http://www.washingto...dodge_t049203.php

It’s possible the “religious liberty” campaign is about to hit a big speed bump tomorrow if AZ Gov. Jan Brewer listens to business leaders and even some of the Republican legislators who voted for a religious exemption bill and vetoes it. But it’s beginning to dawn on a lot of people that the very idea of letting religious “conscience” carve out big and self-defined exemptions from obedience to the law sets quite the dangerous precedence.

The Prospect’s Paul Waldman sums it up nicely today:

[...]

If we grant religious people the kind of elevated citizenship conservatives are now demanding, where the special consideration given to religious practice is extended to anything a religious person does, the results could be truly staggering. Why stop at commerce? If things like employment law and anti-discrimination laws don’t apply to religious people, what about zoning laws, or laws on domestic abuse, or laws in any other realm?


Yup.

MM might like to review his old comrades' writings and arguments. ;-)

http://www.anu.edu.a...dhomsexuality.htm

[...]

I want to take up the debate on the side of Marxism. On the one hand to argue that the self-labelled communist states and the Western Communist Parties aligned to them, rather than representing Marxism are examples of the defeat of communism, defeat of the 1917 worker’s revolution in Russia; and on the other I want to describe the real Marxist tradition, a tradition that offers both an analysis of oppression and the way to win liberation. [5]

The focus of this paper – and the argument carried within it – will be on the works and practice of the early German and Russian Marxists and their organisations as they are both the source of the original analysis of oppression and provide the most revolutionary examples of the fight for liberation.

Marxist analysis of oppression begins with the role of the family, a way of organising human relations that arose with class society as a means of ensuring an orderly transfer of society’s surplus wealth within the ruling class (and out of the reach of the labouring classes) and transmitting much of society’s behavioural norms, particularly amongst the classes with no wealth to transfer. The oppression of women – and hence the basis for the oppression of homosexuals – also coincided with the origin of class society.[6]

[...]


Cheers,
Scott.