Issue: Obvious shit (well, if you know me)

[danaeris]

Gay Marriage: Uh, yes. Please. With a cherry or three on top, and chocolate sprinkles.

Group Marriage: Please. Better yet, get the government OUT of marriage. It isn't their business; marriage should be just like a normal contract which can be platonic or not, involve children, joint property and finances, or not, and as many people of either gender or orientation as desired. This gets more complicated, but I assure you it can be done in a practical fashion if marriage as a legal institution is abolished entirely.

Abortions: Pro-choice; a woman has a right to choose. Admittedly, women who get abortions so they can fit into their bikini for their vacation are bad people. It sucks, but it can't be helped. To say much more about this I'd have to research things such as abortions late in the pregnancy and partial birth abortions.

Drugs: Legalize, standardize, tax, and use tax revenues to treat people who become addicted and run education programs on how to use safely.

Gambling: Legalize, tax, and use tax revenues to treat gambling addicts and run education programs about gambling

Prostitution: Legalize, regulate to require latex protection, regular thorough STD testing, and practice in a safe, healthy environment. Tax revenues should go to related educational efforts, as well as transition programs for sex workers who want out.

Statutory Rape: The way we're dealing with this currently is broken. I have a few ideas about how to fix it, but overall, it isn't that huge a priority in my eyes.

Consensual BDSM: Should be legal between consenting adults. Perhaps there should be laws which regulate pro-domming and dungeons open to the public, similar to those which would regulate prostitution, in order to assure health and reasonable safety. Drawing the lines on the "safety" thing would be tricky, though.

Comments

[elf]

There's no such thing as "partial birth abortion." It's a label invented by christian fundamentalists, which they didn't even bother to define. Doctors--even doctors who strongly disapprove of abortions--are up in arms about the laws (or proposed laws) against it, because they don't know what it is.

It'd be like making a law against "non-hygenic surgery." Sure, nobody wants it to happen, but exactly which surgery is that? Which procedures or conditions are they outlawing? (Is blood all over the operating table "non-hygenic?")

The anti-PBA crowd aren't willing to specify what constitutes a "partial birth abortion." (Seems it's "anything that looks something like a birth to someone with no medical knowledge.")

Also, the screwball laws against "partial birth" abortions miss the point that abortions are done that way for sensible reasons... apparently, they'd rather have abortions done by bizarrely invasive surgery. (It's okay to cuisinart the fetus on the inside & pull out the pieces one at a time, but not okay to pull out part of the fetus, kill it, and then pull it all out at once? What kind of logic is this?)

Feel free to research late-term abortion, and the medical & ethical issues thereof. But don't worry about PBA's; they're a myth invented by fearmongers. There is no medical or ethical reason to consider them any different from any other abortion at that point in the pregnancy.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Thank you for clarifying that; it is quite helpful.

[badoingdoing.livejournal.com]

On drugs: I mostly agree, but there's one question I've been thinking about (brought up by Prof. J. Dumit).

Once the drugs are legalized, what kinds of people should be selling them? Do you want the model of the current alcohol industry? The current tobacco industry? The current pharmecutical industry?

Is there a different option?

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Of course there's a different option! Coming up with a new model.

Some drugs, such as pot, could reasonably be sold in a fashion similar to alcohol and tobacco. The same might be true of mushrooms.

Other harder drugs which have more potential for misuse and abuse, I think should only be available to people who pass a drug education course/seminar/workshop on the drug in question. Kind of like a first aid certification/driver's test. Heck, some might turn out to be only available for use in-house. That is, I can imagine MDMA only being available for use in certified environments or under the supervision of certified individuals, or somesuch.

In general, I prefer to make sure that adults are educated as to the risks they are taking, and then let them make their own choices.

There are also some drugs which politicians should probably not be using (and should be required to submit to random drug tests while in office to ensure this). For instance, I understand that Cocaine will emphasize any person's tendency to be a megalomaniac -- a dangerous thing in someone who actually has power. Alternatively, politicians record of drug use could be available for public perusal so that voters can judge for themselves whether they think the politician is fit for office, although this could lead to discrimination against drug users by right wing folk.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

The idea of someone becoming a certified MDMA/LSD/etc. hand-distributor is facinating to me. I had an experience recently where I was given a pharmaceutical agent that must be taken in the presence of the person perscribing it for you; I assume this would be something similar, only within environments different than a doctor's office.

[biailisha.livejournal.com]

Agrees on all counts

[ghudson.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest reexamining "get the government out of marriage."

A contract can't be be binding on third parties. If your hospital or your employer or your insurance company aren't happy about gay marriage or group marriage, a contract between you and your N spouses won't force them to give you visitation rights or family insurance coverage. (At best, it would prevent any of you from using that hospital or that employer, but as long as gay people and poly people remain marginalized, that won't provide you with any leverage.)

A contract can't affect tax rates. Perhaps it's best if married people pay the same taxes as unmarried people, but perhaps not. Should a marriage with one wage-earner making $100K pay higher taxes than a marriage with two wage-earners making $50K each?

You've advocated for significant government involvement in drugs, gambling, and prostitution; why the sudden libertarian leanings when it comes to marriage?

[auros]

This is precisely why I would prefer leaving marriages to the churches, but keeping a gov't registry of civil unions. All current marriages would be converted to a basic "Civil Union EZ", for which new registrants would have a form very similar to the current marriage license. People wanting a more complex arrangement (say, widowed sisters living together who would get a tax benefit by filing jointly, but who want to leave custody of their respective kids to somebody else, and maybe want their executor and medical PoA to go to third and fourth people, etc) would get a stack of six to ten pages to fill out. Everything's on the record, and carries the same legal force as the current model of marriage.

[ghudson.livejournal.com]

That sounds like merely renaming the state's concept of marriage. I'm not sure what that accomplishes. Certainly, it wouldn't accomplish social acceptance; you're unlikely to find more than a few dozen people in the country who oppose gay marriage but would be happy to have straight marriages symbolically de-recognized so that homosexuals and heterosexuals can have the same rights.

Also, as a non-religious married person, I'm not really keen on "leaving marriages to the churches."

[auros]

If you want to be married, have a committment ceremony and call yourself married -- it just won't be something the state comments on.

And no, what I described is not even slightly like renaming the state's concept of marriage, since it unpacks the various rights and responsibilities and makes it possible to assign them arbitrarily. Sorta like how I can make arbitrarily complicated lists of beneficiaries for my 401k in the event of my death (currently I have my parents as equal share primary beneficiaries, and my brothers as secondaries if my parents died at the same time as me). It does leave the option of doing a simple form that registers you for all of those things in the manner people are accustomed to using -- the Civil Union EZ, which would, for legal purposes, copy the current nature of marriage. And that seems reasonable to me, since the vast majority of people would probably still want that.

[ghudson.livejournal.com]

Unpacking marital rights like that seems subject to rampant abuse. If you could get a tax break for having widely disparate incomes with no impact on child custody and medical decisions, then people would pair up on the web and get tax-break-unionized without having any kind of personal relationship at all.

When I said your plan "wouldn't accomplish social acceptance," I wasn't referring to social acceptance of gay marriage, but social acceptance of your plan. (That is, what you advocate for is much less likely to be implemented than simply gay marriage, so if you are arguing from political pragmatism, I don't think that argument is very strong.)

[auros]

So make application for joint taxation (basically filing as a corporate entity) require at least one qualification -- cohabiting, shared custody of a child, etc.

This fairly clearly could be done. And it would make the provision of marital rights fair, which is rather more important to me than what currently is socially acceptable. Over the long run, attitudes like that change. What's just (and compliant with the Constitution)... not so much.

[auros]

Oh, and I'm not looking for "social acceptance". I don't expect to to find anyone who opposes gay marriage, and yet is perfectly comfortable with gay people being called married. So lets get the state out of that business. If you don't like gay people being married, your church doesn't have to consider their marriages valid. But legal rights have to be given out even-handedly.