Who needs a unifying theme anyway?
Gillard backs controversial web filter
As a person who backs the decriminalisation of all drugs (yes, even those ones), and also supports harm minimisation while those drugs are illegal, this is of huge concern. I have little doubt that the filter would block sites such as erowid, which I suspect has saved many lives through dissemination of information about how to take drugs in a safer manner.
Beyond that, given Australia’s fraught rules about non-violent erotica, the filter will block images of acts that it is legal to do, but not see (such as consensual BDSM and other things that might lift your luggage).
Frankly, I don’t think we should have a filter at all. I think that a focus on stopping people from seeing child sex abuse images is missing the bigger point –– it is already illegal to abuse children. People who do so should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
How about we not create a multi-million-dollar internet filter, how about we stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year protecting carpets from being giggled on and fluffy blankets from being petted when people take drugs, and how about we spend that money enforcing the legislation that already exists.
During debates about equal rights for gays (or GLBT people or whatever acronym doesn’t offend people today), people who support equal rights employ a wide variety of arguments. They are generally common-sense arguments that are so self-evident that they would not be out of place in a philosophy of rights 101 class.
That’s not to say they’re wrong, just to say they’re basic, fundamental, and easy to comprehend. This is a good thing.
However, there’s one that supporters must stop using right now if they wish not to play into the hands of their opponents. They must stop defending homosexuality per se, and especially they must stop saying versions of “it’s natural”, “I was born this way”, and “homosexuality is not a choice”.
This is not because these things are not true. Frankly, I’m ambivalent about whether they are true or not. I don’t care that you’re gay, and I care less why you’re gay. It’s not germane to the discussion of rights, and it is frankly damaging.
Because when you employ this line of thinking, it invites comparison with other human behaviours that people are arguably born into, but that society has no compunction in regulating and banning. To put this in your opponents hands is to pitch them a wonderful slowball that they will smack out of the park by saying “nobody chooses to be a pedophile either.”
The argument in favour of gay marriage argument is a simple one. In society, we no longer grant gender-specific rights. Marriage as it currently stands privileges one class (opposite-sex couples) against another (same-sex). There is no moral or defensible philosophical basis for this.
If society is to offer certain right to couples over those held by individuals (a proposition so appalling that it should offend you much more than that gays cannot get married) then it should not offer them on the basis of gender.
