baldeagle wrote:You completely missed my point. ALL men are immoral. It's the nature of the beast. Your argument is, because all men are immoral, we should never legislate against immorality.pcgizzmo wrote:So, you've never taken a drink? Maybe one too many? You've taken a drug if so. Morality is just a number on a dart board based on who you talk to. in the 1600's men routinely married girls as young as 9. Many societies allowed polygamy. Amsterdam allows smoking of hashish and prostitution. You can get prescription drugs over the counter in Mexico. Ft. Worth Tx used to have legalized prostitution. What is sin to one may not be to another and it changes with the times and the mindset of the people.
It seems like everyone want's less government unless there is something the government legislates that somehow matches their idea of morality. This all stems from someone's idea of what is right for them should be right for everyone else. If we were to move away from the way of thinking we would all be a lot better off.
So, again, I ask you, how do you justify the death penalty? On what basis?
If the basis is it harms other people, well so do drug use, alcohol use, prostitution, pornography and all those other so-called "victimless" crimes.
It's not a question of imposing anyone's morals on someone else. It's a question of whether or not the society will become so "tolerant" that any behavior is condoned. Murder and rape are condoned in Islamist countries. Would that be acceptable to you? If not, why not? On what basis would you disallow them?
There was a time in this country when a woman getting pregnant out of wedlock was frowned upon, thought to be a bad thing. Now women openly get pregnant out of wedlock and everyone celebrates the baby and its mother. Obviously our standards have changed. But what has the impact been on society? From a political standpoint we now EXPECT our leaders to have affairs and aren't the least bit bothered when they have sex in the Oval Office or lie on the witness stand. After all, boys will be boys, they say.
We now teach sex in the public schools and in some places teach homosexuality. What's next? Labs where they can practice? Would that be wrong? On what basis? With your standard of the government should stay out of the morality business, there would be no justification for a law preventing that practice. If two "consenting" 14 year olds want to practice, what's the harm?
If you think that's GOOD for society, I disagree. There's a reason America is the cesspool of ignorance and cowardice it is now, and it's not because we've upheld our high standards. It's because we fell for the lie that "everybody does it" and "no one's perfect" and therefore we have no right to tell anyone else what to do.
Legality and morality are often very disparate standards. Laws, at least as far as the Republic was based were supposed to protect citizens' life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That has degraded into an insufferable morass distorting the ideal beyond recognition. And so we pass laws that stifle our liberty while destroying those that protect life.Capital punishment, when instituted by God (bear with me if you don't hold that belief) was to protect the Hebrew society from corruption by the evil among them. One crime that was punishable by death was injuring a pregnant woman that resulted in the loss of her child (Ex 21:23). Birth control pills use to be illegal because they were potentially abortive. We lie to ourselves when we try to equate abortion with any other medical procedure. It is the ripping apart, chemical burning, convulsive rejection, or the pithing of the brain of a newborn before it has drawn its first breath. The latter being acceptable by many on the left and is practiced today in China when parents break their quota. But we sterilize the conversation by using such words as D&C (dilation and currettement), Instillation (injection of concentrated saline to...well, it's bad), "morning after" (Previn) causing the uterus to spasm and reject both the nourishing tissue and the baby, or partial birth abortion which is a last trimester alternative wherein the (premature to full term) child starts to deliver and before his or her chest emerges and the child begins to take its first breath, the brain is pithed ending their life.
Let's not deceive ourselves. At conception the child's (or children's) sex, hair color, eye color, and to a large degree personality (the nature vs. nurture thingy) is determined. A living soul exists in the womb. By the end of ten weeks, fingers, toes and even fingerprints have formed, they move about and respond to sound and temperature change. By month three (most states allow abortion to this point/ 14 weeks) all the fingernails have formed, the baby is opening and moving its mouth, tongue and taste buds as well as milk teeth are formed and I speak from experience here, you can tell what sex the child will be. By six months, it is sleeping, waking, sucking its thumb and hiccuping as it works its lungs in the amniotic fluid. Killing the child at this point is still legal in Chicago and California but requires medical necessity in others. I Thank God we have, to this point banned the partial birth abortions, which the POTUS and others would gladly undue if given the chance. If one believes that abortion should be legal, or at least not meddled in by the government that was formed ideally to protect the life first, then this is what one advocates or at least tolerates.
Some will argue that it is "tissue" and sterilize this conversation with words like zygote, embryo or fetus. Here's the rub, if it ain't a baby then she ain't pregnant. Any form of abortion (spontaneous notwithstanding) kills a baby, a person, a soul.