RE: Majority of Americans support gay rights over religious freedom bills
April 16, 2015 at 11:47 pm
(April 16, 2015 at 9:35 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(April 15, 2015 at 11:42 pm)Hatshepsut Wrote: Unlike for blacks, no history of chattel slavery or Jim Crow attends the other groups, whose members have generally experienced little difficulty in voting and securing employment, housing, or consumer essentials. Although it has been necessary to ban certain kinds of discrimination, we've never defined prejudice itself as a wrong, only that its absence is a virtue.
Do you have any idea how sociopathic you sound when you say things like this? This argument is one of the most immoral justifications for a law I've ever heard: "Oh, this group hasn't suffered enough to be worth protection yet." What that means is that you've quantified injustice...
O dear, I hope I'm not turning into a psychopath! Since I've covered a lot in my posts answering DeistPaladin (see above), I won't say too much here. There is a general principle in operation, however:
A law which compensates, protects, or rewards one group usually does so at the expense of other groups or of the common welfare. There's simply no way around it. I've provided some examples above. Pressure groups within a society are hardly friends with each other; they seek accommodation at best, selfish advantage at mean, and the destruction of other groups at worst. Identity politics is ugly by nature. That doesn't mean we should never pass laws addressing current issues of social equality, for instance allowing same-sex marriage. It does behoove us to use the minimum necessary scope and number of such laws, and to favor guarantees that apply to all citizens over those that apply only to defined groups.
And yes, the amount of harm redress is sought for does have a bearing on the remedy to be offered, if any.