Catwho wrote:
gbaji wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
If you're not willing to fight to protect the rights of others, then no one will fight to protect yours.
Fight the good fight, oh Internet Forum Warrior.
/shrug
I just find the question itself strange. When did our society go from "I disagree with what you say, but will fight to my dying breath to defend your right to say it" to "You have no right to do anything I don't agree with". The very suggestion that only devout Catholics should care about protecting the religious rights of devout Catholics flies in the face of the most basic required principles of liberalism. You can't have a free society if it's filled with people who only think their own positions/ideas should be protected.
You yourself just went from "say" to "do" between the two sentences.
Fair enough. I'll counter that "say" and "do" aren't that different from a rights point of view though. I mean the first amendment is broadly about "free speech", yet refers specifically to the "free exercise thereof" (with regard to religion).
Quote:
You can believe whatever the hell you want. You can say whatever the hell you want, with certain exceptions (fire in crowded theater, yada yada.) But you can only do the things that have not been expressly prohibited by law (and/or societal norms), which is universal across the span of human civilizations.
I disagree. In a free society you start being able to think, say, or do anything you damn well please. Then you limit just those things which constitute a greater infringement on others freedoms than imposed by limiting them. So we decide that beating someone to death is illegal, not because people's actions aren't protected, but because the right to not be beaten to death trumps the right to beat someone to death.
There's no innate difference between the methodology we use to determine the restrictions on what people can "do" compared to what they can "say". It's the same rules. It's just that what people do is more likely to infringe some other right than what we say, so we falsely assume that speech is more protected than action.