True enough. The right to life should never be left to personal emotion to defend, whatever the emotion, and relatives are just as likely as spouses to tip you into the ovens, especially if they have had a bad kind of sentimentalist education where murder is presented as some sort of act of mercy and even nobility. And we both know that this is the state of media discourse in the Western world. Mind you, even the clearest statement of the absolute Right to Live in a constitution does not prevent, it seems, corrupt courts from overriding it at leisure, and even to thumb their noses at Congress when Congress tries to reinforce the laws by which they should be acting.
What I was saying, however, is something quite different, which the appropriately-named Caprinus ("goat-like") refused to understand. (The saddest thing about being a fanatic is how stupid it makes you.) It is simply that, where the notion of marriage as a lifelong and unbreakable bond which trumps all other bonds is NOT or NO LONGER embodied in the law, there is no reason to award the spouse rights that overcome those of any related person, and that any such rights are simply the fossils of a conception of marriage which does not exist in law.
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Date: 2005-06-22 05:56 am (UTC)What I was saying, however, is something quite different, which the appropriately-named Caprinus ("goat-like") refused to understand. (The saddest thing about being a fanatic is how stupid it makes you.) It is simply that, where the notion of marriage as a lifelong and unbreakable bond which trumps all other bonds is NOT or NO LONGER embodied in the law, there is no reason to award the spouse rights that overcome those of any related person, and that any such rights are simply the fossils of a conception of marriage which does not exist in law.