Thursday Night Open Mic for November 4, 2010

Whew… It is good to be home and relaxing for a minute or two. I arrived home late Wednesday night rather than Tuesday night from my travels, so I apologize that I wasn’t able to do the open mic last night. I took what appears to be the last “business trip” with my current job (which is being addressed in USWeapon Topic #1 below!).  I have intentionally continued to avoid discussing the Tuesday night election results here on SUFA. I am not doing so simply to avoid the topic. I will be writing my articles next week all around the changes in Congress and what I think of the results we saw. I am not looking at the results in quite the same way as some may expect, so I look forward to discussing them next week! For this week we have a few interesting topics to discuss. We have the Oklahoma Sharia Law ballot proposition already being challenged, the United Nations deciding that China and Iran should get to lecture the US on human rights, and the possibility that the Supreme Court could take away the ability for consumers to file class action lawsuits. Of course feel free to add whatever topics you would like to discuss!

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Legislating Morality vs. Legislating Freedom RE-DONE

So I am sure that many of you are sitting here saying, “didn’t we just talk about this subject?” Well, the answer would be yes and no. I felt as though we began to discuss this subject but that it quickly devolved away from the subject and into other realms. I was not the only one that noticed this, as several of you left comments lamenting the lack of discussion on the topic at hand and several others sent me emails to espouse the same sentiment. So I decided that I would offer the article up again and see if we can’t get a more focused conversation around it. For anyone that forgot, or who wasn’t around for the original posting last week, I offered this as a mash-up with both my and Jon Smith’s thoughts on the subject. I have changed the first paragraph (the one you are reading right now) but have otherwise left the article unchanged. What I would like to do is discuss the concept of legislating morality as compared to legislating freedom, and ferret out why one works and the other is one that leads us down a path of tyranny and oppression. I will bring over some of the conversations that I felt went down the right path, and obviously others are welcome to do the same. This is not an attempt to keep anyone’s thoughts down, but more to have another chance to discuss a topic that I felt kind of got away from us.

Guest Commentary Mash-Up- Moral Law vs. Freedom Law

I thought that I would try something a little different this week with the guest commentary. I often present the guest commentary as simply that and allow it to stand on its own. This week’s topic is something that I hold a fairly strong opinion on and which I enjoy debating. So I proposed the idea to our guest commentator of my writing a short article myself beginning the discussion, and then after doing so, offer his article on the subject. Then, of course, we will be able to attack the subject in a more defined manner. He agreed to my altered format and has had a bit of a head start as he has already read what I wrote, and he wrote his piece before I wrote mine. Obviously, I also decided to post this on a different night than the regular Thursday night/Friday morning when the guest commentary is usually presented. This is a particularly relevant subject, as the idea of legislating morality has somehow managed to drill its way into the mindset of modern American politics. And this has had dangerous and disasterous consequences. Read on to get both my, and guest commentator Jon Smith’s, reasoning on why this is so.