XPost: us.politics
From: seesig@msgend

In msg <1tz0kae9gric1$.1tydbn675obuq.dlg@40tude.net>,
on Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:44:09 -0500,
mimus  wondered thusly:

>Shouldn't marijuana be a matter of community standards
>and local option, just like alcohol?

Back up one step. Ask whether the "local option" and "community
standard" rules are valid in the first place.

Around here, the law says you can't sell booze after 9pm -- a patently
arbitrary time and hardly in keeping with modern 24-hour society. Even
here in darkest Backwash, Ozarkia, we have 24-hour quickie marts, gas
stations, grocery stores, restaurants, and of course Hell-Mart. But
those on the night shift who like to buy their six-pack in the wee
hours are SOL.

You can't sell booze here on Sunday, the revered day of a select sect
(a majority, but still just a sect). Why can't a Seventh-Day Adventist
or a Jew or an Atheist open their liquor store (SDA liquor stores?
heh--ok, scratch that one) on Sunday? Seems a blatant violation of the
nature of a Constitutional Republic that alleges no imposition of
religion.

In Massachusetts, wasn't it? the Atty Gen is checking into whether
some grocery stores violated their Puritan-era prohibitions on being
open on Thanksgiving! We sent our son across the street to the store
for some eggs on T'Day morning. The Mass. law is stupid, arbitrary,
and violates the rights of the organizationally impaired like us. :)

Blue laws, booze laws, sex laws, the war on some substance users, and
so on, are all Prohibitionism, a disease in the Body Politic,
spreading faster than bird flu and doing severe damage for decades.

Now understand how this situation arose. American law, which
ostensibly is based on "the law of the land," the Constitution,
actually derives its government from two grand sources, one
historically recent and healthy, the other ancient and sick.

The healthy part is the continuous expansion of individual liberty, a
line of progress which includes the Magna Carta, the Declaration of
Independence and the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation,
the genderless suffrage Amendment (not even 100 years old yet), and
continues today with every Rosa Parks and Ed Rosenthal. From this line
derive our ideas of individual, personal liberty, the right to drink
my beer on Sunday even if it's against your religion. That's the
Spirit of '76 and the true American ideal.

The OTHER line is an ancient illness, and sad to say it is simply how
old-fashioned government worked: the majority imposes their will on a
minority because they can. Rights? Might makes right! That tyranny
unfortunately has been allowed to become incorporated into American
law under the guise of "community standards." You can imagine that
most of America is not ready to allow a couple of naked gay junkies to
make out and shoot up on main street, and frankly it would make me
uncomfortable, especially if I had youngsters in my care at the time.
I'd be about as uncomfortable if they were clothed hetero drunks
slobbering on each other. But even if some kind of "community
standard" SHOULD govern public displays and behaviors, and certainly
should govern transgressions (drunk driving, second-hand smoke), there
should be no such imposition upon what (or who) you do in your own
tall privacy fenced back yard.

So, while public smoking of pot, or whether a pot market can go in
within 100 yards of a day-care center, or other such hair-splitting
questions of the public's alleged rights might have some
justification, the criminalization and punishment of private and
personal transactions and usage is TYRANNY. Oppose it with all your
might.

REPEAL! REPEAL! REPEAL!
--
Radd Dadd is me at us75 dot com

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)