Ironically, though, his opinion was supported by the majority in that California election: 7 million to 6.4 million in favor of Prop 8.
I guess if they consider any other candidates for CEO from California, they'll have to ask them how they voted.
I guess if they consider any other candidates for CEO from California, they'll have to ask them how they voted.
Either way, I'm confident that the same measure today would have a snowball's chance in hell of passage.
That doesn't mean Romney should have won, though. It's the people who turn out to vote who get to decide. If you don't care enough to vote, tough beans!
> It's the people who turn out to vote who get to decide. If you don't care enough to vote, tough beans!
Democracies with more complete voter participation don't seem generally worse off for it.
Saying that a vote would have gone differently if more people on the losing side voted is obvious. It's also not constructive, except in the context of wishing more people would participate in the political process in the future. Amusingly (or perhaps not), the fervor against Brendan Eich is based in large part around his participation in that process.
I'm all for the option to not vote, but I want it to be a choice. I think the current setup provides the wrong incentives: it encourages politicians to care about how they can rouse up enough to come to the polls or demoralize enough to keep away, in addition to or at the expense of reaching out to all constituents. We can change this either through cultural or legal means, but the legal way is faster and not demonstrably harmful.
Greater participation is far from a panacea, of course. It may even introduce its own particular ills (e.g. takes longer to change the status quo). But I hardly think it would make no difference at all. That's why I pointed to other democracies with better voting records, to show that overall democracy isn't harmed by more voting.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout#International_di...
Why do you think human rights should be put up for a vote? Are you against mixed race marriage because it was so unpopular at the time the "activist court" struck it down?
Like a diet that sometimes prevents people from eating what they crave, the system is nothing more than a mechanism of self-control for the majority.
Since we don't live in that ideal world, our only option is to designate some body to decide what are rights and what are not. Whether that body is a king or a judge or a council of judges or a legislative body or the full populace (or some combination of the above) is an important and worthwhile discussion, but in the end we do need to designate some entity to decide what the rights are.
We've added a few hops, and hopefully increased the average intelligence of the people who get to decide on rights, but they still end up there based on the population's vote.
The campaign for gay marriage, branded as marriage equality, actually leaves many people behind.
Brothers can't marry sisters, mothers can't marry sons (nice way to avoid inheritance tax!), men and women can't join in a polygamous marriage even though there is a long history of polygamy in many cultures around the world.
It's quite ironic that the campaign for marriage equality is itself highly discriminatory.
(which I've never understood why it wasn't spelled "beastiality")
I guess the rationale for specifically bestowing marital rights on same-sex (but non-related) spouses is that there's a significant number of them.
Polygamy, too, there might be a lot of that somewhere in the world, possibly Africa, obscure corners of Utah, certainly pre-modern China when it was normal for a wealthy land owner to have several wives, etc. I suspect it won't be long before polygamy is legalized. Maybe a couple of decades at most.
Interesting. The difference between which box you check, and giving money to influence other people to check a certain box. The privacy of the former is a nearly-sacred privilege, while the latter is not allowed to be private. And I do tend to agree with campaign finance disclosure, but the double-standard is interesting. To be consistent, will we have to make all voting records public?
Would there be outrage if there were political questionnaires for employment/promotion like this? If proof of lying was found, would there be more outrage over the lie; or over violating privacy to find out about the lie?