Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to I could live with it

You could? I couldn't.
Mary Anne — (archived)

The Bill of Rights is either applied or it isn't. It was never intended to protect culture or society. It was intended to protect individuals.

The Southern kid who decides he is an atheist in the seventh grade would have nowhere to go. He would still have to pray in school, or... what? Be suspended? And how about the citizen who collects and uses guns? Without pressure from other regions who honor the Second Amendment, she would become a criminal in some parts of the country. The laws are already extremely strict in some places.

I would have to leave where I live. I've always been a philosophical and political minority. The ability to make regional interpretations of the Bill of Rights would literally make it impossible for me to do my job here.

We are either one nation or we aren't. The basic idea of republican democracy is one of negotiation and compromise, an idea whose practice has been severely damaged lately by our leaders' inability to practice realistic give and take. We already have regional differences, and have for our whole history. If we mess around with the underlying mutual interest provided by a common body of law, we are finished as a nation.

I think of the partition of the Raj. We would have the same chaos, the same frantic moving from place to place. What we wouldn't have, thank Vishnu, are the massacres of refugees that marked that unhappy partition. People would lose their property here, and their rights, rather than their lives.

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