Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Whose Prerogative ?
Boobie-gate ... Gay weddings ... Kerfluffle ensues and the State steps in to correct the situation. "Corrections" like the War on Drugs, gun control laws, Jim Crow Laws, smoking laws. Laws that tell us how we are allowed make love and whom we are allowed marry. On the way: food laws, weight restrictions, income limitations, travel restrictions . . . Is that what we want our State to do for us; to step in and legislate until all the loudest feathers become unruffled? It takes a lotta laws to satisfy Mrs Grundy. Is that the highest and best function of the State; to legislate societal and cultural norms? Is that what we want our State to do? Do we support the State so that it can make our decisions for us? The problem is deciding whose standards to use. Some call us a Christian, or Judeo-Christian nation. Will that come to mean that everyone must accept that Jesus is saviour? Or that everyone must take communion? Will it spell the end to BLT's and ham on rye? Or to using technology? Each of those ideas is Truth to some very respectable, decent people. And anathema to some other respectable, decent people. So if a particular religion holds as a sacred tenet that women should cover their hair and not speak about political matters, or that crab cakes are forbidden, or that no one must sing, or that everyone must sing, or that people of the same gender shouldn't be life-partners -- how do we decide which set of values the State should choose to force us all to live by? Or have we given up that prerogative?
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