The Problem with Republicans: They don’t know what is right

I was reading a story about how conservative justice Scalia ignored the possibility that an innocent person could be convicted and sentenced to death- as so many have been- and it reminded me of the old argument against abolishing the death penalty: “The death penalty is a deterrent- if you kill somebody, we’re gonna kill you”

I was snickering at how ludicrous this sounds when you actually think about the statement, as well as the mountains of evidence showing that when the death penalty is removed from a society, the murder rate actually decreases- and it hit me: this kind of argument has been used before!

When republicans are foaming at the mouths over abortion, they say “If you legalize abortion, all these women are going to get them!”

As if women are just dying to get pregnant so they can queef out a fetus. But again, conservatives are arguing “how will we know what is right unless the government deters us!?”

When thinking of it this way, I realize MOST of their arguments against freedom and human dignity are rooted in this one idea. “If we let gays marry, how will I know whether I should marry a man or a woman?” They seem very confused about what to do unless the government has explicitly dictated it to be legal or illegal.

The most generalized and laughable use of this argument appears when attacking atheism, asking “If there is no god, who will tell us what is right and wrong?!”

Even crazier, it’s Democrats who argue that people know what is right based on their individual philosophy. Democrats have unwittingly stumbled across the atheist’s argument separating religion and morality, government and choice: it is our own human empathy, not a powerful fist shaking overseer, which allows us to know the right thing to do. We need neither religion nor the government to tell us what we already know based on human solidarity as a species. Jesus’ parable about the good samaritan- someone who helped and cared for an injured stranger without a mandate from his god or his government exemplifies this concept.

So if you are this confused about how to operate in society, if you really need all of your decisions pre-chewed by our government in order to know what is the right choice, I don’t think you should be allowed to influence public policy, much less, own a fire-arm.

This inability to think for oneself belies that republicans don’t know what a politically right stance is. The right wing of politics is about individualism and self reliance. The fact that republicans don’t know the right thing to do, shows they don’t know the right’s philosophy on how to do things.

In every sense of the meaning, republicans are not right.