seigneur wrote:

So you are a professional politician? My condolences. Sincerely.

No, by the grace of God, but every political policy you or I ever envision, if it is meant to be actual, tacitly supposes some politician or other agent of power (yourself or otherwise)  bringing it to pass. If one is *not* to be merely idly prattling, then concrete considerations come into consideration early and often.

seigneur wrote:

When you are some faction leader or such, it's hard to avoid compromises indeed, because that's precisely the job of negotiating compromises, but if you are not, it should be somewhat possible to keep a clean voting record in matters of principle.

Yes, but this is in our own state often merely a pseudo avoidance where the party as a whole has been organized to acquiesce by means of all but a select few voting against something so as to give the appearance of innocence of innocence to the bulk of the party, while in fact amounting to a corporate compromise. People who genuinely believe in whatever principal it is in question usually have already compromised on allowing these sorts of actions when they know a longer fight is possible for the sake of the additional power they get by being in a political party.

seigneur wrote:

It doesn't end there. If you are principled, you step down and refuse to administer the policy.

The difference between loudly prattling about policy that can't come to pass and doing nothing seems to me not particularly different from loudly prattling about a policy that can't come to pass, pretending that it can in your function as a politician, and then abandoning your job when it doesn't.

seigneur wrote:

Masses never rule themselves spontaneously. There will always be active leaders of some sort or another, and to be a leader, you have to make yourself heard as such. In a democracy, the political arguments between politicians are supposed to reflect the needs of the population, so you have to take demographic trends into account, which is a sign of a pragmatic politician in any case. Statistics tend to indicate that marriage in natural law sense is extinct. What's the purpose of trying to keep an extinct concept alive? What practical utility does marriage serve for the state or for the people? If there are other concepts that do the job equally well, marriage can safely be forgotten and be supplanted by those other concepts.

That doesn't answer my question- If you think that natural law reasserts itself apart from positive law then what's all this woof and wail about public policy for? You either want something done politically or you don't.

If you do, then it makes sense to consider not merely just what should ideally be done but what should actually be pursued given the circumstances of the opposition. Perhaps I will never have enough people to defeat the opposition on the issue of abortion entirely- they are too numerous, powerful, and determined for that -and while they on their own would have absurdly open abortion maybe I can forge and keep a compromise that will allow for limits on availability and term of abortions. I can blunt them if I cannot stop them.

seigneur wrote:

=13pxCan you formulate concretely, in practical terms, what purpose would your proposed policies serve? Leave any sort of self-refuting idealism out of it, like "monogamy for gays" or such. That thing serves no practical purpose. Gays have absolutely no use for monogamy, and nobody else will gain anything if gays got monogamous

I think this is false because I think men (homosexual or not) are not meant to flit from one romantic entanglement to another indefinitely- not *just* because they are meant to have children either -because it clearly cultivates the wrong mindset and isn't conducive to stability in life (as well as having its own inherent dangers). If you honestly think that on the whole open gay relationships are *just as good* as closed monogamous ones (despite the fact that both are some degree suspect), then I'm not sure what to say. A thief who steals one car seems to me manifestly a better man than the one who steals 20, and if I can't stop thievery from being permitted as a part of public policy maybe I can shape policy to prefer and encourage controlled thieves to excessive ones.

Others will gain by a limiting of exposure to a publicly shameful legitimized class (or by, at least, coming to regarud with shame, instead of celibration the promiscuity itself). I think this is something that also needs some cultural policing in heterosexuals, but the "acceptance" of it as a representative cultural expression is rather pronounced in the homosexual community. If I can't outright ban licentiousness, at least I can encourage limiting, shaming, and moving past it.

Last edited by iwpoe (8/21/2015 12:51 pm)

These two old posts from Alex Pruss' blog seem appropriate to the discussion here:
 
Marriage and natural kinds
Marriage as a natural kind