The spirit of opposition

[aadler]

 
I just saw some kind of online poster, that started out:

Don’t like gay marriages? Don’t get one.
Don’t like cigarettes? Don’t smoke one.
Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.
Don’t like porn? Don’t watch it.
Don’t like drugs? Don’t do them.
…
— and on and on. The obvious message, underlined at the end, was that we should all be content to live and let live, and leave other people to follow their own preferences.

So I have to wonder what the people who think that sentiment is so wonderful, so apropos, so true, would think if it read:

Don’t like gay-bashing? Don’t bash one.
Don’t like rape? Don’t commit one.
Don’t like genital mutilation? Don’t perform one.
Don’t like car-bombs? Don’t plant one.
Don’t like child molestation? Don’t molest one.
…
— with the same implication of Follow your own inclinations, and leave other people to follow theirs, because it’s none of your business.

Live-and-let-live applies to a lot of things, but it doesn’t apply to everything. We all have things that we disapprove of to the point that we won’t participate in them, and we all have things that we despise to the point where we feel a moral obligation to oppose them.

Either way, as I saw someone observe, you don’t settle the disagreement by dismissing the opposing viewpoint with a smug cliché.

Comments

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

I see where you're coming from, but there's a huge difference between the first list and the second. The first list are with questions raised about the last two, are not being forced on people who don't want them. The second list are the exact opposite, all criminal attacks towards someone else who will be the victim.

I don't think this is a cliche, but I would honestly be interested in why you think these are comparable. Could you please try and explain to me why you at least appear to think they are.

[aadler]

I don’t view them, and wasn’t presenting them, as being precisely equivalent. I chose the second list specifically to illustrate the overall fallacy. Once you recognize that the ‘reasoning’ works only for certain cases, it becomes a matter of choosing which cases have to be decided how.

There is another aspect to it. Abortion IS a violent assault on an innocent victim, and the entire concept of drug use as a ‘victimless’ crime denies or ignores the obvious reality that drug use potentiates and even prompts other criminal activity. Then there’s the matter of so-called gay marriage: opposing that isn’t a matter of denying anyone’s rights, but of resisting the efforts of an intolerant, activist minority to force everyone else to accept a wholesale redefinition of marriage purely to accommodate their own preferences.

In every social issue being argued, there are at least two sides. When one side attempts to depict the other as being baseless, en masse, in all their arguments and attitudes, especially when their own argument is so superficial, I’m going to object.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The distinction is that all the acts in the first list (save, arguably, abortion) involve no aggressive use of force or fraud on another individual, and that all the acts on the second list (save, arguably, "gay bashing" if confined to mere insult) do involve the aggressive use of force or fraud on another individual. The principal being appealed to is that of Natural Right.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

... and the entire concept of drug use as a ‘victimless’ crime denies or ignores the obvious reality that drug use potentiates and even prompts other criminal activity.

Then punish the "other criminal activity," rather than the drug use itself.

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

Okay, I can see where you're coming from on the overall concept, but with regards to gay marriage for example, would you oppose the introduction of the system we have here in england of civil partnerships where two people of the same sex who want to spend the rest of their lives together get the same rights as those who are opposite sex?

If it's the word marriage and all the related religious connotations I can understand that, but if you're say that it's intolerant activism to want the same rights and legal protections than I simply can't see that as anything other than prejudice. I'm sorry, but the argument seems at least to me to be identical to that opposing mixed race couples which is not to call you racist, but from my perspective that how it seems.

[aadler]

In California, civil unions had evolved over the years to the point where the only difference between them and marriage (so far as legal rights were concerned) was the name itself.

Rather than satisfying the activists, this very fact was used by an activist judge to ‘prove’ prejudice. Whereupon he promptly ruled that gay marriage (an inherent oxymoron) was the law of that state, even though the people of California — hardly a hotbed of seething right-wing intolerance — soundly rejected the proposition when the choice was theirs.

Gay people are already allowed to marry … but, since marriage is between a man and a woman, they are inherently disinterested in that. Instead they want to force the other 98.6% of the population to apply the name of marriage to what they do, and anyone who disagrees is instantly labeled a bigot and hatemonger.

[aadler]

I actually have a certain sympathy to this approach. I’m not convinced that it would be effective, but there’s considerable evidence that our current drug policies aren’t particularly effective, either.

It isn’t simply a matter of law, however. I’ve heard the “If you don’t like xxx, then don’t do it” argument applied before, and the intent was not just to prevent people’s rights from being impinged, but to discourage and negate criticism, disagreement, or opposition. I loathe drugs, I despise drug users, and I don’t have much more respect for their enablers.

Even a society that allows recreational drug use will tend to discriminate against schoolbus drivers who are known to be regular users, not to mention cardiac surgeons or air traffic controllers … The same “if you don’t like drugs, then don’t use them” could be (and probably has been) used to argue against such sanctions, because there’s no argument too farfetched for some fool or ideologue to trot it out.

Some things are just wrong, and discouraging others from pointing out that those things are wrong doesn’t make them any less so.

[aadler]

As I observed to mymatedave, I formulated the second list not to be an exact counterpart to the first, but to show that the argument itself can’t be applied across the board. In fact, I consciously chose extreme examples for the purpose of making that point in a clear, striking manner.

And, as I observed to you in the reply to a previous comment, my principal objection is to the notion that — to repeat myself — smug clichés can ‘settle’ questions of serious disagreement.