Difficult Civil Rights Question

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

Civil Rights is also a moral and social issue. If I choose to post on the moral or social issue rather than the legal issue, that is MY right and you have NO right to tell me that I don't have this right because you have no authority over me.

I have the right to rag on you about it, which is exactly what I did.

"Civil Rights"-- which was the 1960's code word for antidiscrimination--is in fact a legal issue. And, despite what too many people seem to believe, the purpose of law isn't to enforce ethics or morals. It's a system to make it possible for people who hold differing values (and hence hold different beliefs about ethics and morality) to live in the same society without killing each other. You can't find sufficient agreement on ethics and morality to run a society bigger than one or two dozen people. (Those are usually called "cults", by the way).

To scale bigger than that you need a system for regulating behavior that most folks can agree on and that most folks interpret in something like the same way. Notice that I said "regulating behavior" not "regulating beliefs" or "regulating thoughts".

Originally Posted by Aliantha

If one is to only consider the legality of any issue, then one would be in a very tenuous position...

Unless one is a judge, in which case one is doing exactly what one should do. That's what the original post was about.

Originally Posted by Aliantha

Perhaps I should simply have said that the law is wrong and I believe that no person who is a member of a group which advocates discrimination against another [group] should be entitled to hold a position of authority in any capacity for a government office.You can argue the legality of the issue all you like as it stands now.

I don't need to argue the legality; it is what it is. and the arbitrator, the judge in the case, and several of the posters in this thread understand that.

It's you that has the argument, because you want the legal power to pillory people for what they think. Orwell called that thoughtcrime. The sad thing is that you seem to have exactly zero appreciation for how dangerous that would be.

Of course, as long as it's only thoughts you disapprove of that are forbidden, everything's OK.