Do Republicans support a stronger UN?

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

No, that’s the opinion part. The point under discussion is why some Republicans don’t really care for the UN. So, are these things false (I’m really asking):

…under Article 13, parents could be subject to prosecution for any attempt to prevent their children from interacting with material they deem unacceptable.

Under Article 14, children are guaranteed “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” which suggests they have a legal right to object to all religious training. Further, under Article 15, the child has a right to “freedom of association.”

…in 1995 the United Kingdom was deemed out of compliance with the convention “because it allowed parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes without consulting the child.”

In full, Article 14 reads:

Article 14

1. States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

2. States Parties shall respect the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.

3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

I should think that rather obviates any potential inroads on family autonomy that the other articles might open up.

And if it doesn’t, so what? People who have a serious, AR-15 cleaning, grounds-for-rebellion problem with homeschooling being banned – people like your brother – are a lot scarier than any do-gooder diplomats or activist judges! :dubious:

[Ms2001]

@Cardinal

Under Article 14, children are guaranteed “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” which suggests they have a legal right to object to all religious training. Further, under Article 15, the child has a right to “freedom of association.”

Does “freedom of association” refer to something other than the right to assemble which is protected by the First Amendment, or is that also something these Republicans oppose?

[sqweels]

I think the vision would be the U.S. acting unilaterally for the most part, forming temporary coalitions when they’re needed

Of course, I knew the answer all along. For all our self-righteousness, we don’t really support making the world a better place, we just react to events–ineffectually.

[John_Mace]

The UN is in a tough position-- it has lots of responsibility but almost no authority. It’s good at coordinating things like disaster response where pretty much everyone already agrees that help is needed, but it’s terrible at enforcing it’s resolutions since it’s so hard to get agreement on putting force behind them. Maybe that’s better than making it too easy, though. The only thing worse than having the UN as it is would be having no UN at all. The world is too small now for there not to be some kind of forum to deal with international issues.

[Cardinal]

@BrainGlutton

I should think that rather obviates any potential inroads on family autonomy that the other articles might open up.

And if it doesn’t, so what?

Wow, man. I mean, wow. Like WOW. A hamina hamina bbbbbbbbb. Like wow.

Family autonomy? You don’t care about family autonomy? Like, really?

I can’t wrap my brain around that.

[Cardinal]

I mean, you’re really, really tempting me to violate Godwin’s law here.

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

Family autonomy? You don’t care about family autonomy? Like, really?

Yes, I believe in it, but not as an absolute. Time was compulsory childhood education was resisted in the name of family autonomy – by families who would rather send their children to work in factories. As for home schooling, I have very little confidence it’s good for children.

[Ms2001]

@Cardinal

Family autonomy? You don’t care about family autonomy? Like, really?

I don’t find anything objectionable in the examples you mentioned. “Family autonomy” is fine right up until it starts to mean allowing parents to force religious training on their kids or prevent them from learning facts which make the parents uncomfortable.

[Cardinal]

Just to be clear, you realize you’re saying that the state by definition knows better than the parents, right? You also know the names by which this is known?

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

Just to be clear, you realize you’re saying that the state by definition knows better than the parents, right?

Not by definition, but that is perfectly true in too many cases to count. And it is certainly not true that the parents by definition know better than the state – although that, too, is true in many cases.

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

You also know the names by which this is known?

:rolleyes: You can have state protection of children from their parents’ misjudgments (or worse) without having totalitarianism.

[Cardinal]

On religion? :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

On religion?

Did I say the state could choose the children’s religion? Look, what I’m describing isn’t some hypothetical hyperstatism, it’s the accepted status quo of American law. No state of the Union lacks the lawful and constitutional authority to interfere in familial relationships in many ways, up to and including taking a child out of his/her parents’ home and placing him/her in another. There are legal limits on that power and established court tests to determine whether it is being properly exercised, but the power is there. And if your state legislature decided to ban homeschooling, or even private schooling, that would be constitutional. I mean, as an alternative to public education as distinct from a supplement. Of course it would be unconstitutional to ban Sunday schools, after-school sessions with private tutors, etc. But if your state were to decree, “All children must attend public schools and nothing else will satisfy that requirement,” that (absent contrary provisions in the state constitution) would be constitutional and lawful. That’s America I’m talking about, not some international bureaucracy. Tell your brother to think about that long and hard before he starts cleaning his weapon and watching out for black helicopters.

[Cardinal]

I reject your insult about black helicopters, a reference you just made up out of nothing, and state that you still simply seem to not value the individual rights of people. I don’t care if the state legislature makes a law about making kids go to public school, that doesn’t make it right.

“George, don’t get so worked up about that tea taxation. I mean, the legitimate parliment made the law, you’ll just have to abide by it.”

You’ll have to just take this on faith that you’re confirming every libertarian’s nightmare about liberals.

[Cardinal]

Oh, and I don’t think this is productive any more.

I quit.

Again.

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

I reject your insult about black helicopters, a reference you just made up out of nothing . . .

:dubious: So? It’s innocuous compared to your own reference to your brother “cleaning his AR-15”!

@Cardinal

. . .and state that you still simply seem to not value the individual rights of people.

:mad: I never said that, Cardinal, nor did I even imply it. I say only that “individual rights” do not trump every other consideration. Which is the mainstream, status quo position in this, arguably the most libertarian country on Earth.

@Cardinal

You’ll have to just take this on faith that you’re confirming every libertarian’s nightmare about liberals.

Please remember that the issue in this thread is not the proper limits of government authority as such, but international bodies’ (the UN, etc.) authority vs. national-government authority.

Furthermore, based on your comments in an earlier thread (angels?! demonic possession?! :dubious: ), I don’t for a moment believe you are any kind of a libertarian. Libertarians have this in common with socialists: They’re rationalists. They want to redesign society along “rational” lines, the difference that they start their reasoning process from a completely different set of preconceived axioms. From “Which Civilisation?” by Michael Lind, in Prospect, October 25, 2001:

. . . [T]he most important civilisational divide-one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September-may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). The two major Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, conquered most of the world’s territory and people, including south Asia and the Americas. Only China and Japan, among the major non-western nations, escaped Muslim or Christian rule. Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

On that map, I (proudly) place myself midway between the humanist view and the socialist version of the rationalist view. But you, Cardinal, and most American “homeschoolers,” I place in the supernaturalist political camp. Please tell me I’m wrong. Please.

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

Oh, and I don’t think this is productive any more.

I quit.

Again.

GD Dopers don’t quit that easily. You’ll learn that if you even lurk in this forum much longer.

[Cardinal]

I’m sorry, the divide too gross for my, well, my spiritual well-being, so to speak. It pains me and only brings out the worst in me to get into these un-solvable debates.

Honest-to-God, I don’t know why I even come into this forum. The fact is that I don’t, but about 2 times a year. The overwhelming sentiment is such that is squashes the idea of real disussion, and anyway, when a debate has not been settled through logical discourse, you can tell that it occurs because of a fundamental disconnect of basica assumptions/beliefs about the universe in general, which are not going to change by yelling on this message board.

And if you’re trying to indict me by that link to that other discussion, let me state that I stand by everything I said. The problem is that Christians here are so often seen as “the intolerant asshole who wants to make me convert at gunpoint.” Even if that’s not your personal view, it does basically come up here, and since I have NEVER seen an advancement in real understanding, on, oh, any issue in GD, I simply reprimand myself for coming to this forum in the first place. I hope I’ve missed something in which some reasoned debate has yielded real fruit, but I haven’t seen it.

I will also note that you have basically called everyone in the Christian camp who believes in demons “an idiot”, again. Thanks. That’s really advancing the idea of informed discussion.

Bye.

[BrainGlutton]

@Cardinal

Honest-to-God, I don’t know why I even come into this forum. The fact is that I don’t, but about 2 times a year. The overwhelming sentiment is such that is squashes the idea of real disussion . . .

Is there any forum on the Internet where you will find more “real discussion” than the Great Debates forum of the SDMB?!

[Cardinal]

It’s inherent to the fundamental disconnect.