| Runa216 said: You know what I think is a major crux of what I find annoying about the entire Republican/Conservative parties? This idea that they want all the rights and freedoms but none of the responsibilities or expectations that come with them. They want guns but don't want gun control because their sense of utter and unfettered freedom means more to them than the benefits that could come from being stricter with the laws. they want freedom of religion but ONLY their religion. they want freedom of speech but don't care how much that speech can actively harm people. they want to be free from taxes and having to pitch in to the greater good but tend to be super bitchy when the gubmint doesn't keep their roads clean or their schools funded. |
They also want freedom of speech only for THEIR speech, as evidenced by Ron DeSantis's sweeping retaliations against Disney.
That leads to another point. They only want to limit the power of the federal government. They are okay with the individual states wielding terrifying amounts of power over an individual's freedoms (again, in the ways they approve of - see their reactions to the attempts of blue states to mitigate the pandemic). When the Constitution was written, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government, not the states, on the grounds that the states had their own constitutions. That meant the states were perfectly free to restrict speech and property rights as the state government saw fit, and against whoever the state government saw fit, regardless of the rationale. States could practically run themselves as tinpot dictatorships, and a great many of the grosser infringements of civil rights of minorities before and after the Civil War stemmed from the states, not the federal government. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment where any language in the Constitution put any restriction on state power (". . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . ."), and it wasn't until 1925 that the first case law was established that held that state laws could not violate the Bill of Rights [Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925)].
Currently Online 
