Posted by Psilocybin at 2:47am Jan 26 '14>>Changing the laws to give people more freedom (or even to restrict it) is not discriminatory! (Which is not to say that it can't be wrong -- it's just not wrong for that reason.) It's exactly the opposite. Otherwise you're arguing that women's suffrage laws -- the ones that granted women the vote -- are sexist, that racial equality laws are racist, and that marriage "equality" laws are homophobic.
Which is exactly why the people who will use lowering the voting age (or removing any status crime such as women being arrested for being topless in public) as an argument against equality are flawed. I'm worried that I foresee this being used as a case against ever lowering the age for anything again, even though the party making this argument may not have a leg to stand on, because some people will grasp at any straw they can use to try to hold onto the status quo -- think of Bill O'Reilly's observation that all the anti-gay-marriage folks have been able to come up with is "thumping their Bibles". As you showed, this argument of theirs can be argued not to be the case.
>>[The caveat, of course, is that laws can indeed be discriminatory, but your example of universally expanding rights/privileges -- or even an example of universally restricting it, such as passing mandatory seatbelt or motorcycle helmet laws -- is not discriminatory.]
Hmmmmm . . . discrimination covers gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, ethnicity, country of birth, ancestry and relatives, surname, nativity, age, marital status, veteran status, religion and disability. What you seem to be arguing is that "time" should not be added to that list.
>>This argument can only logically be applied one way: Support of the status quo. Because you are explicitly arguing that any change to the status quo (at least where rights and privileges are concerned) is inherently discriminatory on the sole basis that it grants rights/privileges to a group that previously didn't have them, and is therefore discrimination against the previous group!
Yep! For instance, if everyone in a nation (let's call it Bezmirkia) out of bitterness that they grew up with a king in a monarchy, tried to stop the younger generations from growing up in a freer country with no king because they wanted younger Bezmirkians to suffer what they suffered ("Now it's your turn!"), Bezmirkia would still have a monarch to this day -- this including no voting by The People. If cranky people like this had always gotten their way, most people on Earth would still live in an empire with no property ownership for anyone under 21, arranged marriages with women the property of their husbands, no marriages for same-sex couples anywhere, slave labor from descendants of certain slave lineages -- the status quo (of course, in many places on Earth today we could call that the status quo ante, but for them it would be the "status quo aeternam"!)
>>The other issue with this argument is that differing laws in different countries is also not discriminatory. That a Brazilian has more or less freedom than a Brit or an American is irrelevant, because they are living in different nations and therefore subject to different laws.
Let me see if I understand what you're saying here. You're saying that each set of laws (i.e. the constitution and law-books of each country) has one law about voting age, driving restrictions, marijuana use, province crossing, etc. that applies to everyone living in that country and people can be of different status by moving among the countries? I can see how it isn't discriminatory if people can choose what country to move to, but I never bought the Aristotelian argument that people by choosing to live in a state have made a contract to obey its laws, because this first hit me when I was a teen-ager and I was living in a country I didn't choose and would have been arrested for running away if I tried to escape.
Re: I meant to reply to this a while ago - Psilocybin