Dead On
Sean Lynch of Catallarchy is dead on with this:
The headline showing on Google News reads: "NJ's Move Toward Same-Sex Unions Called Undemocratic." My first thought upon reading that was, "Duh!"
It seems to me that civil rights are undemocratic by their very
definition, since they are rights that cannot be taken away, even by
the will of the majority, at least in theory. The whole reason our
Constitution even contains anything other than voting procedures is
that it was clear to the framers that if they left everything to the
will of the majority, they'd end up with an even worse tyranny than the
one they just threw off.As much as some libertarians may complain, the fact that civil
rights today are in as good of a state as they are is a testament to
what a great job the framers did at making the USA an
"undemocratic" country. Heck, even the Second Amendment survives mostly
intact in most states. And the rate at which technology seems to be
empowering individuals seems to be outstripping the rate at which
democracy is attempting to take away our rights, even using that same
technology.
Terrific! I shared similar thoughts but from a different angle when I wrote that "the right to vote" is the least of our freedoms.
Ray G:
One of the most difficult things to explain to the average person, in my experience anyway, is that a pure democracy would be the ruin of our freedom. That is, after you first explain that we don't actually live in a pure democracy, which is news to most in the first place.
December 16, 2006, 8:11 pmScott in SF:
Love the line about the constitution and voting procedures.
December 30, 2006, 11:30 am