{"id":20195,"date":"2011-05-22T05:40:53","date_gmt":"2011-05-22T11:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=20195"},"modified":"2013-01-21T14:22:15","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T20:22:15","slug":"open-letter-to-marriage-amendment-opponents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=20195","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter To Marriage Amendment Opponents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To: Opponents of Gay Marriage Amendment<\/p>\n<p>From: Mitch Berg, small-&#8220;l&#8221; libertarian<\/p>\n<p>Re: Your Sudden Conversions<\/p>\n<p>Dear Gay Marriage Supporters,<\/p>\n<p>Over the weekend, as the House debated the Marriage Amendment, I saw a lot of \u00a0you talking about &#8220;Civil Rights&#8221; and &#8220;Liberties&#8221; and &#8220;Principles&#8221;. \u00a0About how civil rights are <em>not<\/em>, no-how, not never, up for popular vote.<\/p>\n<p>Great! \u00a0Today we are all libertarians!<\/p>\n<p>So tomorrow, we&#8217;ll count on your support on&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Abolishing Campus Speech Codes<\/strong>. \u00a0Young citizens are citizens too! And there is no &#8220;civil right&#8221; not to be offended! \u00a0And just as you claim gay marriage won&#8217;t destroy breeder marriage, certainly being exposed to ideas that challenge or even offend them won&#8217;t destroy students&#8217; education. Right?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Second Amendment Rights<\/strong>. \u00a0Unlike gay marriage, our Right to Keep and Bear Arms is in the constitution, right next to speech, assembly, the press, jury trials, searches and seizures and the whole gamut. You may not understand the Second Amendment &#8211; most &#8220;progressives&#8221; don&#8217;t \u00a0&#8211; but it&#8217;s a <em>right<\/em>, not for trivial restriction &#8211; or how closely-knit it is with the Fourteenth Amendment &#8211; but \u00a0I expect to see you calling your legislator the next time she votes against, say, the &#8220;Stand Your Ground&#8221; bill. \u00a0It&#8217;s a <em>civil right<\/em>. \u00a0And a <em>human right<\/em>. \u00a0Pardon the redundancy.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Enumerated Powers<\/strong>: You can stop calling people &#8220;Tenthers&#8221; and claiming that defendin the Tenth Amendment&#8217;s enumerated powers is akin to supporting slavery.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Property and Possessions:<\/strong> You can not gabble about civil liberties without duefending the civil liberty that crosses all races, orientations, faiths, and other divides; the right to keep as much of what you earn as possible, as opposed to feeding it into the stifling maw of big government. \u00a0 You&#8217;re all gonna be tax hawks now, right?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Self-determination<\/strong>: Government mandates to buy heathcare are a civil-liberties abomination. \u00a0I&#8217;ll trust you&#8217;ll join me in attacking Obamacare.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll expect the same level of civil-liberties absolutism that you have developed on the make-or-break issue of gay marriage.<\/p>\n<p>See you at the barricades!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To: Opponents of Gay Marriage Amendment From: Mitch Berg, small-&#8220;l&#8221; libertarian Re: Your Sudden Conversions Dear Gay Marriage Supporters, Over the weekend, as the House debated the Marriage Amendment, I saw a lot of \u00a0you talking about &#8220;Civil Rights&#8221; and &#8220;Liberties&#8221; and &#8220;Principles&#8221;. \u00a0About how civil rights are not, no-how, not never, up for popular [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[249],"class_list":["post-20195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20195"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20197,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20195\/revisions\/20197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}