3 thoughts on “CIVIL RIGHTS: “Don’t Like Your Rights Taken Away?””

1. No offence intended vicar but I think you may have missed-the-point.

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   • Well, perhaps you can enlighten me then. It certainly reads as though the point is “we shouldn’t take away the rights of people to have gay marriage, have sex, etc. any more than we should take away the rights of people to smoke, drink, etc.”

     If this is the case, then the argument is a bad one, because many of these actions do not fall in the same category. Ironically (not from the perspective of the sort of person who reads this kind of blog 🙂 ), the most non-harmful act on the list is gay marriage, since it has no negative effects outside of the imaginations of people who want to be offended. (If anything, they have a positive effect on society by way of increasing the amount people spend on weddings, which is good for the economy.) And abortion is generally the lesser of two evils in individual cases. Every other item on that list, however, is something for which there is at least a plausible argument in favor of regulation or restriction.

     – Cigarettes: effects on public health via secondhand smoke, additional costs tacked onto everyone’s health insurance to pick up the extra health issues of smokers, smokers are horribly smelly and unpleasant just to be around if you aren’t one, etc.
     – Sex: STDs, overpopulation (which is at the root of a huge number of major problems)
     – Drugs: even marijuana (which is less harmful than alcohol) still impairs mental functions in certain ways, and most drugs have long-term harmful health effects; further, as mentioned, there are knock-on effects from drug addicts in realms outside of the mere physical symptoms of drug addiction, such as theft
     – Porn: not my issue, but the argument that porn is bad for society at large has yet to be definitively refuted.
     – Alcohol: pretty much everything having to do with alcohol is bad for society. If we were really sane, we’d swap enforcement on booze and marijuana; as far as I know there’s no smokable equivalent to a roofie.
     – Guns: for every one instance of a gun being used for a legitimate purpose, there are something like 300 instances of people accidentally shooting themselves or a friend or an innocent person; they aren’t actually useful for self-defense on the fly; they tend to turn assaults directly into murder; etc. etc. etc.

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2. If drunk drivers were magically guaranteed to kill and injure other drunk drivers (or, even better, being drunk magically meant you never attempted to get behind the controls of a machine), and drug addicts magically never experienced any mental degradation or fed their habits by theft, and second-hand smoke magically never harmed the lungs of people who don’t smoke, then I’d be quite happy to leave those who have those habits alone. Alas, this is not the case. The universe is not as simple as this image makes it seem.

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