I consider myself a liberal, but more and more I'm disturbed by the level of discourse descended to by people on the left and this is the latest example. Can you imagine the outrage if a controversial liberal female were called bitch and cunt or had her past sexual history dragged out into the open or jokes made about her appearance which I see on comments all over this issue.
Moral equivalency fail. Two wrongs don't make a right, and bad behavior on the part of someone making an argument does not automatically invalidate their argument.
And I don't like the arguments that slam her down for acting on her convictions. You can argue that she's doing it for publicity, not convictions, yes, or that her convictions are wrong, yes, but I don't get the sudden support for just mindlessly doing what your employer tells you.
1. Her convictions are wrong.
2. She has a
real easy remedy to avoid "just mindlessly doing what your employer tells you," and that is to resign.
There was a meme going around saying that supporting Kim Davis was like supporting a quaker clerk who wouldn't issue gun permits because it was against their religion. And yet somehow I'm sure that you could find plenty of support among my acquaintances for such a quaker. History doesn't condemn those who helped the Underground Railroad in violation of the Fugitive Slave Law. Or people who dodged the draft for moral reasons.
The difference is that Quakers and draft dodgers don't insist on getting paid for their [refusal to perform] military service and refuse to let somebody else take their place.
Well, given that apparently, Hillary Clinton is not the only elected representative who has ever used a private email account, I'm not sure she is the only one who should be pilloried.
Clinton had top secret/classified emails on a private server that were likely hacked by America's enemies. That's not only a severe breach of security, but may also have led to the death of Americans.
But as I pointed out earlier...the left have an amazing capacity to overlook or minimize instances like this, and the lack of outrage from the left is quite telling.
Clinton is a manipulative asshat who has no business running the country, who should immediately abandon her candidacy, and who should (after being convicted at trial) go to
prison for running that private email server.
And it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it was hacked or not; that's irrelevant. What makes it wrong and morally repugnant is that
it circumvents FOIA. That kind of secrecy is antithetical to democracy.
Is that so? Is there no law that, if you were in a position to resist and found offensive to your values, that you would choose to actually resist rather than resign? Think this through, Kris, because I can think of a whole lot of laws that should have been resisted in their own time.
The point you're missing is that
this law ain't one of them!“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
[and other quotes]
The key word there is "unjust," which is why King's argument doesn't apply here.
This whole debate is disingenuous. She can't claim moral high ground for a position that removes rights, and comparing her to MLK, Jr., of all people, is distorting what he and the entire civil rights movement stood and stands for.
I made the argument in the way that I did, because from her perspectives, she believes that her moral convictions are being violated; for which (even as an employee of the government) she has a right to freedom of religion. So just as MLK, Jr. felt that he had rights being violated as a black man, Davis feels convicted in a similar manner. You don't have to agree with her position on her religious interpretations, (and honestly, I don't) but I do agree that she has the right to assert her religious convictions to whatever degree of suffering she is willing to endure.
There's a difference between standing up for your beliefs and simple stupid stubbornness. First of all, it's hard to argue that it's genuine belief given how hypocritical we already know she is.
Second, again, the important principle here is that
her rights end where others' rights begin. She deserves to be jailed for this for the same reason why someone who commits religious sacrificial murder deserves to be in prison, despite religious beliefs being protected. Even if here beliefs
were genuine, it still wouldn't give her the right to deprive others of the ability to exercise their own rights.
