more crack pot stuff from you. You seem confused on every point. One minute you are attempting to tell Christians they can not vote their conscience or beliefs. Then you start spewing off point crap. Deists - what do you mean by Deists. to whom do you attribute such belief? Regarding Sharia law or a theocracy - more strawman crap from you. The founding fathers set up the United States to be a weak federal gov't. They left many of the choices to the states. They let the states choose and govern their ties with Christianity and 3/4s of the states endorsed or supported the Christian religion. Just because the founding fathers allowed the states to support religion does not mean they did not want everyone to free to choose. They set up a system to allow people to be free to chose to worship virtually any way they chose.
Am I having a discussion with jem or stu? I am not telling Christians how to vote, I am suggesting that Christians vote like Muslims vote, based on an external scripture, and not on a rational unbiased reasoning process. Take the faith out of it, make a non faith based argument if you can. Then let's see what happens. The best Christians I ever met kept their mind in Christ, not in trying to force their Christian beliefs onto the lives of others through a political agenda... Free worship yes, a wall between church and state, yes. Again, if you can make secular arguments...you won't need to rely on faith based unprovable arguments.
thats the specious crap I have been saying you are spewing. Who the hell are you to tell Christians to keep their Christianity out of their vote. Your view is not supported by the constitution. Your view is not supported by logic. Do you you tell gays to keep their gayness out? What the hell should a gay get to vote their preferred lifestyle and a christian not vote their preferred lifestyle. You do not even know how their vote will turn out. You are fascist pretending to be tolerant. I personally support gays rights to vote how they see fit. I also support a Christians right to do the same.
Who am I to suggest people reason rather than blindly follow a religion when pulling the lever to vote? A reasonable person, like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and a host of others who preferred reason above a particular religion's dogmatic edicts. The big difference you either don't see, or won't admit is this: 1. Straight Christians want to tell gays who they can or cannot marry. 2. Gays are not telling straight Christians who they can or cannot marry. Gays don't want to subtract the rights of straight Christians to marry a member of the opposite sex, they just want to add the same right as straight Christians to marry whomever they love.
I said Jefferson was a reasonable man, you are suggesting he was not? He was ahead of his time, and today he would be a democrat voting for the rights of minority groups to enjoy the benefits of the majority. I don't blame him for not being as evolved as people are today, but it is hard not to blame those who several hundred years later are still stuck in the thinking of several hundred years ago. If Jefferson didn't want change to happen in the future, he would not have lobbied hard for a constitution that would allow for the societal change that has taken place. We can either build in the ignorance of the past to create more ignorance in the future, or we take the progress we have had in establishing equal rights and expand that to include people of all types of preferences...yes, including marital preference. Of course, a return to a couple of hundred years ago...where people had no AC, indoor plumbing, no modern medicine, wooden teeth, no Internet, no TV, etc., is available now. People can convert and join an Amish or Mennonite community. We don't force them to live in the 21st century.
Allowing gays the right to marry is Libertarian, and also Democrat today...unless the Libertarian is a right wing republican Christian like some of the Ron Paul followers who don't belief in equal rights for all Americans. Jefferson was a scientists, and most scientist evolve both scientifically and socially as their science reveals more truth of life. I don't blame Jefferson for his ignorance then, I blame those who today are stuck in the same level of ignorance in spite of all the progress we have made in trying to actually realize that: All men and women are created equally, and have a God given right to life liberty and justice equally...gay or straight. Why you would be arguing against gay marriage is quite odd...
Passionately defending equal rights for all Americans is odd? Maybe in your world... In my world it is a patriotic duty to argue for the equal rights of all Americans...irrespective of race, creed, religion and sexual preference. That's the democratic way.
Oh, and regarding marriage: Association of Libertarian Feminists ALF News No. 80, Fall 2001 An Interview With Jennifer Roback Morse Q: How would you state the thesis of your book? Dr. Morse: I believe that modern America has developed a notion of freedom that is incoherent, not only from a libertarian point of view, but really from any point of view. We have come to define freedom as meaning not limited government, but as being unencumbered by personal relationships. A person is not free if she is dependent, emotionally or financially, on her husband. A person is not free if her children are dependent on her. This view of freedom is incoherent for two reasons. First, it is not possible to sustain a free society, in the sense of reasonably limited government (let alone a nightwatchman state) unless children develop personal, human attachments to their parents. That means that the individual person of the mother and father really are irreplaceable, and so are to some extent, constrained by their relationship with their child and with each other. Second, I do not believe it is possible for human beings to find happiness in the absence of meaningful human relationships. That means commitment, and the act of commitment necessarily limits our options afterwards. My book uncovers an inconsistency among libertarians, one which had never occurred to me until I became a mother. My argument is that a free society relies on the vast majority of the people being self-restraining the vast majority of the time. We cannot enjoy the benefits of a minimal state unless people can control themselves. Otherwise, we have to rely on government coercion to ensure compliance with the laws against force or fraud. Therefore, libertarians must address the question of how people become self-restraining, or how people develop a conscience. Once we open that question, we will inevitably come to the question of how people are treated as babies, since the groundwork for conscience development is laid in the first 18 months of life. For this reason, libertarians can not be indifferent to the kinds of decisions people make in their family lives. Q: Conservative traditionalists have championed what seems to be a little-discussed double standard, by which married mothers should be discouraged from taking part in the workplace, but welfare mothers should be required to work at paying jobs. What's your view, both as a libertarian economist, and as a mother? Dr. Morse: I agree that this is a double standard. The idea seems to be that a child in a single parent family is better off in a no parent family! Welfare reform in effect said to welfare recipients, "society values work in the market place, and economic independence. We expect you to conform to those values by getting a job to support yourself, at least to some extent." I think we need to have the courage to say something similar regarding marriage. Society values the family. We believe you should get married and stay married. (In fact, the evidence shows that being born into a single parent household is the single strongest predictor of child poverty.) But, the institution of marriage has been attacked for so long by so many people that few politicians have the courage to take that kind of stand. At the very least, we need to remove the implicit barriers to welfare recipients getting married. Full interview below: http://www.alf.org/alfnews/alf80.shtml
Many Christians are gay, so there goes your argument. Equal rights doesn't mean taking rights away from Christians, they are free to marry straights, it just means that they don't force their religious beliefs down the throats of others to the point that they deny equal rights to non Christians or Christians simply because they want to marry and love someone of the same gender. If you are a libertarian, I am sure you understand that marriage should not be determined by the government, or the churches, or by anything but the contract of love between consenting adults. It is illegal to "fuck children" in America, so why would I support such illegal action? There is no fact in evidence that I would support such a thing. I always oppose coercion and forcing those who are not capable of consent to be forced to do anything against their will when it comes to intimate relationships. Why do you need to make false claims about such things? You continue to perpetuate the same false claims without any supporting factual evidence that is subject to cross examination. That is the best you can do? People are free to support Israel, and I would like to see our government money go to causes that need that money...Israel is not one of those causes. Jews in America have sufficient wealth as a group to fund Israel if they want without the need of taxpayer money. Israel is not a poor country, elimination of the poverty in the poor countries that are Israel's neighbors will do more than giving Israel money to buy more advance weapons in the name of peace in that region. I believe people have a right not to be shot by a gun owner, and a child not to be killed by an accident in a gun owner's home who didn't put on a child safety lock, etc. but when so many own guns, that is a difficult right to enforce. I have never said that people should not lobby for their own causes, I would just like to see them make rational arguments in support of those causes so we can clearly come to agreements instead of the type of divisiveness and acrimony that religious political agendas bring. I would like to see arguments that can appeal to common grounds, not the divided grounds of one religions vs. another religion...all in the name of God of course. We will find common ground in reason, as the world has show consistently that we find grounds for war and violence when religions become the dominant force in politics. Churches for religion, protected by the government to practice their freedom in their religion of their own choice, and government by reason...protected from the churches dogmatic influence to allow free choice for all men and women, devoid of the undue influence of a majority religious group is a nice goal.