Posted on 11/19/2004 3:07:51 PM PST by Lindykim
I consider it telling that none of the supporters of the "right" to view, sell, distribute, or manufacture pornography have addressed any of the many salient points I or any others have brought up on this thread. None of the supporters of porn have addressed the very cogent arguments in support of morality quoted by Jefferson or Burke. No one has said anything other than this:
"No one has the right to get in the way of what I want. Well, *I* don't want it, but others do."
You are saying that traditional moral absolutes should not inform what the government can and can't do. Yet you have not offered any other set of rules or guidelnes for such standards.* You are walking a very thin line, because there are people whose idea of what is right and wrong is so twisted that it makes the porn you so valiantly support look like a Sunday school picnic. And those people think that YOU are the nanny staters.
If you reject the moral absolutes that have are consistent with every theist religion, you are left solely with your own minds. And guess what! Every mind is different. You have no reason to have laws against child/adult sex, human/animal sex, consensual cannibalism, and so on. None of you has addressed this very important point.
Since all you want to do is toss empty slogans around without any attempt at reasonable discourse, there's no reason for me to respond any more. You can rub your hands and think, "Aha! We defeated him!". Go ahead. You still haven't addressed the points above.
*Therefore, might makes right. Whoever is the big dog will make the rules. Someday a bigger dog may come along and make rules that you don't like, if there are no absolutes standards. None of you has addressed this fact.
The same critique could be leveled against anyone who "uses" a maid, plumber, doctor, actor, or cook.
When I make use of a cook, he really doesn't mean anything to me beyond satisfying my base need for food. I don't care about his feelings or the total complexity of who he is as a person. His only value to me is how well and how quickly he can make me a taco.
Does that make me an evil person? Is the cook somehow degraded or devalued by the job he does?
Exactly. Welcome to the human condition. Might does indeed make right, and there are already rules in place that I don't like, but I'm forced to obey.
I'm something of a knife afficianado. IMHO, the butterfly knife is the best design for a folding knife in existance, bar none. However, they're illegal to carry in the state of Texas. Never mind the fact that I carry a gun, I can't legally carry a butterfly knife. It's too stupid for words.
Alas, stupid or not, the rule is in place and via the use of force the state of Texas has made it a losing proposition to carry a butterfly knife. If I disobey the big dog will haul my ass into court, take my money, and possibly my liberty.
My job has a freedom loving individual is to do my absolute best to guide my government into codifying only that which it MUST, MUST, MUST take upon itself to regulate and/or criminalize. If there is ever any doubt, I'm siding with the individual and against government. We owe it to ourselves, and to our neighbors to promote not the absence of law, not anarchy, but a minimum of law.
So, when you say, "You are saying that traditional moral absolutes should not inform what the government can and can't do.", you're way off base. I'm not arguing that no line should be drawn. I'm not arguing that every individual should be absolutely free to do anything he/she desires. What I am saying, unequivocally, is that it is as grievous a harm to try to outlaw everything you percieve as immoral as it is to outlaw nothing. However, you seem to be unable to grasp that very important point.
ROFLOL!
You've done the right thing. Trying to get the pro porn crowd to see the negative moral results of porn on society is akin to telling a dog it's not civilized to lay around licking his plums in public.
I appreciate your reasoned response.
My response is this:
You want the definer to be your mind and its (current) thoughts.
I want the definer to be the codes of moral absolutes that have always existed, that are essentially the same in every religion in the world, and have been agreed upon by the great moral and intelligent thinkers of history. Such as Edmund Burke, Blackstone, and Jefferson. Not anonymous posters on FR, however interesting such individuals may be. I concur with them, I don't try to surpass them impudently.
Meaning I concur with such men as Jefferson, Burke, and Blackstone.
Not exactly, but you are getting closer to actually understanding my point.
See, it's not the moral code that I'm particularly interested in. Not that I don't care about the moral code, but that the fact that something is immoral, is not in and of itself sufficient reason to criminalize something. I think that's where we're disagreeing.
I think you see it as black and white. What's immoral should be illegal. I just can't agree with you there.government should only act it absolutely must. Our history is repleat with mistakes when our leaders failed to restrain themselves from acting unnecessarily.
I saw your comments about Jefferson et al to MM, and while I share your admiration of Jefferson especially, I wouldn't necessarily say he was our better. Most strikingly, I'm aware of a markedly different perceptions that Jefferson and I held/hold on racial matters, and yes, I would say that in this case, my views are superior. I've always maintened that the founders were ordinary who did great things, not great men. Certainly not perfect men. There are no perfect men.
One of the reasons the left promotes sexual libertinism is because of its tendency to expand government power. For example, unleashed homosexuality leads to more hate crimes (thought crimes) laws, more laws dictating who people can hire, who they can have as members of their private clubs, who they can sell or rent property to, etc. Gay marriage will lead to an expansion of social security, etc.
Promiscuity causes more illegitimacy, which means more welfare, more single moms voting for socialism, etc.
James Madison was right. An immoral people cannot remain free. Tocqueville was also right when he attributed America's greatness at least partly to our better morals than those found in Europe.
You're really stretching to make what isn't a credible point.
I agree - I certainly don't think the men I quoted are perfect.
Although I disagree that there are no perfect men, in the sense that "perfect" means without any taint of ignorance, illusion, selfishness or dishonesty. I consider that to be our natural condition, although buried very, very deeply.
Everything immoral should not be illegal! Crap, we'd all be on death row.
Self-defensive? LOL. That is a typical liberal attack tactic. Defending one's position does not make a person 'defensive.'
We don't have to ... the words they wrote have a plain meaning.
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!
But they did not believe that government could make people moral. And they were right not to believe it.
Nobody is saying you should not have the right to ostracize people for engaging in behavior you do not approve of. Nothing in our society requires you to associate with people whose morals you do not like.
You seem to want to take it to the next level, though: you want to use government power to peer into your neighbors' bedrooms to make sure they aren't watching or reading naughty material.
The more monocultural a society is, the weaker the government it can have because the coercion of law is replaced by the coercion of ostracism to control negative behavior.
Despite whatever myths you may have been taught, America has never had only one culture.
Strawman. Nobody believes in the right to depersonalize, debase, demean or dehumanize other people- such actions would violate their rights. However, people have the right to depersonalize, debase, demean or dehumanize themselves, if that is how they choose to live their lives.
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.
A right is a right. Just because people use their free speech rights to demean themselves in no way invalidates such rights.
Sure we have. We've told you several times that all those things can be outlawed because they they either involve nonconsensual activity or violate the rights of others.
As has been mentioned before, porn cannot make people do anything. Your argument that porn harms the morals of society is utter nonsense. People harm the morals of society.
Despite whatever myths you may have been taught, America has never had only one culture
Let me explain the word "society" to you. A "society" can be a relatively small number of people. Small town America for most of its history was monocultural. A town basically had one culture. So there were clearly understood cultural rules of right and wrong which if you transgressed, life would be made very uncomfortable for you. Try openning up one of your precious porn bookstores in a Mormon or Bible Belt community and you'll see what I mean.
Ostracism is exercised on the community level or it is meaningless. That is why only a community that is monocultural and ostracizes deviant behavior can be libertarian because it doesn't need government to enforce rules.
And America has never, ever been in the least libertarian about things like drunkeness, Sunday business, or obscenity. So your anarchic model of freedom as unrestrained license is one which the American people have never, ever accepted. Communities, unlike Supreme Court justices, have always been very, very clear about what constituted obscenity and they have always legally proscribed it.
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