Originally posted by: Jzero
Originally posted by: SMOGZINN
As long as we have living creatures as legislators, someone is going to TRY to impose his values by law.
When our system works they fail impose those values, and it has worked for 250 years because people like nakedfrog and I work to oppose creatures that attempt to impose their relative moral values on us.
Quite simply, you cannot have a law without imposing someone's moral values on someone else. It does not matter what your religious upbringing is, where you grew up, what type of ethnic background you have - if you are a lawmaker, you cannot possibly draft a law without incorporating your own values. You are not going to draft with or vote for or against a law if you find the result to be morally reprehensible.
If you want to change the system, you should run - except then you would have to attempt to impose your relative moral values on others. See why voting is so important?
I believe that it is possible to make laws without relative moral values. Your argument is that anything that someone does is a result of their moral upbringing, and therefore a moral value decision. I can't disagree more here. A person can look at the facts and realize that his parents/church/beliefs are wrong, and then change his actions to fit the new information. People can overcome their prejudices, most are simply to prideful to try.
When I said that the system works because people oppose laws designed to legislate relative moral values, I was talking about the fact that laws are almost always compromises. Even if one person writes a bill, it is hardly the same by the time it is voted into law. Both sides have worked it over to limit the input of the moral values of their opponents, and this process gives us a good chance at creating a fairly neutral law. This process get in danger when too many of one side (am I not talking democrat and republican here) holds sway.
I am a regular and informed voter. I spend a lot of time looking up the voting records and other political information of the candidates, and attempt to find a candidate that I can vote for. Unfortunately that task is getting harder and harder, both because there are fewer decent candidates, and because they are hiding their political views better.
Also, putting that quote back into the context of abortion, he is right on the money.
He came up with the correct solution for the wrong reasons, that makes it little better then chance.
How are his reasons wrong? He says if religious people believe abortion is wrong, instead of trying to strongarm everyone else with legislation that barely passes because it is so hotly contested, they should be trying to convince people of their views at the grassroots level. This is correct on virtually every hotbutton issue - instead of trying to force laws, people should be trying to come to a consensus. That's why political extremism is so frustrating.[/quote]
You might be right here. After re-reading that section of the interview, I believe that I had a knee-jerk reaction to the way he said it instead of what he said. I was left feeling that there was an unwritten "Yet! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!111" at the end of that sentence. Let?s look at it again:
"And until we do [convince Americans that abortion is a sin], we shouldn't be trying to impose our values by law -- not because it's wrong to do so, but because it won't work."
It sounds at first read that he is saying that he does not have enough support to impose his moral values by law, not that he should not try to. He does say that making a law would not work, but it still sounds like he would like to anyway. Overall he used the work 'it' too many times for the sentence to be clear, so he ended up with me and you coming away with different opinions on what he was trying to say. I'll call this a danger of a interview and give him the benefit of the doubt.
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