Posted on 11/19/2004 3:07:51 PM PST by Lindykim
(a) I'm not saying anyone in particular here does that - although a number of you support the practice rabidly. By supporting the rights of others to do the same, you are sharing the responsibility.
(b) No, I do not engage in either of those practices, JFYI.
I am speaking about the cultural acceptance* (and forced legal acceptance) of all-pervasive pornography. If men don't masturbate while watching porn, why do those "adult" movie shops offer private booths?
No, I've never been in one. But anyone can see them as they drive or walk around towns.
*Although it would be very interesting to find out what percentage of a given population - the country as a whole, particular states or communities - want the continued legalization of porn, and what percentage want to see some restrictions.
I am surprised that you do not consider Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson intellectual and moral superiors. I accept them as such. Will people be quoting your wise words two hundred years hence?
Of course, every soul is equal in the eyes of God. I am not saying those men (or any others) are inherently more worthy.
But as far as a deep understanding about the nature of human nature, society, government, and morality, they are in a different league than you, me, or any supporters of pornography here on this thread.
Regarding your feeling that all speech warrants protection, here are two thoughts for people reading this to consider:
1. Up until the leftist SCOTUS decided, with pressure from the leftist (as we all know) ACLU and pornography producers, that there was a right to porn under the Constitution that no one had ever known was there (kind of like the right to kill unborn babies that no one had known was there), porn was not even considered "speech". Naked dancers on stage is "speech"? The protected speech clause is meant for ideas - that no ideas or political or other points of view can be silenced.
1. There are many kinds of speech that do not have protection, as I mentioned above - slander, libel, false advertising, lying under oath, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, speech that incites violence or treason, etc. I am not a lawyer so I don't necessarily know all the right terms and kinds. But any sane or rational person understands that some speech is not protected nor deserves protection.
Read my comment above. I've made many rational and reasonable arguments on this thread, and so have others. But people who irrationally support pornography can't hear them.
It would be very interesting if people could discuss topics like these without using libertarian code words.
But I guess that's too much to hope for.
That's not "no right to limit or restrict." Short of outright banning, what further restrictions would you want that the courts have forbidden?
But with porn all over the internet, it is inevitable that kids are exposed to it.
Unless parents do their job and monitor Internet use. Why should adults who want porn be restricted so parents don't have to do their jobs?
And a certain number of adults who indulge are then more likely to seek out children or adolescents as sex partners.
A certain number of adults use alcohol to work up their nerve to commit crimes, but I don't think that's a sufficient reason to ban alcohol; do you?
Another point is that by legalizing porn, the sexual content of all media including advertising is "dumbed down". We see yearly that explicit sexual content is more and more pervasive. The amorality crowd think this is fine, but it is not.
I don't think it's fine either, but I doubt it wouldn't have happened if porn had remained more restricted.
They (you?) say that if someone does't want porn in their life, they don't have to access it. That's the same arugment abortion proponents say - if you don't like abortion, don't have one.
Abortion violates a person's rights; porn made and viewed by consenting adults does not.
That's not the argument; the argument is that "accepted morality" doesn't include using force to make others avoid immoral acts that violate no rights.
But it is the arguement in our country
Who's making that argument? I'm not.
Men are truly free only when they act within the dictates of their own God regenerated consciences.
Nobody proposes to make anyone view porn.
The thought consciousness that allows for porn in the first place is decidedly anti-religious and anti morality. It does not allow for Religious free expression
My pro-freedom argument allows for religious free expression.
The 18th century framers never envisioned the envelope being pushed this far with respect to the 1st amendment. Washington stated that "Religion and morality" were the "twin props on which our liberty rests"
Sorry, but generalities about morality aren't sufficient to show that the Framers didn't really mean what the plain language of the First Amendment says.
So by that measure, anything that is unmoral should be outlawed. May I ask who gets to define what is moral? you keep pulling these quotes about morality then assigning them to your cause of abolishing pornography based on the assumption that since you believe it is immoral then it is there by qualified as immoral. I do not agree with the way you are twisting the founding fathers words.
I guess this poster would outlaw divorce, petty lying, and worshipping false gods.
When one's debate opponent engages in defensive rhetorical games, such as creating strawmen withwhich to attack their opponent, they are signaling their intellectual bankruptcy. You've not countered even one of the substantive issues I've raised.
Until nonConstitutionalist USSC justices such as Sandra Day O'Connor claimed to be able to read the Constitution and see 'penumbras, auras, & emanations" of knowledge knowable and seeable only to themselves and from which they magically created your much worshipped "consent" argument, no such thing existed. And guess what? No such thing exists in our Constitution. They made it up.
Only those with a Personally Vested self-interest would believe in the existence of a 'right' that gives them {sexual libertines?} the right to depersonalize, debase, demean, and dehumanize other people in order that they can be used as though they were nothing but a disposable sex toy.
This is a losing debate for you because you must defend something ugly, dark, and twisted and which should never have been allowed out of the Hell of infinite darkness.
Well obviously we can't bring Washington et al back from the dead to ask him if the 1st amendment covers pornography. My question goes to the notion that if we could bring them back from the dead and ask as to their intent as to what the amendment should allow and should not allow, would we find them assenting to the way the amendment is currently viewed?
We know from reading the Federalist papers of the era that our founders believed that God was involved in the founding and nurturing of the nation, and that the practise of rather broadly agreed upon morality and religious dictates by the majority of the population would keep licentious factionalism in check!
You can poo poo my use of "generalities" as a weakness in my questioning but our founders themselves relied upon the generalities of accepted religion and morality in the population at large to keep the new republic strong.
They knew that to build a consensus based on the concepts of "rights" with-out the benign co-ercion of the latent morality of the Christianized population would be to produce a still-born nation, and at worst a nation of demoralized factions crawling back to Britain for order and security!
"With-out vision, the people are unrestrained" states Proverbs(or literally "go wild"). The culture war that is going on is about that vision of our selves as a great moral nation vs. those who would propose that we should not live under moral restraints; that Americans are nothing more special than animals who live by instinct and not by enlightened reason!
Ksnavely opined...May I ask who gets to define what is moral? you keep pulling these quotes about morality then assigning them to your cause of abolishing pornography based on the assumption that since you believe it is immoral then it is there by qualified as immoral. I do not agree with the way you are twisting the founding fathers words.
Little Jeremiah's sense of right and wrong is based solidly in God's transcendant moral law. Since you've questioned the legitimacy and/or veracity of his moral claims, one must assume that you base your sense of right and wrong on something else. Will you share with us what that is?
And where it comes from?
You claim to be unable to see the relevancy of a nonconstitutionally existant hocus-pocus man-created 'right' to your claim that such a right exists? Are you really sure you want to ask this silly question?
As for your claim that you feel no sense of guilt......hogwash! Of course you do, otherwise you'd not be hunkered down in a self-defensive position while trying to fling useless arrows at me.
No, the fact that I get so angry is the voice in my heart that resents serfdom, even if it's benevolent. You don't get it, but I don't want to wear your yoke and do things your way, anymore than I want to be the vassal of some regent.
You call it extreme libertarianism for a man to want to be able to make his own decisions. I don't. It really comes down to that. You have a semi-marxist view of society as the collective, and everything should be for the greater good of the collective. I don't. I believe freedom is for the individual, not the collective.
I agree with almost eveything you said and furthermore, I thank you for clarifying your stand.
On the issue at hand. Since it was by an unconstitutional USSC edict that the harm we're speaking of was unleashed upon American society, doesn't it seem logical to you that the harm be undone by a reversal of their poorly reasoned and highly disasterous edict? That is what I'm speaking about.
Actually, I think history reveals that the reverse is true. In the U.S. the Progressive Era and the New Deal preceded the Sexual Revolution by decades. Europe was flirting with socialism long before they reached their current level of sexual libertinism.
Furthermore, in the 1980's porn became much more accessible through cable and videocassettes. This trend continued in the 1990's and up to today with the internet. During this time causal sex became more acceptable in the media and in society, but was tempered somewhat by the AIDS crisis.
These same past two decades of sexual libertinism have been the era of Reagan, welfare reform, and tax cuts.
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