Smart Republican

[scottw]

"And that’s what’s so terribly depressing about all of this. We live in a country where more and more people are terrified to work things out themselves in a conversation with someone they disagree with. That’s why I didn’t like S.B. 1062 — because people on the right found it necessary and because people on the left made it necessary."

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372282/print

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by spence

Interesting that there's not a problem with religious freedoms being violated, but they want to pass a bill just in case. -spence

Spence, from where do you get the idea that no religious freedoms are being violated? There have been cases, valid cases, of the government ordering people to do that which violates their beliefs. I posted one about a Christian baker who wanted nothing to do with a gay wedding, and the govt said "serve that wedding or we'll fine you." In other words, the government said "we have the authority to tell you what you can believe and what you can't believe".

Let's say a black person owns a house-painting business. If I ask him to paint a confederate flag on the side of my house, does he have the right to say no, or doesn't he?

Like hell no religious freedoms are being violated. The proposed bill is not anti-gay, it is pro-first amendment. Big difference.

I support gay marriage. But I have huge problems with the government telling its citizenry what they are allowed to believe. Everyone should be appalled at that. We cannot ignore the parts of the Constitution that aren't fashionable at the time. If we decide religious freedom only exists until someone's feelings are hurt, we need to amend the Constitution to reflect that. Until then, someone should tell homosexual agitators that freedom of religion applies to everyone, even people they don't always agree with.

Freedom of speech means that someone can hang a painting of Christ covered in feces. Freedom of assembly means that the Klan can hold a rally. Freedom of the press means that Ed Schultz can call Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut" on the air. And like it or not, freedom of religion (in a country that truly is free) means that I have the right to decline to provide services for, or attend, a gay wedding.

Freedom ain't free. It means you'll occasionally have to put up with that which makes your skin crawl. There's this liberal tolerance and inclusion on display, where liberals want diversity in everything, except in ideas. If you will tolerate others to express their opinions which you despise, you respect freedom. Anything else is called totalitarianism. Which do we want to be, Spence?

[detbuch]

Originally Posted by scottw

"And that’s what’s so terribly depressing about all of this. We live in a country where more and more people are terrified to work things out themselves in a conversation with someone they disagree with. That’s why I didn’t like S.B. 1062 — because people on the right found it necessary and because people on the left made it necessary."

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372282/print

Another incisive and artistically written essay. I don't know about these "conservative" writers. They seem to possess those qualities which some here think only "liberals" have. Maybe they're closet liberals. Or, maybe they're the real liberals. And those who profess to be politically "liberal" are really authoritarians who must impose their prescription of how we must act--sort of like Spence's imposing freedom.

Which leads to another Spencist maxim: "everything has to be evaluated on its merit." That would apply far more in Goldberg's hidden law than in prescribed law. Rational human beings who are free to observe, speculate, and decide on the basis of their individual experience are not totally bound by prescribed law. They can act in accordance to their perception of individual merit. A policeman can decide on his own to suggest that conflicting parties talk it out rather than strictly imposing the letter of the law.

But those who are caretakers of the prescribed law don't have as much latitude as a policeman on the beat. If a conflict rises to the level of criminal or civil charges to be decided in a court of law, judges and juries must decide on the merit of the case as it falls within the prescription of the law. Now, juries may nullify the law if they feel or believe it would be too harsh or unjust to apply to the "merit" of the case, but judges, though they have some latitude, are not allowed to nullify the law. They can only act within the bounds of law. To do otherwise would be to destroy the law and the concept of law.

The latitude is constricted even further as a case is appealed to higher courts where there is no jury, but only judges who decide. A supreme court is the final defender of the law more than a defender of individual merits, and if the members of that court decide outside the bounds of law, rather than being defenders of the law, they nullify the law permanently.

So the separation of prescribed law and hidden law is critically important. It's true, as Goldberg says, that we live the greater, greatest, part of our lives without constant attention to prescribed law. And that our lives are more comfortable and effective because of that. So, when prescribed law becomes too dominant, when it pervades our everyday existence to a degree where we must be minutely cognizant of it, people are more prone to be, as Goldberg says, "terrified to work things out themselves in a conversation with someone they disagree with."

Then, what is the necessity of prescribed law if hidden law is so effective when, as Spence says, "everything has to be evaluated on its merit"? That essentially asks the question "why have government?" Well, of course, government is in our "nature." Two people discussing and resolving differences is a form of government. Even a single person deciding the best course of action on its own "merit" is a form of government--self government. Families, cultures, societies, States all must, for cohesion, resolve differences, and the larger the entity, the less opportunity for everyone to discuss and resolve those differences. So hidden law cannot hold a large society together.

This seems like it should be obvious and not worthy of discussion. But the devil is in Spence's merits. The merits of different prescribed law--the law that glues the larger society together.

We are having a debate in our time on which type of law, which type of government, is the best. Is it better to have a law, a government, which allows its vast number of citizens to have local discussions on how to lead their lives on personal merit, while setting a limited prescription on its own duties in respect to protecting the rights of its citizens to so act. Or is it better to have a government which can prescribe laws that dictate to citizens how they must act.

The first type, what we call constitutional government, has the advantage of actually being more evolutionary, though it is perceived to be static. It allows change over time without abandoning its self-limited duties because those duties don't prescribe against individual merit. They actually give those merits encouragement to fulfill themselves. The other type, what we refer to as progressive, though it is perceived to be more evolutionary because it presumably changes, in practice, because it removes power from individuals and smaller units of society and translates that power to prescribed law and all-powerful government, in practice it limits the ability of self and local government, and dictates against the hidden law by which individuals on their own merit discuss and govern amongst themselves. As such, progressive government hinders the natural, organic change that evolves through the merit of individual perceptions of themselves and of their fellow citizens through free experience.

One small anecdotal experience may apply here--I recall a Mr. Duditch, a self-realizing man with a strict and sound moral code, but having a bigoted view of blacks. This was when Detroit was still predominantly white, but changing fast and blockbusting was being used to move blacks into white neighborhoods with the effect that whites would move out and leave the space and housing for blacks. The first black family moved into the neighborhood, and Mr. Duditch was very disturbed. It turns out that the black family was not the stereotype that Mr. Duditch expected. They kept their property immaculate, grew flowers (Mr. Duditch was an avid gardener), were polite, and just not what blacks were supposed to be. Mr. Duditch came to like them, have conversations with them, and wound up preferring them to some whites in the neighborhood. He didn't come to his new perception because he was ordered to by some prescribed law. Not by some government mandate that he must do such and such or be fined. He came to it as a free man who judged by his experience--by the hidden law of people discussing amongst themselves rather than by prescribed law. The change of heart did not take generations or require the 23d century to arrive.

So, as Reagan said years ago, it still remains a time for choosing. Do we want to be individually free, on our own merit, to live our lives as we choose and because of what we experience, or must we be forced to live them according to a prescribed law, one which constantly changes to suit the elusive merit of the moment, a merit decided by a few experts on how we must act and be.

[detbuch]

QUOTE=spence;1033566][*]Slavery came out of left field and surprised the process built by slave owning Founders.

There's this peculiar notion, or more to the point, an ignorant agenda driven bromide, that because some of the founders owned slaves they couldn't actually believe in individual freedom, or didn't have a right to speak of it, or were hypocrites, or weren't qualified to write a constitution based on it. I suppose by the same idiotic reasoning slaves could also not speak of freedom or believe in it. How does a slave become not a slave? How does a slave owner become not a slave owner?

If you're born into a system and live it through most of your adult life, a system accepted by the society you live in, that was inherited by that society and those before it, and was considered, protected, and instituted as the way of life, an institution that was practiced throughout the world for ages, do you just wake up one morning, get brain-zapped with an idea that the slavery, the ties with England, the separate colonies--the whole business--was all wrong. And POOF with a snap of your fingers all would change and become somehow better?

In your dreams, perhaps. But it didn't change because of a dream. It changed because of circumstance. And because of dissatisfaction, not with the way of life you were taught to live, or your association with the world's greatest power, or with the security and opportunity that association provided to you and your forbears, but because that association was beginning to change in a fundamental way. A way that promised to reduce the opportunities for freedom and wealth that it once allowed. A way that promised to reduce you more toward the state of a slave than a free man.

Rather than some idealistic dream of freedom, it was a threat to the actual freedoms you possessed that required a change in the old relation. And that first required a parting of ways, which could only be done violently, and then a construction of a new order. And that construction required a foundation, principles, a new governance which would assure the maintenance and continued fruition of the freedom you coveted.

Though there were calls to ideals of freedom from those like Paine which inspired the Revolution, it was in those moments, and hours and weeks and months of debate afterwards about why you had done this and how you would secure and perpetuate it that the principles of national government were ordained. Those principles were a result of change as much, or more, than the path to it. And the Founders were caught between what they created with its motivating creed of equality and the reality of their existing societal norms.

The world and society didn't instantly change after the Revolution. It was relatively the same but with a new order, and a new form of government. But the principles which were the foundation of this new society were much higher minded than some of its actual practices, including slavery. And the resistance of some to changing that was a problem. And some of the Founders who had hammered out the new government and had arrived at and agreed to its principles but still retained slaves from the previous society knew that was counter to the principle of freedom and so faced an internal dilemma.

Jefferson, who is proclaimed an egregious example of hypocrisy had spoken against slavery even before the Constitution was written. And did so afterwards. He made dire warnings and predictions about the future as a result of slavery. Washington also is a noted "hypocrite." But he actually, in his will, freed his slaves upon his or his wife's death. So why didn't they immediately free their slaves. I suppose the most obvious and immediate reason is they lived in a slave state. There would be obvious problems for the freed slaves for those and many other reasons. That's not to say they were right. They were also, as were most whites of the time, racist in their view of the ability of blacks to thrive on their own. And there was no doubt fear of freed blacks, especially if they didn't have the means to make decent lives.

It was not as simple as a snap of the finger. They knew it was wrong. They made provisions such as the prohibition of slave importation after 1808, and prohibition of slavery into the Northwest Territory, and so on, with the intention that the institution would die out.

But the principle that all men are created equal was a declaration not only to England to be applied to the rebelling colonists, it was a message to the world and to all its people that they had the same rights for which the Revolution was fought. And that ideal was true and worthy for the struggle to obtain it, and because it was true it should be evident to kings and even to slave holders.

The Founders arrived at that truth, and some were mired in a way of life that was not so easily nor instantly divested.

Progressive jurisprudence isn't an open book, like I said, everything has to be evaluated on its merit. Just because you can change doesn't mean you must change. With the inverse conservatives would never be able to evolve either...

-spence[/QUOTE]

You're spot on. Progressive jurisprudence is no book at all. It evaluates everything on whatever merit progressive judges feel applies according to their personal views of the moment. Progressive jurisprudence is not bound by books or laws. They evaluate more by trends of perceived social justice which may change from time to time, even quite often. The trends can switch instantly, in midstream of an election cycle--one day the prevailing trend of progressives even like Obama can be that marriage is between a man and a woman, the next day that becomes passé and tossed into the trash bin of history. What was good ten years ago . . . well . . . that may not work today. That was a long time ago. History marches on. But what is important in progressive ideology, backed by progressive jurisprudence, is that just plain regular folks, sort of the drones, are not allowed on their own to evaluate everything on its merit. Only progressive ideology filtered through progressive jurisprudence is allowed that privilege in order, of course, to create that perfect union of like minds--stepping in unison.

And, of course, because you are not expected to change or to evaluate everything on its merit on your own (which is the purview of progressive ideology and jurisprudence) you will, MUST, change in accordance with ad hoc progressive jurisprudence. In this way, we, conservatives, liberals, progressives, atheists, Muslims, all the various genders, will all evolve together--in the same way. Which eliminates that old, natural way of evolution which happened with the friction of differing or opposing ideas or elements intermingling--in sometimes uncomfortable overly bumptious ways--and brings us all together harmoniously, peacefully into a world that no longer even requires evolution . . . or . . . will no longer be able to evolve.

[detbuch]

"It really is that black and white."

http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/201.../?subscriber=1