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Edited on Thu Dec-23-10 06:04 PM by tomg
serious issue for me. I am ecstatic about DADT. The START Treaty is a gem. While I am really angry about the Dream Act going under, that is, finally, Republican obstructionism coupled with some ( 5 I think) Quisling Dems. And I heard an interesting analysis that says it will be up again in about a year and will pass ( and while justice and equality deferred is always wrong, if approval soon is the case - and I think it will happen in a year of so - it is a soon-to-be-realized good.)
The deeper issue for me is that I was always under the assumption that when the The Declaration of Independence said that
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"
it meant that this essential principal applied to all human beings, not simply citizens of the United States. That, I think, has always been our greatest strength. We asserted as a fact of our existence what most saw as an ideal. For the most part - and obviously in spite of our actions in many specific instances - we were moving in a direction that asserted these as universal and not simply local principals. This order on indefinite detentions, though, is a moral and legal retreat of an unprecedented nature. We have screwed up in the past but we never tried to institutionalize that immorality.
If this ruling holds, we have asserted that while Americans - through the constitution - have certain inalienable rights, not all human beings simply by dint of their being human have those rights. The implication for me, then, is that a right is not inalienable. It is simply a legal construct granted by a particular government.
Even more, it feels as though in this case we are now getting one set of human rights in exchange for another set of human rights. As soon as we on the left start to criticize this, we are - again - going to be told to "be quiet. Look at what you just got." Human rights are not negotiable issues. For me, this ruling is serious stuff, and I need to learn a lot more about it.
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