HappySqurriel said:
The problem isn't that there is a lot of grey area between these two ideologies, the problem is that all governments fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and you have groups that are pulling/pushing the government in opposite directions. For the most part a Capatalist Democracy is individuals giving up certain rights and freedoms to the collective, with checks and balances in place to prevent the collective from taking further rights and freedoms away from the individual, in order to receive the safty and protection that only the collective can provide.
At the moment the problem in the United States (and several other western countries) is that politicians at all ends of the political spectrum believe heavily in increasing the involvement of government in people's lives. Consider how politicians want to right laws to make gay marriage legal/illegal and none of them suggest that the government should have no involvement in people's lives.
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I definitely agree with your first paragraph.
Your second paragraph is a bad example. You are trying to suggest that the government allowing people to do something when it has no material impact on someone else is interfering with their lives? If anything, telling gay people they cannot marry is interfering with the gay person's life more so than the person who is offended by it.
And if you are claiming that allowing gay people to marry harms other people's lives, doesn't forcing private businesses to allow black people and white people to use the same facilities interfere in racists' lives? Doesn't allowing women in the military interfere in sexist people's lives?
You are missing a fundamental issue. One person exercising their rights will ALWAYS infringe on someone else's life. My freedom of speech right may often infringe on someone else's life. The question you should be asking is which of those rights is worth protecting, the right that allows me to do what I want if it doesn't materially impact someone else's life or the right of someone else to tell me how to live my life when my decision does not materially impact their life.
People who are offended by gay marriage are being harmed in the same way that someone who is offended by interracial marriages is harmed. Does that mean we shouldn't allow interracial marriages? What happened to Equal Protection under the law? Isn't that in the Fourteenth Amendment?
Writing a law that allows gay people to marry takes away government involvement in people's lives. It doesn't increase it.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
