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[QUOTE=ReelinRod;1172789
Well, when you can't even acknowledge that the base "conversation" is governed by a set of rules, it's hard to have any structure or arrive at any consensus. You dismiss the Constitution as having any effect on your ideas, the singular directing force for you is opinion, based in emotion, divorced from principle. You react to challenges to defend your policy positions as a personal attack on your feelings which is why you find it impossible to have an intelligent, reasoned conversation.
.[/QUOTE]
This is the critical distinction between the positions held on both sides of the argument. One side is based on a set of fundamental rules and principles, the other on transitory opinions that seem right for the moment.
Got Stripers, for instance, cannot understand why someone could object to a solution that would not harm the ability to lawfully own a gun. But he does not understand that there are principles that can be harmed by that solution.
It's similar to the idea of wondering what real harm there would be in having sex with others to whom you are not married. You can still love your wife or husband, still provide, give comfort and passion, raise children, be companions for life, and cooperate in building a home and life together. Aren't those the real, meaningful reasons to get married? There are folks who understand that and have "open" marriages.
But, on the other hand, is it necessary to marry in order to do those things? If there is no actual harm in so called infidelity, what is the point of having fidelity? What is the point of having marriage?
I suppose that the point would be determined by those who do it. But there will always be a point. A reason. A principle. All things, material or imaginary are based, for humans, on a principle. Otherwise they would not actually exist, not be comprehensible to the human mind.
Transitory opinions may be based on some principle such as carpe diem. And therein lies the problem of applying that principle to society as a whole. To have a society, a community, a nation, the principles must be lasting, structurally foundational rather than quicksand. That is they becomes rules. Laws. Rule of law.
For there to be such a thing as "marriage," it must be founded on some principle. "Marriage" is merely the name we give to the realization of that principle. And if our definition of "marriage" requires fidelity, and if we stray from that principle, in effect we have destroyed it, and the name has no meaning. So then it no longer exists.
And so, what is the rule, the principle, that we stray from when we apply the principle of "no harm" on the ability to legally own something if we impose various regulations on those for whom it is not necessary, nor constitutional, to do so merely because it would not harm their ability to own that thing legally in terms of a law we create?
Simply put we destroy the principles on which this nation was founded. We will still seem to have a nation, but really more of a mirage of one. An uncertain, vague, undefined one whose principles are no longer fundamental. No longer lasting. They are quicksand. They are transitory opinions which, as in this case as pointed out by Scott's post, are not founded on solid reality. They are desperate attempts at "solutions" which only further erode what is left of original principles and lead us into the rule by the few, whose motives we ultimately do not know.
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