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Comment by Asbostos | Hacker News Reader

One trouble is that we don't know what's right when we're in the thick of it. Who would have guessed it was OK to be gay? I mean it's not OK to be a pedophile or zoophile, which aren't fundamentally different. The rules keep changing so you can't blame people for sticking to what they're used to.

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I am trying to appreciate your position on this: the problem is, we ought to know what's right 'in the thick of it' using the two C's - choice and consent. Like discriminate-against minorities (disclosure: I am black), gays do not have a choice to be who they are. Therefore, their position, if you will, is a biological one (as is mine). You mentioned pedophiles and zoophiles, who, could also (possibly and unfortunately) have the disposition of just being who the are without choice. Yet... the difference is consent - no one should get the right to take away the rights of innocent children, or innocent animals for that matter, much less kill, enslave, or otherwise harm them (as was the case with blacks, etc). There is no harm in my being black to anyone who is white, just as there is no harm in being Aboriginal or gay. The rules didn't change. The point is that they (human rights) need to apply equally to everyone.

Pedophile and child molester aren't the same thing. Looking at pictures of naked children is something parents and doctors do all the time but pedophiles go to prison for it. "kill, enslave or otherwise harm" is OK for animals according to current popular opinion - ask any meat eater or dog owner. Consent is not required for animals (by our current standards) because we freely allow them to have sex with each other without checking for consent.

My point is that things really aren't as black and white as they seem to people when everyone they know agrees with the same ideas.

That's the thing though: they are different, and applying some thought will bring to light the way in which they are different. But most people who are against these things apply their efforts at conflating them due to their similarities, not understanding the importance of the differences.

Just look at the way abortion arguments go. You can't just go around saying "abortion is murder" and "a fetus is a person" without completely failing to consider the ways in which you could be wrong. And that's fairly easy to do, because there are plenty of people trying to tell you otherwise.

Engaging in consensual sex with other adults is indeed fundamentally different than sexually assaulting partners that do not or cannot consent.

Who would have guessed such a thing? Well, anyone who spent any time thinking about it who actually cared about the principles of individual liberty.

I'll delegate to Jon Stewart on this one:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/18/1202810/-Jon-Stewar...

[video clip] FORMER HOMELAND SECURITY UNDERSECRETARY ASA HUTCHINSON (4/16/2013): It's important because we as a nation have to get this right. I look back at history to the time during World War II, that we interned some Japanese-Americans. At the time, it seemed like the right and proper thing to do. But in the light of history, it was an error.

JON STEWART: I'm sorry, just excuse me for a second, I just need to check something real quick. I just need to.... (takes out cell phone and dials a number)

----

GEORGE TAKEI: Hello, Jon.

JON STEWART: Hey! Hey, is this George Takei?

GEORGE TAKEI: Hi, how are you?

JON STEWART: I'm very well, sir. How are you?

GEORGE TAKEI: Just great.

(audience cheering)

JON STEWART: It's Jon Stewart. I have a quick question for you. When you were four years old, and your family were taken from your home and placed in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans — at the time, did that seem like the right and proper thing to do?

GEORGE TAKEI: No! It did not.

(audience laughter)

JON STEWART: OK, thanks a lot, George.

GEORGE TAKEI: Anytime, Jon.

JON STEWART: All right, bye-bye.

----

(audience cheering and applause)

JON STEWART: Yeah, that's what I thought! See, the thing about a moral compass is, if you take it out and check it from time to time, you don't have to wait for history to tell you you're facing the wrong direction.

Jon Stewart is glib. That's his act, but at the core it's just current received wisdom. It's the easiest position a person could possibly take.

I'd like to see him play the same scene on an issue that almost nobody feels comfortable about. Say the decision to use atomic weapons to end the Pacific war.

First he could call a Japanese orphaned child and ask if it seemed right and proper at the time to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to avoid more Allied casualties in the alternate invasion scenarios.

Then, playing the counterfactual, he could call an American mother who lost her son in the invasion of Japan, for which hundreds of thousands of casualties were projected on each side, and ask if it seemed right and proper to waste her son's life when an alternative existed that would have precluded the invasion.

Stewart's approach is a garden variety example of studying the past only in order to look down on the past's inhabitants.

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