General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhere do your rights end and mine begin?
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
Zechariah Chafee
I think that's pretty sound in principle. If someone's behavior isn't harming me, it's none of my business. Two homosexuals want to go at it, none of my business unless they're noisy, same applies to heterosexuals. That's reasonable. If they're having sex on the front lawn, that's indecent behavior, same goes for a heterosexual couple or anyone parading around in the buff.
The kicker seems to be imaginary wrongs. I can prove a harm if a neighbor is dumping motor oil in the backyard or burning tires or running a meth lab. There's a code violation if he fills has backyard with livestock or turns his house into a daycare. But imaginary wrongs, that comes down to faith. Blacks in the neighborhood lowering property values, the mere presence of gays threatening to increase incidents of homosexuality among the children, there's no more factual basis to those beliefs than religious dietary laws. Show me the scientific test that indicates this steak came from a kosher-slaughtered cow and that steak came from a halal-slaughtered cow. Ok, with property values there might be a drop due to hysteria, the same as if people stop shopping at a business rumored to be owned by a witch but that's just ignorance.
If your identity, cultural or religious, is predominantly about who you hate, you are fucked. You have nothing to offer the world. The only positive contribution you can make is dying childless and letting your ignorance follow you to the grave.
What I think is being missed here with people in these debates is the question of public and private behavior. Nobody is legislating that you have to like people. If you don't like gay sex, don't fuck someone your same gender you don't believe in divorce, don't have one. If you don't like black people, you don't have to be friends. That's private. But in public you have to suck it up.
The one difference, I think, is between customer and proprietor. You don't have to shop at a given store but if you do, they're obligated to serve.
Arkansas Granny
(31,540 posts)"If your identity, cultural or religious, is predominantly about who you hate, you are fucked. You have nothing to offer the world."
narnian60
(3,510 posts)Talk about putting it in a nutshell.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I can think of plenty of people that applies to.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)or maybe provable direct harm.
Because otherwise people can say "someone being gay/reading a naughty book/smoking pot in the privacy of their own home makes me mad, and that is harmful to me!", or they'll use some convoluted argument about how society in general is damaged by, say, wearing white after labor day and as such it needs to be punished with the death penalty.
jollyreaper2112
(1,941 posts)That's what I meant by imaginary wrongs.
Some things end up being cultural and are hard to fight. Men with fatty deposits on their chest have moobs that are pretty much like hairy breasts. These can be displayed in public but a woman's breasts cannot. It's stupid but a fight that will take a damn long time in winning. But it's the same sort of idiocy as behind segregation. "I can't prove it with science but I have my faith! Mixing races is bad!"
If I want to get right down to it, I consider religion toxic and think it's abuse to raise kids religiously. But that's not a fight I even want to try to make because what sort of solution wouldn't make for a bigger problem? CPS taking kids away from religious households? I'd be against that. Best I can figure is have freethinking organizations available for kids who survive the upbringing.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)At this point in the game I couldn't deal with living in an uptight religious type area.
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)Best single line on DU in months, distills so much into such a short space.