Porn Viewing: Do you know what you're talking about?

[RainDog]

48. Yes. Education and information

helps people to make informed decisions.

The problem is always when people use educational opportunities for their own agendas - like the creepy abstinence-only people who lie to students about sex and engage in shaming as a propaganda tool. Or the many lies told as part of the drug war to pass legislation that creates the opposite effect of its supposed intent.

Do you ever have to deal with people with those sorts of agendas? I would think that would be difficult to do. No doubt one reason I come down on a more "free speech" side of this issue has to do with my distrust of and dislike of religious right thought and action. I don't want to be associated with things associated with them - they've been on the wrong side of every social issue I can think of, so I'm immediately more suspect of any position if they take it... that's just what my experience taught me.

Martin Luther King said something that made a big impression on me, in one of this last speeches. He said we try to deal with issues that are the result of poverty, rather than the issue of poverty itself.

We are as moralistic about poverty as we are about vice issues - but they so often go hand-in-hand because people who are shut out of access to well paying jobs will look for other ways to survive - and to make enough money to get beyond mere survival.

I didn't know until recently, however, that both liberals and conservatives have put forth the idea of a basic minimum income (and the idea was floated before this nation was even founded, too.) Milton Friedman - who also looked at marijuana prohibition when Nixon was changing the law and opposed Nixon's decision to create the escalation of the war on drugs - also thought a basic minimum income could be more cost effective and more helpful than programs targeted for one problem or another.

And now there's a international movement for a basic minimum income from the left, because it would provide some bargaining power for working people. And before that, Martin Luther King was moving toward the issue of poverty as a class issue, not just a race one. That was the way he was going to bring great change to this nation, as his leadership had done with civil rights (and, of course, he wasn't the first - Vernon John was his mentor, and Gandhi before...)

The sad thing is the knowledge that such work would generate violence toward women and men, as it has anytime people tried to improve the lives of those in poverty.