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The problem is that it shows a deep lack of understanding of the purpose of ideals and of private and public virtue and the idea compelling virtue.
An ideal is pretty much by definition something that its holder fails to lives up to. Therefore, let's dispose of all ideals. The Democratic Party can't live up to its platform? Disband the party because it's populated by a bunch of lying hypocrites. Kid brought up in a racist household still lets slip some atavistic thought? He might as well join the Klan.
Life doesn't work that way. The good thing about most ideals is that regardless of how badly we live up to them, they're defensible and constitute a goal to strive for. The alternative is to be utterly satisfied with one's self--and then instead of setting the bar high or you can just sit at the bar until your liver gives out. No diff.
This has to relate to the concepts of public and private virtue. If the reason for the HCR is to be good Xians, I'd have to say that's rather repugnant to the first amendment and much Democratic rhetoric. There's no sane reason for trying to say that the Obama HCR is related to Xianity in the least--the attempts to link the two smack of demogoguery and manipulation. Having a president or cabinet officials try to demogogue or manipulate the electorate is rather anathema to the very idea of an enlightened democracy. "Do as I say, I know better--the best dialog is when you repeat what I say, the best dissent is, 'Yes, sir!'"
However, if all virtue is required by law, and the law constitutes the sum total of required virtue, then we've reduced morality to a set of perfect laws and yielded our morality to a group of politicians and legislators. It's reduced--by governmental fiat--an individual faith, a group of individuals, to a collective, corporate faith, in which obedience is required, conformity enforced, and only the group matters. Invariably, the "group" winds up being dictated to or is abhorrent on its own. You get the perfect secular religion--whatever your creed, you serve the same Moloch. (Which is what I figure has largely happened--the same impulses to morality, to enforce morality, to harshly condemn the imperfect and be self-righteous, to be overly self-deprecating and attempt to make up for one's unworthiness are all human qualities, not Xian or Hindu or Muslim qualities, so you'd expect them to show up among the saintly secular, as well. They do show up, of course, and have the same kind of vile stench in jeans and a t-shirt or in a business suit as they do in chasuble or observed occupying the minbar.)
Note, however, a crucial difference between Prop 8 and the HCR. Prop 8 is a restriction on government, not a requirement imposed on non-state actors. The private consequences from the secular sacrament dubbed "marriage," which all the intellectual consistency that "secular sacrament" would hint at. The HCR is a requirement imposed on non-state actors to compel action. Both have government sanction and use of force to require certain behaviors as possible outcomes. The letter writer's consistency is in saying the state shouldn't force behaviors. One doesn't have necessarily have to be against government-sanctioned gay marriage or the HCR to make this argument any more than somebody for them can't make the argument. It comes down to the idea of private vs. public virtue, and to what extent either is to be imposed by state force and sanction.
In another time the writer might well have referred to "freedom of conscience." It used to be a big deal. Not so much, now. Utilitarianism seems to have triumphed, but that, I think, is the wrong conclusion. Rather, only the right-thinking consciences deserve freedom in a Truly Free Society (tm).
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