like arguing with you and your friends...largely a fruitless exercise. Which is why I equate you with them. There is no discernable difference.
I think we're getting to the heart of something here, though. It seems that you believe a *right* can only be something that you agree with. Is that correct? In other words - you would, on some level, agree with the Islamists - that people do NOT have the right to do things that they believe are sinful? The Islamists believe, like you, that there is no *right* to sin - and those who do - should be stonned or whipped or killed etc.
In America - we are free to do whatever we choose - as long as we don't break the law or infringe on someone else's *rights*. What that means is that people are *free* to do things that you believe are wrong.
It has been that way for a very long time, EV, a very long time. Right now - women do have the *right * to abort. It IS legal. And people have the *right* to engage in sodomy or adultery or to fornicate, to do drugs, to look at dirty pictures, to masturbate or to lie - to cheat - to do all kinds of things. There is no question but that they have the *right* to.
It seems to me that you have brought this out into the open now - and I thank you for that. It seems to me that you are saying that people do NOT have the *right* to be a non Christian? Isn't that what you are saying here? I think I finally understand how the extreme right gets the sense of *entitlement* that I see - to attempt to *force* their views on the rest of us. You really do believe that people have no *rights* except those based on your personal beliefs about what is right and wrong? That's what you are really saying isn't it?
Do you see how similar it is to Islamism?
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?
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.