As creator Matt Groening described them: "Brothers or lovers, possibly both"
Posted on 08/04/2005 12:24:55 PM PDT by neverdem
You make a good argument for anarchy. I will bet that there is not a single law on the books that someone has not violated at one time or the other. I would futher venture that there are people who every day violate some law of which they are entirely unaware. I probably violate speed limits every day.
Evidently you missed the point of my rant. Anarchy is the absence of law, and leads to the rule of the strong, so I was definitely not advocating Anarchy - I was asking how we decide what should be in law.
One of the great advances of Western Civilization was the concept of the "rule of law" as opposed to the "whim of the King". Laws are written down so people can understand them and not violate them -- that tends to promote cooperation, which builds wealth enjoyed by all.
One of the great setbacks of Western Civilization was the invention of the "regulation". Given the 40,000 pages of IRS Regulations, the 1,000,000 or so pages of regulations by Federal OSHA, EPA, ... etc. as well as similar duplicative regulations by the States ... and similar duplicative regulations by the Cities (e.g., building codes) ... I would not be surprised if every one of us violated multiple laws every day. So I agree with that part of your assessment.
As Ayn Rand noted, honest men cannot be ruled. So passing a million laws enables the honest men to be ensnared and thus ruled.
And the results can create absolute disasters. How many people died at Waco because it was suspected that Koresh didn't pay a $200 tax? And how many people at the Murrah building died because no one was punished for those deeds? A woman and her child died at Ruby Ridge because it was asserted that her husband, at the insistance of a BATF agent, cut off the barrel of a shotgun 1/16 of an inch too short. Vin's "Send in the Waco Killers" is full of this kind of insanity. The rule of law is one thing --- the rule of 10,000,000 laws is quite another - a sane person couldn't even read them all before he died.
If you are going to have a government, you should ask, "How do I decide which immoral things I am willing to use force to prevent?"
Libertarians generally conclude, "Only when others are using force or fraud against another".
Moslems conclude: "Everything that is not allowed in the Koran is forbidden", with death penalties, lashings, and amputations to show they are serious.
The founders of our Republic appear to have concluded: "Only give the Federal Government limited powers, but the States and Localities can pass any laws they want to", including the Stocks for adultery, and death for sodomy.
It is a serious question, and I hope it is not too hard a question for the populace at large to consider. In general, people get the kind of government they deserve.
On the positive side, I am encouraged that, after the Supreme Court said it was OK for a State or City to take someone's property for any potential public benefit ... enough people sent enough nastygrams to enough politicians that Laws are being passed to prevent cities from doing this.
Are you seriously proposing that everything you personally believe to be immoral should be illegal -- with men with guns to enforce it? That is a conclusion that can be drawn from "no separation between public and private lives". For example:
If you belive people should go to church on Sunday -- then should everyone who doesn't be placed in Stocks?? And businesses which open on Sunday should be confiscated??
If you belive that people should only worship in a Protestant Church -- or a particular sect of a Protestant Church -- then should all Catholic Churches, and all other churches of all other Protestant sects, be confiscated or burned?
Europe had about 400 years of that kind of thinking, with more than enough death and destruction to go round, and they finally declared an exhausted truce, and saw the benefits of "tolerance" for other religions. Islam has not yet seen this light, and is due for a lot of death and destruction until they do.
I never even implied that there was no difference between good and evil. I strongly suggested that there was a difference between what you require of yourself, and what you should be willing to require of others by force of law. And once you have agreed that there is a difference, you should start to think about how you should decide; then you can persuade others to decide using the same principles.
For me it comes down to sort of a small "l" libertarian view: I don't care what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes as long as 1)they don't shove it in my face, and 2) they don't ask me to pay for the consequences of their actions.
Oh, and murderers, serial child molesters, and treasonous SOB's pay the ultimate penalty.
So if you have sex with a sheep who also happens to be a blood relative, will Anthony Kennedy approve?
Its become a corrupt little money game. Perhaps the law has always been so. I am what used to be known as a strict constructionist when it comes to making law supposedly based on the Constitution. I think that every 4th year the various legislatures should be instructed not to make new law, but to repeal old law. And I might like to see rock solid sunset clauses built into most laws. That way the cowards in Congress wouldn't really have to vote to repeal some egregiously unconstitutional monstrosity, they could just let it expire, like the rotten 1994 AW ban.
LOL. Just as long as it's a consenting sheep.
Or else they might cry "fowl!"
"Oh there's no slippery slope..."
Says the lie-berals as their constituents are f---ing their siblings.
Still, the article does bring up a good point that if gay marriage is found to be constitutional, incest would be constitutional for the same reasons. (Although, that reasoning may not be quite the same as in Lawrence v. Texas.)
I think the initial point was that criminal laws are based on public morality, not that all public morality should be made into criminal laws. At some level, any law is created because some person or group of people wants that law to be created. It could be for any reason. For the major criminal laws, it's usually morality of some kind. Any belief you have as to how people should behave (including yourself) is morality. If you happen to take a more libertarian position and think people should be able to do anything they want as long as it doesn't 'hurt' someone else, that's also a morality. You are saying hurting someone else (without their consent) is immoral. It always falls back on morality, how you think people should behave. Since we don't all have the same moral values, we need some way to harmonize them. You should not be allowed to force your morality on everyone else any more than I should. However, laws must follow some morality and the only way we can decide which moral values to follow (and 'none' is not an option) is majority vote, though this is tempered by our form of government.
Not necessarily. They might claim: "It's for The Children."
I believe you are being disengenuous, or at least exaggerated, in your protests. Of course I wouldn't advocate jailing those who don't attend church. But the issue at hand is far from that, blatantly extreme, example.
That we've come to the point in our society that incest is seriously being considered as an entirely private matter, a protected personal liberty, is utterly shocking. It is a long way from "placing in stocks" those who don't go to church.
You also try to impose an absolutist, all-or-nothing attitude on my argument. It's absurd on the face of it. My argument is that laws do and must have a moral foundation to them. You have never responded to that claim. Instead, you go off on an inflammatory rant about imposing my morality on others. You set up a straw man, then light him on fire.
Democratic principles at work in our nation generally impose the judgment of the majority to the whole. What is judged to be wrong by that majority is declared to be illegal, with varying degrees of severity. (No stockade for the non-believers.) On what basis do voters declare what is illegal and what is not? It is based upon their collective moral judgment.
Therefore, the "you can't legislate morality" line simply couldn't be more incorrect. That's exactly what legislation is. So, as the moral restraint of the majority of voters declines, so do our laws follow.
No! Because it's intrinsically evil. And the fact that it's intrinsically evil is knowable to everyone.
Whether specific acts of theft should be criminalized, and what penalties should be applied to violations of laws regarding theft, are a matter for prudential judgement.
...unless you count thieves in your "everyone". See, I would put homosexuality and abortion into the "intrinsically evil" category too. Sadly, our society's "intrinsically evil" list shrinks with every passing day.
I find it consitent that the homosexal marriage lobby talks of marriage as if it was just another sexual position for gratification.
Marriage is about society creating an institution that maximizes the raising and producitno of the next generation. Homosexuals do nothing of that.
Incestual relations do not maximize the gene pool.
All the talk of love and comitment are irrelevant window dressing.
West Virginia ping! :P
As creator Matt Groening described them: "Brothers or lovers, possibly both"
And how many people at the Murrah building died because no one was punished for those deeds?
This justification doesn't cut it.
The moral fabric of a society needs to built into the hearts of the citizens, which allows for the government governing them to stay out of the morality business. Many people believe the way to reverse moral decay is more laws, more external force to make people behave better. The federal government was never constitutionally given power over society's morality, but through our courts it has grabbed up a lot of power in that area, which is how we've gotten into much of the fix we're in. Misuse of the tenth & fourteenth amendments has done harm to our society & using it further, in the attempt to reverse that destruction is not the answer, the magic bullet which will make all right again.
This incest case should have been sent back, left to the state. If any state wants to allow marriage between a brother & sister, so be it.
Let me see if I can boil down your position:
1) Laws do and must have a moral foundation to them.
2) Not all moral judgements should become law.
3) Which moral judgement should become law are decided by the collective moral judgements of a majority of the citizens.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will accept Position #1 - and ignore the critical question of which code of morality the law should be based on.
I certainly agree with Position #2. I started off this conversation with the critical question -- how do you decide which things which violate the code of morality should be the subject of laws, of force to prohibit them??
Your position #3, that the majority of voters decide, is both untrue and begs the question. It is untrue because the concept of "individual rights" as codified in the Constitution limits what the majority can make illegal (in fact, the purpose of the Consitution is to limit the power of the majority, you know, all that ... Congress shall make no law ... stuff). It begs the question because each voter must decide the question before they vote, and they must and will use some criteria to make that decision.
And that brings you back to my original question -- how SHOULD people decide which "immoral" things should be made "illegal"? How do YOU decide, especially for the so called "victimless crimes"?
For example, a person could simultaneously believe that:
* taking addictive drugs for recreation is very very dangerous, and thus very very bad; and
* everybody has the right to go to hell in their own way, as long as they don't ask me to pay for the consequences; and
* the demonstrated cost of enforcing laws against drugs (including loss of privacy, loss of liberty, the corruption of the justice system, and the cost of the taxes to support such laws) far exceed the value of its demonstrated results...
and thus conclude that the immoral behavior of taking addictive drugs should not be made illegal.
This is NOT the same as saying that my morality is to let everybody do their thing, regardless of consequences, or that law is not based on morality.
So... again I ask ... how do YOU decide which immoral things should be made illegal, i.e., restrained by the use of force??
I don't expect an answer. I just suggest that it is a serious question that should be the subject of serious thought.
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