Has the USA changed its original priorities?

The right to follow your own dreams not those of master-planners, the securing of each others rights through the use of just power derived from the consent of the governed remains the purpose of our government.

They were throwing off the yoke of tyranny.

Here is some research you might enjoy.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/46460

They trace the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of virtue.

 

Of course there is ad much a legal right to the pursuit of happiness as there is to life and liberty, which you take for granted and enshrine those rights in many subsequent laws.
Now the US and individual liberties?
Not for women who live in states where abortion is restricted.
Not for those who demonstrate against glorifying the oppression of their ancestors. Not for black people who are murdered by white policemen. Not for voters who are accused of illegal voting as an assumption with no proof. Not for millions who voted in good faith only to see an attempt to overturn that vote. Not for those who decide they were born the wrong gender or those who have long term health problems they can't pay for.

BTW French restrictions on public dress is in respect of the 1901 laws on secularity which were passed after some cruel behaviour towards Jews and the Dreyfuss affair. They apply to everyone, define much of French cultural and social life and are central to them in the same way as liberty, equality and fraternity are. These laws make clear that EVERY PERSON in France is equal, that faith cannot distinguish them or confer special treatment, that laws are not flexible according to faith or ethnicity and that outside the home, and in law and rights and responsibilities, everyone i indistinguishable from everyone else.
All religious festivals are celebrated privately and things like Easter eggs and Xmas are purely a non religious thing.
Secularity recognises the equality of every person and while it cannot ever stop bigotry, goes some way to quashing difference before it gets violent. And no it doesn't wash faith out. You can do what you want at home. Just leave it at the front door.
Other countries have scripts and principles they respect as much as Americans do. You are not unique.

 

Zorro thank you for that explanation of what the pursuit of happiness is.
I was interested in the idea of the rationality in moral philosophy and the idea that this is somehow immutable, a stable floor upon which we can build a "happiness".
Yet IMO there is no rationality in moral philosophy other than the most fundamental one of what keeps us alive and productive in the best possible way. That is the only rationale I can see in identifying what is moral.
So if you accept that morality changes over time (slavery or gender equality being two obvious examples) then morality becomes an unstable basis for defining morality and therefore the epicurean idea of happiness.

 

In its essence, the abortion debate is a debate over whether or not an unborn is a human being or not. If we all agreed that it was not a human being, there would be no debate. But some people think it is a human being, or that at some point it develops into a human being. They believe that if its a human being, it deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness just as much as the mother does. I do not wish to deflect to that debate. That is not the topic of your thread. I'm just saying that both sides of that argument believe that they are arguing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In America, one may demonstrate peacefully for anything you want.

Not for anybody who is murdered by police or by anybody else. The idea that police are wantonly murdering black people in this country is simply false. When police do kill a person, the case is thoroughly investigated, and if the killing is unjustifiable, charges are brought against the officer. And by the way, police kill more white people than black people in this country.

I don't know what you mean. All legitimate votes are counted. A small number of votes are excluded for legitimate reasons.

The January 6th riot was unique, and the attempt to overturn the vote had no chance of succeeding.

The fundamental rights of transgender people are protected in this country. Yes, there are debates over gender specific settings like changing and showering facilities and in sports. But these debates are grounded in certain facts, and the debate is over those facts. For example, if a female athlete loses a sports championship to a biological male, what about her "pursuit of happiness"? This is a debate about fairness, not about the fundamental rights of transgender people.

This is an area where we could stand some improvement.

The man who owns the convenience store near my house is a Sikh who always wears a turban on his head. He has the liberty to do that, and it has no effect on my liberty. In America, if someone wants to wear traditional clothing specific to their culture, they may. If you want to wear a necklace or pin with a Christian crucifix on it, you may. If you want to wear a Jewish skullcap, you may. We don't want an oppressive government dictating how we may dress or accessorize. In America, if that bothers anyone, they are the one with the problem, not the wearer. How someone dresses has no effect on anyone else's liberty or pursuit of happiness.

In America, if you want to have a public observation of Christmas or Easter or whatever, you may. If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. If a religious group holds an Easter egg hunt for kids in a public park, it poses no threat to the life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness of anyone else.

Our government is a secular government. Today, the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment prohibits all levels of government from either advancing or inhibiting religion. The establishment clause separates church from state, but not religion from politics or public life. Individual citizens are free to bring their religious convictions into the public arena, or not.

I don't agree. I have already given you multiple examples of how other modern democratic countries can and do exercise their power to control the liberty of their people. I gave examples from UK, France, Germany, and Australia. The U.S. is the least restrictive and most liberal when it comes to individual rights, and the U.S. guarantees them in its founding documents.

All of these freedoms of speech and expression, press, religion, assembly, and others may contribute to a kind of messiness that Europeans are uncomfortable with. But we like it this way, and we're going to preserve those freedoms, and we won't give them up without a fight.

 

And I have given you particular examples of your non secular state interfering with personal liberties.
Frances secularity is successful in establishing open visible equality while allowing private fairh based lives. ISTM you don't understand it. And I don't have an interest in explaining it any more than I have done.
Having lived in Europe in more than one country, I can assure you that you do not stand out as guardians of personal liberty. I am afraid your selective details are designed to give an impression, but that is all it is.
Many of your fundamental liberties originated in Europe's enlightenment and are rooted in European history which gave rise to it. Your original documents were largely mimics of those from the period of revolutions in Europe in the late 18th century. Yours is not unique. It is one of many which established a new era in the Western democratic tradition in which many countries partake. None are better, more complete, offer more liberties than any other. Laws are made by necessity and the passing of time affects us all the same since we share so much history and culture.
No nation is exceptional because each one thinks it is.
There really should be more teaching of international matters in schools instead of pumping dangerous patriotism into subject matter.

 

What makes you so sure of that? Which countries did you visit? For what lenght of time?

 

Living in an organized society necessarily entails giving up a part of your freedoms. Otherwise you want to live in a jungle.

The important thing is that those restrictions to your freedoms are democratically decided.

And, of course, you are free to vote against these restrictions.

 

Not sure. We're learning more and more every day that it was a close call!

 

Who is responsible for the fracturing of national identity:

 

One does not have to visit a country to know how it operates.

 

The state should remove individual liberty only to preserve civility and domestic tranquility, and then only if it is self-evident and not something decided by some politician. Anything beyond that is a step toward tyranny -- the natural direction of people and politicians.

 

It is the left abetted heavily by Democrats who are hell bent to purge our identity, history, and institutions.

 

"Group rights" have supplanted individual rights, but otherwise we are about the same I suppose. Both sides are guilty of this to some degree or the other.

 

A logical thought. However "group rights" by any other name is Marxist, and if group rights are what is then individual rights do not exist. You are correct that this is the direction we're headed in.

 

Or Fascism. It and Marxism are two sides of the same coin by my measure. We really need a injection of libertarianism into the judiciary. Left libertarians, right libertarians and pragmatic libertarians to help restore the primacy of individual rights.

 

It seems like those profiting from the sale of antidepressants are happy!

 

Sorry but freedom of speech and all other freedoms laid down by the UN and national constitutions are Marxist?
I have always seen in courts and governments that such rights and freedoms belong to every individual personally and equally and thus by definition and inevitably , are group rights.
Pronouncing them as Marxist is to deny their place in the Liberal western tradition, particularly since they have existed for far longer than Marxism has been around as a convenient term of reference.

 

Yes of course. All evil in the world is the fault of the left.
Give it a rest. Your institutions, identity and history were seriously attacked on January 6th attack on the capitol in a right wing effort to overturn them all.

 

Do you always believe everything you read and hear?

 

You're getting hung up in the semantics. I simply said that rights given to a group (or class if you will) are Marxist and not the same as individual rights.

 

Note the phrase pursuit of happiness does not come with the guarantee that you will ever catch it. Happiness in this world is an ephemeral state that is most close attained by learning to be content with what one has and by cheerfuling giving aid to others as best your own circumstance permit.

 

I suggest they are equally fascist and right wing. I only need to point to any dictatorship which delineates favoured groups...which is all of them.
Literally right now the conservative governing party in the UK is in serious trouble because after clearly telling the country not to meet, have parties, go to funerals or visit family, were enjoying a series of parties in No. 10 . This govt has always assumed they were above the hoi paloi and that laws were for someone else.
And I can assure you, they are certainly not Marxist.
Your problem is that you see the word "group" and indoctrination instantly says "marxist".
That is highly inaccurate.

 

However that is your personal definition...

 

Please note I didn't really define happiness save as an ephemeral state. That's largely because some people are made happy by the most awful things. There are more than a few people, some if them on this board that will never truly be happy as long as everyone else isn't miserable.
Most of what I wrote was simply what I have found about how to acheive happiness but even that doesn't guarantee you will always be happy.

 

I am greatly displeased about voter suppression efforts, abortion banning efforts and education/books repression efforts. This two party system just is not working and it is not working out because the desire to win elections has become paramount ahead of everything else under the sun. I think we ought to abolish political parties and make everybody run as an independent. Of course that would mess up funding big time so the government would have to arrange for all campaign contributions to go through an agency and that agency would need to see to its equitable distribution. Don't press me for the details because I can't think that hard