just want to refer back to my "sociology 101" reply to this thread.
Ooops. I seem to have missed finishing my statement here.
for those of you who missed it, it goes like this:
people have morals. people make laws. people make laws based on their morals.
Well, according to our Consitution and the Declaration of Independance,
our laws are based upon the idea that man is a creation of God and that all men are created equal. And for this reason, all men should have equal right, access and privilege under the law. Our founding documents do not talk about the tyrannical rule of the majority. In fact, the Founding Fathers fought against this idea -- that is why we live in a democratic REPUBLIC -- not a democracy. Our legislators are supposed to protect the minority from the majority that is why they are there. If this were not the case, we should simply have a straight democracy and we can then vote ourselves whatever privileges we want no matter who they may hurt or take advantage of. If there is a minor group that we do not like, we could ban them -- kick them out of our society and confiscate their property after all, we would be the majority. Or, at least we would be the majority until somebody decided that they did not like us or that they wanted our property.
Hey, I like that boat in your back yard. I think we should vote and make it community property so we can all enjoy it. Your house ? Oh, the homeless need it more than you. Or actually, how about we put our legislators in your house since they need a nice place to sit and relax and can think about how to govern us the best.
No, we do not live in a straight democracy for good reason. Our Founding Fathers were all good students of history and decided to do all they could to protect us from that.
(So, rather than Soc. 101, I'd recommend Poly Sci 101 or American Heritage (at BYU) or ....)
;-)
-Art
-- Art Pollard http://www.lextek.com/ Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines. .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
