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October 24 - December 19, 2016
if all values are culturally and ethnically relative, then racism cannot be morally judged as objectively and universally evil. This is absurd.
E=mc2 is not Jewish simply because it was discovered by Albert Einstein, a Jew.
No one culture owns its accomplishments; they belong to everyone. When the knowledge is out there, we can all access it.
If a primitive thinks he can jump off a thousand-foot precipice and fly because the totem told him he can, he will die.
these trends imply that all cultures have contributed to human progress and knowledge equally.
Thus we can condemn both Western imperialism and headhunting in Africa.
And objective truth, whether moral or epistemological, also permits us to break free from our cultural prejudices.
Ideas are not the power by which to change the world, but rather, the world’s ideas are changed by power.
Evidently, on some college campuses it is permissible to behave like a tramp but impermissible to be called one.
Absurdo! A donde hemos llegado.
We have moral responsibilities to other people in our community because they are people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or lot in life.
The barbarians are inside the gates.
His original position refers to an imaginary place and time where there is no government;
In this decision the Court redefined the principle of “treating people equally” to include “treating people’s behavior equally.
¡No es lo mismo la vaselina que la gelatina!
It is one thing to embrace “equality of all people”; it is quite another to translate that into “equality of all lifestyles. ”
any legislation that presupposes a notion of what is morally good cannot be rational.
the belief that no sexual practice is more or less good than any other as long as all the participants exercise their personal autonomy.
To assert that the state ought to prefer a certain lifestyle, such as heterosexual marriage and the raising of children, because it is inherently good and part of the natural order of things would be, according to Justice Kennedy, “transcendent” and therefore “religious.
would not be surprising to see the debate over polygamy being reopened or debates arising over the constitutionality of incest laws and the age of sexual consent.
views of the human mind that exclude the existence of an independent soul entail determinism.
It’s like giving a deaf person a “right to hear. ”
We need to make clear that social tolerance is not the same as social approval.
a person’s choices should be honored regardless of what others may think—and thus absolute autonomy is true.
marital arrangements that include two brothers, two sisters, a mother and a son, a father and a son, a mother and a daughter, or a grandfather and a grandson, would be consistent with the philosophical assumptions undergirding the same-sex marriage defense.
the state and its institutions (including public schools) could not say that a heterosexual monogamous couple raising three young children in a traditional Christian, Jewish, or Muslim home is a better arrangement for the moral ecology of the community than the marital union of a father and four of his adult children who make their living producing pornographic films of their sexual encounters.
(1) the natural purpose of sexuality
the intrinsic value of traditional marriage.
the inescapable fact that only two people, not three, only a man and a woman, can procreate a child.
a person who is comatose, insane, sightless, or sexually desirous of his neighbor’s young child lacks something either physically, psychologically, or morally.
even people who are not covered with college degrees have been able to grasp the natural correspondences that establish the coherence in the design of marriage:
sex alone is not really sex.
it would not suddenly become ‘sex’ if two people simply replicated, in tandem, the masturbation implicit in the joke.
human nature is a necessary condition for the array of rights, obligations, and virtues many of us take for granted.
when gay-rights activists attack their opponents as being backward or ignorant, they thereby imply that the natural purpose of the human mind is to acquire knowledge and wisdom.
if the philosophical view of a natural purpose of the body is inadequate to convince proponents of same-sex marriage that their position is incorrect, they must abandon the natural teleology, or purpose, of the mind.
