Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The real issue and the real stakes

I have come to the (provisional) conclusion that every expansion of government since this country's founding was caused by the desire to legislate morality. The desire on both the Left and the Right to impose their brand of collectivism on this country is ultimately grounded in altruism.

And I think that it is only a morality which rejects authoritarianism as such which can support a ban on legislating morality. I'm thinking specifically here of Objectivism's morality of rational self-interest. Objectivism holds that the moral is the chosen, not the obeyed. Those who wish to legislate morality seek to make morality the obeyed, not the chosen.

Does not every attempt to legislate morality violate someone's rights? Is this not one of the very reasons why rights have come to be held as conditional?

After the Gay-Marriage Debacle, Activists Rethink Tactics

On the Evangelical side, Mohler told TIME that religious conservatives see the threat from the gay rights' agenda as much broader than just an affront to traditional notions of marriage. "Full normalization of homosexuality would eventually mean the end to all morals legislation of any kind," he says, echoing the line of reasoning made famous by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent in the high court's 2003 decision striking down state laws that made gay sex a crime.
I hope to be able to expand on this in the future.

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