Over the weekend my colleague Mako Yamakura put together a post regarding his thoughts on the new motorcycle helmet law enacted recently in Michigan. This article generated a number of good comments with some support for Mako's stance that requiring helmets for motorcycle riders is one of the good types of regulations that saves lives while others feel that the choice to wear a helmet is a personal freedom.
While I'm not really concerned about the new law I find the rhetoric of those who support it to be particularly fallacious.
When they use the term personal freedom what they really mean is the freedom to do the things they like and legislate and suppress the things they are against.
If these people truly believed in the personal freedoms of all American's they wouldn't legislate what collection of cells it is OK for a doctor to remove, they wouldn't legislate who a person is allowed to marry, they wouldn't legislate a person's ability to pay for sex, they wouldn't legislate a person's choice to end their own life, they wouldn't legislate who has to carry identification papers, they wouldn't legislate what drugs a person is allow to consume, and they wouldn't censure a legislator for expressing her first amendment right to say the word vagina.
So if you want to ride helmetless on your hog, swigging a 32 oz Slurpee, yelling out curse words, while smoking a cigarette, with a semi-automatic firearm strapped to your back on your way to a rally against polio vaccines you won't get an argument from me. But realize that your attempts to legislate my morals is just more job killing tax increasing big government overreach that infringes on my personal freedoms, which, of course, makes you a complete hypocrite.
No comments:
Post a Comment