I don’t have any fancy RSS feeds or trackbacks on my site. (I don’t think Geocities supports them, and I’m not technically savvy enough to figure out how they work anyway). So I don’t always notice when other people talk about what I post. But I was surfing before and I happened to notice that some of my past posts on gay marriage sparked a bit of a debate on the nature of rights.
David Janes disagreed with me, claiming that rights are not inalienable because we’d get into a slippery slope situation where everything was considered a right. Mark responded with a shooting down of David’s argument, and the two of them had it out over a few subsequent comments.
Later, on my post on the extension of hate crime laws to gays, David agrees with me that they should either be included, or else the whole laws scrapped. But he disagrees with me in that he thinks they should be scrapped. Michael Demmons disagreed, and posted his defence of hate crime laws. And Alan agrees.
(Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough ego for one night, I noticed that David also found my review of the Live concert.)
If rights are not inalienable, then why don’t we just call them privileges? If the government can curb your rights based on how “responsible” you are, then that’s what they are. We here in Canada have a privilege to free speech. This privilege can be revoked if you’re deemed unworthy to have it.
The Switching to Glide offer is still open, if you’re interested in being our Quebec correspondent.
Cheers
Mike