Khross wrote:
Indeed, your support of the recent Health Care Reform Act, indicates such a breach of [the right of free association]....You undeniably refuse a doctor's right to choose who he or she treats on the grounds that you believe health care services are a right: consequently, you implicitly support the notion that someone can demand such services of a person who chooses to practice medicine.
I don't believe health care services are a right that one can morally demand of another, but I do believe people should choose, as a matter of charity and compassion, to help others afford such services, and I think a democratic polity can make such a choice collectively. Paying the bill (which is what the HCRA is designed to do), however, isn't the same as requiring the doctor to provide the service in the first place.
Khross wrote:
I think you grossly misunderstand the South and much of the history of the Twentieth Century. Indeed, it's a curious thing that the South is so often castigated on this issue, when it persisted for far longer and in far more sinister manners North of the Mason Dixon line.
...Government intrusion merely exacerbated the situation politically by trying to regulate an innate human desire to spend time with people like one's self....All the Civil Rights Act did was slow the social shift to a more equitable and less ethnically hindered social state.
This is just Southern apologism, Khross. Certainly, the North had a ton of racial tension and discrimination, and yes, Northerners often overlook that repugnant aspect of their own regional history, but I'm sorry, it just was not comparable to what existed in the South. Formal, legal discrimination was nowhere near the extent of Jim Crow laws, and while there was de facto social segregation, its contours were not so rigidly and violently enforced. Southern apologists often argue, as you do here, that Federal interference simply triggered a backlash, but Federal involvement only came about once the persistence of Southern blacks' own protests and the violence of Southern whites' response became impossible to ignore. Southern racism, and the Jim Crow laws that formalized it, were very much based on a white supremacist vision of society in which blacks knew their place and didn't get "uppity" by demanding equal treatment. As soon as civil rights activists tried to upset that social order, the virulence and repulsiveness of Southern racism was laid bare for all to see. In fact, I think that's a big part of why the South changed so much, so quickly. Many white Southerners themselves were shocked by the intensity of the hatred and violence underpinning their social order.
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