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To: Sam the Sham
Government has ALWAYS enforced those mores either through the sanction of ostracism and disgrace for those who violated them (and in pre-modern cultures in which status depended on who you could call in favors from, this was socioeconomic death) or now through civil codes. That is because protecting the family isn't a "noble cause". It is the job that government has always been responsible for and is always supposed to do. Society has lost the capacity to protect the family through the weapons of ostracism or worse.

That wasn't "government" it was the will of the people acting without the proxy of government. The Romans and Greeks both had successful cultures and both tolerated homosexuality. Both cultures failed through corruption and action without responsibility.

A post-sexual revolution man is no longer under any real pressure to "do the right thing" if he gets a woman pregnant. In an earlier age her male kinsmen would have killed him for disgracing the girl. In a more recent age society would have black balled him as a "scoundrel". Nowadays, he can just waltz away. Societally, this is not acceptable. So we have the state to impose child support laws to protect the innocents. Marriage has always been about a great deal more than "what two people do in their bedroom".

Again, action without responsibility perpetrated by liberals. Your veering from my point that state-sanctioned marriage would be unnecessary if people were held responsible for their actions.

Should I start my topics off with Christian Idiocy so it would better make my point?

23 posted on 10/21/2004 2:53:51 PM PDT by LiberalSlayer99 (Follow-Up)
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To: LiberalSlayer99
More libertarian idiocy.

Again, action without responsibility perpetrated by liberals. Your veering from my point that state-sanctioned marriage would be unnecessary if people were held responsible for their actions.

HELD RESPONSIBLE BY WHO ? We live in a modern world of mobile wealth and mobile people. We no longer live in a world where people spend all their lives in one place and reputations are etched in concrete. And it is only in such a world that libertarianism could ever work because the fewer fixed cultural norms enforced by ostracism and disgrace you have, the more government you need. Fear of punishment has always been a basis of human virtue, not airy talk of "personal responsibility". When society can no longer punish with fear of ostracism, disgrace, and ruin because the cultural moral consensus has collapsed, it must use state coercion.

31 posted on 10/21/2004 8:09:19 PM PDT by Sam the Sham
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