THIS IS THE FOURTH INSTALLMENT IN MY REPLY TO Chris, a conservative reader, which begins here .
I ended the previous post in the midst of responding to your desire, Chris, for:
...government to remain at the most local level possible.
I pointed out that, as a liberal, I am in complete agreement with that principle: empowering local control is what those dreaded "community organizers" are all about.
I also pointed out that the most local that control can get is the freedom of the individual to live his or her life as he or she sees fit—without any government intervention at all, unless that person is hurting someone else.
Take another current example from California—proposition 8.
This is a clear example of a majority voting to overturn the rights of a minority, and for no reason other than blind, ignorant, prejudice.
As testimony in the trial—from both sides—made clear, there is solid, well-researched and well-documented evidence that none of the fears the prop. 8 campaign appealed to had any basis in fact.
Yet the majority (barely more than 50%) was still tricked, by a very well-financed and very dishonest campaign, into voting to take away the right of same sex couples to marry.
If this country took an overly simplistic stance on the value of keeping government as local as possible, that would have been that.
But because the federal government intervened, the rights of individuals were preserved.
The vast majority of the liberal federal interventions that conservatives haven't liked involve the protection of the individual's right to live as he or she sees fit.
Whether that involves:
- the right of a black woman to drink from a public water fountain, or
- the right of any woman to vote,
- the right of a gay person to marry,
- the right of a retired couple to hold on to their house,
- the right of a woman to make her own decisions about giving birth, or
- the right of a child in school to pray or not as she, and her parents, see fit.
So, in one way, this moves government away from the local arena, but in another way it moves ultimate control to as local a place as possible: the free will of the individual.
Toward the end of your comment, you propose an interesting experiment to test the liberal and conservative approaches against each other.
I'll give you my response in the next post.
Next: Chris' Proposed Experiment
