Darren New wrote:
> Your right to polygamy infringes on my right to the sanctity of marriage.

Yeah, that is always a good one. So say all the people that fail to read 
*any* history on the subject and thus fail to grasp that in the 1800s, 
and up until it was banned:

1. Most marriages, even in the US, where polygamous.
2. Most marriages where arranged.
3. The ones that where not #1, where still usually #2, so it was common 
for ones true love to be a "mistress", not the person you where actually 
married to.

Makes one wonder what the "lets return to the nations true traditions" 
people really do want... I mean, if they meant it, instead of just 
making shit up they *think* where the nations original traditions, then 
trying to impose them. lol

But, fact is, the "right to not be offended" is nonsensical anyway, 
which is why its not codified into law. How do you determine *who* the 
victim is when just about any idiot idea imaginable is believed by 
someone some place, and **someone** among the other 300,000,000 people 
in the country finds "that" offensive when expressed, done, shown, or 
suggested? The only "right not to be offended" anyone has is the age old 
"community standards" laws, and almost all of those are based on some 
mixture of misunderstanding, paranoia, fear, stupidity, and a failure to 
grasp the "real" causes of the problems they are intended to address.

The result, to give an example of what "might" trigger it, is, 
inevitably, some law that punishes 500 people who, say, want to nude sun 
bathe, on the basis of the 5 idiots that got drunk and peed on someone's 
car during spring break. The problem isn't the nudity, its the behavior, 
and the *refusal* of either the other beach goers, of the cops, to 
enforce "good" behavior. Instead they equate the solution to the problem 
with removing what the "community" decides is a problem, rather than 
dealing with the real issues, and, most of the time, this ends up being 
based on some religious interpretation of what the problem is (sorry, 
but its true), even when there are those the belong to the same 
religion, who, by being a minority of them, get ignored, while having 
the opposite view. (In this specific case, I find it damn idiotic that 
there are Christian nudist groups in the same country as the vast 
majority of idiots that think "dressing properly" will prevent lewd 
behavior, drunkeness, and/or rapes, despite all evidence to the contrary.)

So, sure, if your "community standard" says something about it, then... 
it more or less equates to "you have a right not to be offended by 
this", otherwise, you are SOL, as it should be. But, like someone 
pointed out recently on a blog which often talks about the politics of 
some of the more atrocious trolls in the US, small towns are the ones 
most likely to "have" such standards, and the reason is invariably that 
they are controlled by a small number of people, isolated from different 
opinions, and the more isolated they are, the more insane their 
interpretations of what is right and wrong get. And, this is the most 
disturbing thing, its precisely these kinds of insular, narrow minded, 
self absorbed, ignorant of the rest of the world, people that the 
Republicans kept whining about being the "core" of real American values 
during the presidential campaign... Yeah, I *really* want the 
dysfunctional, self protecting, denial driven, and morally relativistic 
cast of the Morel Orel cartoon running the US government... lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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