Worgen said:
[your wrong, both sides use it but the conservatives tend to mean it and have historicly been much more set in it, oh and if you look at the states supporting the whole bull shit of cali's ban you will see more then a few conservative idiot states, the whole small govt thing only goes for small govt when it comes to telling states who they cant discriminate against
No I'm not, as you might notice I myself said that both sides use it. Simply that it's far more of a liberal position.
I do however understand the perception that "Republicans only care about small goverment when it comes to telling them who they can't discriminate against". It's not correct of course, but since it's the biggest issues involving the most vocal people that get national attention, along with the bias in how most media reports on these things (and who they allow to go on the air to represent the Republican viewpoint) it's fairly understandable. Media control is a powerful thing.
While it gets away from the main subject, you have to understand that the very issue of "discrimination" is a lot more touchy than a lot of people make it out to be. While our country is a representitive republic, it's based on the idea of democracy and intregrates a lot of those ideas. The idea of democracy simply being that everyone votes, and whatever gets the most votes is what winds up happening.
The thing is that a lot of minority rights issues revolve around an interpetation of certain laws and principles that can be argued to say that democracy is non-existant, and that a small group of people cannot be forced to conform to the will of the majority (or move out of their area and go someplace else). It's one of those things that starts with the constitution, goes into how our founding fathers interpeted it, metric tons of precedent in all kinds of directions, and arguements at pretty much all levels about the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law by both sides.
The Republican side of things tends to argue that equality means that minorities get the right to have an opinion and vote like anyone else, they however are not entitled to any specific weight to their votes simply by being a minority. Indeed by definition in a country based on an ideal of democracy minority groups, which are by their definition small, are supposed to lose. The idea being that the greater good is served by having more people in agreement with what happens.
To use a favorite example, look at conflicts about things like Christmas decorations and town tree lighting ceremonies and such. When you get past the religious aspects of the entire thing, a big part of the arguement comes from religious minorities like Jews and Hindus claiming that a star on top of a tree in the middle of the town square is offensive, and that it's not right that they can lose on an issue like this despite the fact that they got to vote and lost to the other 99.9% of the community. Democrats in most cases argue it's the job of the big bad Federal Goverment to come in and stomp on the people of Hooville (or whatever) on the behalf of a handfull of butthurt minorities. Republicans in most cases argue that the minorities were given equal rights, they got to vote, they simply lost, and this is how things are supposed to work. Every single year, people throw down about this kind of thing somewhere with mixed results.
Agree or disagree, the bottom line is that it's a fairly sensible conflict with a decent amount of logic on both sides, even though I agree with the Republican point of view more than the Democratic one. However on the rare occasions when this kind of thing gets national coverage the majority of news networks like CNN traditionally pick the biggest whack job to represent the case of the town. You wind up with like some professional political activist argueing the democratic point of view, against the head of the town's church (who was probably quite vocal) as opposed to say a Mayor, Selectman, or other such person. The networks getting to choose whom they give a platform to (and this is incidently a big part
of claims of media bias, it's not quite what a lot of people think those complaints are). People get to see a well informed activist argue about the law, while the preacher talks about god, and in the end you wind up with a lot of people assuming that this is some case
of religious fundementalists oppressing minorities, where if say the Mayor or someone similar was allowed to make the case for what happened it would seem somewhat less insane.
I don't mindlessly follow a Republican point of view, I just tend to agree with that side more than I disagree with it. In general I tend to be critical with liberals because they tend to accuse people of ignorance, while themselves being ignorant and typically not knowing much of anything about the other side and what the actual issues involved in something are. Of course I'm one of the people who also blames a media bias for this, but I do so not because other people have told me that this is the case, but because I've actually sat there and watched discussions on issues I'm familiar with, with the Republican side being represented by someone who does not belong argueing a case on a national platform, or taking entirely the wrong track of debate. A favorite technique seems to be to call up religious leaders to represent the right wing, giving the impression that the right wing is based a lot more on religious fundementalism than it is, instead of the people who have actually been involved in the legal conflicts themselves. When you later hear that a news program didn't want the guy that should have been making the case to begin with, well let's just say that is how hard set opinions are formed.
As far as the actual issue we're discussing goes, this (like anything) goes cross party. It should be noted however that despite general tendencies in the past, you'd have to look at who is calling the shots in, and representing the various states involved, and how much conflict is going on within those states.
Understand that right now you see a lot of things happening because the left wing didn't just take The Presidency, it managed to get control of pretty much the entire federal goverment. Most states right now are being represented by liberals. One of the big liberal battle cries right now is to make things happen while they have control, to more or less avoid the pitfall that the Republicans fell into when they had control and were able to get little done. The typical liberal problem of various left wingers fighting each other endlessly over specifics is somewhat dealt with for the moment, that is what the whole Obama/Clinton alliance was about where she was convinced to support her with her followers in exchange for a cabinet position instead of dividing the party and turning it into a grudge match. The outnumbered Republicans are also forced into a position of compromise and fencewalking and deciding what is the lesser of evils by their position to get things done, trading support on one issue, for lack of opposition on another.
The bottom line being that if they want to make a major push for video game regulation and start the moral censorship snowball rolling, they are in a better position now than ever before. Having a socially liberal Republican (with connections to the Kennedies no less) lead the charge makes it appear there is more solidarity and demand than there is as part of the show, as does being able to bring in what are commonly thought of as Republican states. You'll doubtlessly see a lot of high profile Republicans that went cross party for this being heavily flaunted as part of the entire performance. The intention being to sell The Supreme Court on "this is what the overwhelming number of people want".
I'm not going to tell you that there are whacked Republican censors out there and such, because there are. However this paticular issue, and this paticular battle, comes from the left wing. As things stand now if your anti-censorship, it's the democrats that are after your rights. Tomorrow it could very well be the other way around, but today the enemy are people like Mrs. Clinton even if they aren't currently acting as "faces" as much as they usually would.
