One Degree wrote:If I understand the gist of your post, it is inconvenient to allow different states to have different laws. Yes, it is.
The problem is wanting the 'convenience of consistency' over the 'fairness of inconsistency'. Selecting a 'pet minority' such as gays and making the argument about them hides the underlying real issue.
If you accept their rights as universal then you deny the rights of the opposition. There is no way around denying rights to someone unless you accept the inconvenience.
There is no end to the minorities who must eventually be argued over, so the insistence upon 'convenience' guarantees the 'inconvenience' of continual conflict.
The whole idea of 'minority rights' is a demand their rights be accepted as universal. Once you move the argument beyond 'pet minorities' then the absurdity should be clear to anyone. The opposition to any minority becomes the 'discriminated against'. There is no end to the conflict as long as everyone wants the convenience of being right everywhere.
The battle is over convenience, not rights.
I see now, your point relates back to your general tendency to make a virtue out of smaller groups and locality against the tyranny of others.
I;m guessing your sense of the word democracy already finds the nation state as undemocratic. Which would need unpacking in the way that it's plenty democratic in terms of liberal democracy, which in it's essence is a capitalist dictatorship.
Yeah, I think this relates to my many reiterations of hegemony stability theory where you only posit a negative conception that I believe leads to an infinite regress in which the extreme and likely logical conclusion of your outlook is based in abstract individualism in which no force imposes itself upon the individual. Though based on descriptions you do seem to hold some sense of local community have some moral basis on forcing a standard on others., I guess in it's directness.
But I think the issue is you seem to reject the nature of power in it's entirety rather than see such enforced standards as an inherent part of the social community at any scale. One can't have a sea of atomic individuals free to do purely as they please. And you would in fact find, that if conditions regressed to the point that local communities were an epitomizing force for people's lives away from mass society, that you'd simply be subject to the tyranny of the community.
But away from this notion, in a nation state there are federal laws and at present, the law sets a standard which is against many people having legal rights in many states still.
To which one could in such an contentless focus on such force within itself in negligence to the substance of such force, that there has been a tyranny imposed upon gays and their capacity to have legal rights that afford them the same ease of other married couples in matters of property and child custody and so forth.
You make the force within problematic and hold no concern for what the force employs. Which is why in some sense that it seems as if you have no opinions except on a sort of formalized set of views that you're attached to irregardless of their relation to reality I believe.
But I should probably refrain in the future from these interactions because I think we'll repeat distasteful interactions from which we are fundamentally opposed in our outlook. Your views remind me too much of that which I dislike in liberalism in it's broad sense. I'll simply accept you as you are in that you might be like many Americans that I have the sense of having a leave me a lone sentiment.
Regardless, Australia as a nation state has laws that are a standard to all within it.
And within that framework, I think Australia has been ready for same sex marriage so we can move on and don't have to listen to politicians stall time from other political matters. A case that it shouldn't be such a big deal, but because it's made into one, it clearly is (It is because it is because it isn't what it isn't haha).
Though I think you should perhaps look into Rae Langton who I think does well to work within a framework of liberalism but to show that it doesn't go nearly far enough. Because she doesn't focus purely on the capacity to speak, but that which actually undermines one's capacity to be heard, where if one values free speech, then one can justify certain interventions in order to actually create the conditions that allow a more substnative sense of free speech. Thus freedom can often require intervention rather than merely absence, and what it clearly focuses on is what creates the conditions to realize something. Which directs one's attention to the conditions people exist within, rather than abstract sentiments of people's choice from themselves without consideration of the forces acting upon them as real existing people.
The idea that your right to do something stops where my nose ends or what ever, is clearly an inadequate notion because one has to mediate conflicts and assert something. Not everyone can get what they want, and so the idea of being unrestricted and that any imposition is tyranny is nonsensical as it simply doesn't exist and never has. Even in primitive groups, because such individualists notions primarily arose from capitalism, not in the dependence of people which did have community override the individual every time because if one person stepped out of line it was significant threat to others.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics