discrimination of atheists

[kandrathe]

You make this seem as a very clear thing but it isn't.

It is clear to me. Where is the harm?

Wearing a Burqa often is not done because of liberty but it is forced upon someone. So by giving people the liberty to dress according to what they think their religion tells them to, you take away a liberty of for example a woman who doesn't want this at all.

The harm is that the woman is forced by others to wear the burqa, and so those who are doing the forcing are in the wrong. That is the wrong we should right.

The same goes for a woman who together with 6 others is married to one man.

The harm is that the woman or women are not legally old enough, or do not willingly enter into the "contract", and cannot willing exit the "contract". It is the State who adjudicates the validity of contracts. If people, under-aged women in forced marriages in this case, are held against their will this is the harm we should right.

But apart from what you and I think, it is important what a government thinks. Being completely objective they should also allow gays to get married, under aged people to get married etc.

Theoretically, we are the government, right? The State should have laws to protect the person and property of the vulnerable (those deemed mentally incapable including youth, the mentally ill, and those too senile).

I guess you see here that it is not very easy to make a 'one rule' that fits all here.

Not one rule, sure. But, if we followed the principles of "harms", and focused the power of the State on the appropriate adjudication of legal contracts, the protection of property, and people from harms, then we'd stop needlessly wasting time and money meddling in peoples personal lives.

In France it has been decided that you are not allowed to wear a burqa in public because it is considered to go against rights of women. In this case this law also doesn't really go against human rights.....I mean a Burqa is not necesarry for living a full life.

Neither is drinking wine, or going to the discotheque. Women have the right to wear whatever they like, and France is wrong to meddle in determining a dress code for it's citizens. It is as wrong to deny them their right to wear it, as it is to force it upon them.

The Phelps family is allowed to go to funerals of killed soldiers and it is known that this is incredibly hurtful to the relatives and friends of these killed men but still it allowed. On the other hand it is no allowed to use swear words in video clips.

As much as I hate... really hate what the Phelps family does, and as much as I believe it to be wrong headed, and results in emotional blow back, if one believes in the rights of people to voice their free speech and conscience, then we must suffer the idiots in the town square along with the savants. Much like the obviously confrontational marches by white supremacist, hate filled bigots, if we believe in freedom, then we must allow them to parade their wrong- headedness for us to then justly oppose in the arena of ideas. No one wants that fight to be rigged, except perhaps the tyrannical State.