Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.
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Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing that if they are really trying to quote Jefferson and the US Declaration of Independence, then they probably don’t understand what natural law means.
Hint: it doesn’t mean, “me and my friends think gay sex is icky.”
Um. Wait.
“Natural laws” are those things science discovers. For example, the speed-of-light limit is a natural law.
Things that violate natural laws are generally considered supernatural. (That’s where the word “supernatural” comes from, of course.)
Many people don’t discriminate gays because they know some, and know those folks are nice good people.
Therefore…
Did my little patriarchy just prove that friendship is magic?
Natural law in legal theory is the idea that there is an objectively right/perfect legal system which law-makers should work towards, and furthermore that laws derive legitimacy from complying with natural law. It tends to be popular with the politically reactionary because it can be interpreted as saying that laws which are counter to morality aren’t ‘real’ laws and so shouldn’t be obeyed.
The guy in the video is trying to argue that something which is against morality should necessarily be against the law. This is a really old natural law argument (dating back to Thomas Aquinas at least) which has fallen out of use in most circles because no natural law theorist can explain convincingly why, when there’s no moral consensus on a behaviour, the people wanting to prohibit it should get preferential treatment (natural law arguments were made against granting universal suffrage and in favour of maintaining the laws banning blasphemy, sedition and sodomy).
tl;dr These people need to stop re-using arguments from the 13th century
@ wrathfuljade:
Huh. Okay. At least their language is correct, even if their legal theory is old and decrepit.