The examples of Bountiful and bin Laden with regards to both polyamoury and polygamy have such a different meaning from what playful urbanites do with their free time. Is it possible to comprise rules for such differently lived activity?
As with so many things, the primary laws seem to cover a lot of ground.
Murder, rape, unlawful confinement, and exploitation of children
are all crimes whensoever they occur.
The issue of prostitution is in the public mind this weekend, as the laws
were struck down for adding harm to the situation. And the counter argument is
that the situation would be still worse without the laws. But with my
philosophy background, I wonder how all the endless porn gets made,
being also sex for money, apparently legal. It’s strange that the prostitution
industry hasn’t leapt past the law by having porn studios serve as bordellos.
My guess is that the answer is, the people making the laws don’t like porn either, but have somehow been pushed away from imposing their will.
So if you made that argument they’d still be mad, would want to intimidate
about porn, make sure you know it’s bad, and ignore it as a precedent
so as to cling to their right to tell prostitutes how to conduct business.
ie unprotected in the streets.
It doesn’t seem like much will make it all work out tidily, but for what rules can do the laws against murder and assault and rape and child exploitation and
unlawful confinement might just cover the government’s role in things. Thus, polyamoury is basically people’s own business, but thus polygamy would be as well, unless marriage is some incredibly palpable transformation of the meaning of two or more people together in some sense. Since neither religion nor political power has really won my trust and faith, and I don’t “believe” in the imposed categories as being the business of institutions, I expect I’d emerge onside with many lawyers and judges: murder, assault, unlawful confinement, and the exploitation of children, are rightly illegal and that perhaps does cover the instances mentioned above, bin Laden at least. The instance of Bountiful comes out of it all more cluttered though. When one is born into a given culture, when does it become unlawful confinement? It’s not easy to imagine. That is probably why the issue has just hung and hung all these decades.
Balancing among cultures is I think more complex than people, all of whom are born into cultures, can sort out. This applies beyond all the topics above, pertains to any earthly nation’s ways, if the people of the culture I am born into do not like how things are in North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia or Bountiful, do we have some basis for going in with bombs?
I asked my mother about it. We disagreed on the matter of the Wikileaks leak today (Sunday November 28, 2010). She felt it risked many lives, and flew in the face of the fact that diplomacy has to be conducted with utmost privacy and secrecy, reminding that indeed information released can later be used other ways. But only there. On the subject of America’s frequent forays into bombing of other countries, she said it must be because they’ve never been bombed that way themselves and don’t know what it’s like. “With airplanes flying over, bombing, all you are is a target, you cannot fight, you are just a target.” Suggesting that America just doesn’t know what it is doing to them.
How it would make them, and Canada, Britain, “the allies” so unpopular.
Even though “we” don’t like how they do things there! Still we
become unpopular. Even as we feel so self-righteous about not liking it.
Philosophically war generally becomes a farce.
I think I’ll append this piece with one from the other side of the park. The case of Bibi. This stunning photograph. The people troubling over the slight to their culture and religion allegedy uttered by Bibi, whom in the most racist sense was offended, according to stories, that her neighbours felt they shouldn’t have to drink from the same bowl as she, because she is Christian. Those feeling offended by Bibi’s alleged response wish to see her hung, but it was their deeply racist behaviour toward her that would seem to be the offense. Should she be hung for not suffering it gladly? Is the feeling there that racism on the part of the majority is acceptable, and objection to it punishable by hanging? Governments always seem to be lumbering giants tailing behind the seventy directions at once populace, operating in illogical symbolic behaviour to attempt to communicate or appease or see things along. Thats why I continuously tend to feel that individual rights, respect for rights, including minority or disempowered, civil rights, are the one safety against mass dementia.
Everyone’s been to a party where just about everyone was in agreement on some awful untruth, and were all comfortably in their untrue position, all in the wrong, and wondered what to do about it. If they are powerful you are wary of saying it, if they are not, you are less wary. But that is no basis for deciding these issues. Only the measure of rights presides with a meaningful conclusion.
Oversion 
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