Comment by bmelton
11 years ago
It would be a non-issue if people understood that the rights of others weren't fungible. If the equal protection clause were better understood, such that other people's voting rights were as sacrosanct as their own, as would be other peoples' marriages, freedom of association, etc. Or perhaps if our legislative process weren't focused so much on attempting to pay lip service to the letter of the law while wholly attempting to violate the spirit of it.
Regardless, we should reject majority rule where it violates constitutional restraint, but in practice, people on both sides have shown themselves all to happy to prioritize their own whimsies over the rights of others.
This is not a critique of democracy, mind you, but it is a critique of the people who fail to understand the premise of constitutional restraint while attempting to enjoy their democratic privileges. If more people realized that, as a matter of schema, certain policy options were off the table, and that's a legitimate feature, not a bug, then I think we'd all be better off, but whether done through noble intent or bigotry, the suppression of another's rights is the result of having failed to understand that the necessary component to a healthy democracy is in the required inability to take things away from those you don't like.
Well, practice shows that people in direct democracies understand this. Because for them, being minority in referendum is a common thing. Most people are mostly in the majority and sometimes in the minority. It has been shown that (semi)direct democracy actually decreases the polarization in the society and increases willingness to compromise with others.
So you may have a valid complaint, but unless the society actually practices democracy it won't get better - you will just continue to live with the imaginary fear of "majority".
Being a minority in a referendum leaves you with being exactly that -- the minority in a referendum.
Having your views represented directly is only as effective as the majority respects them. Historically, we haven't been all that great there.
I'm not saying there's no good in it, but we should similarly not forget that Proposition 8 was the result of referendum.
> Being a minority in a referendum leaves you with being exactly that -- the minority in a referendum.
The point is, if there is reasonable number of referenda, you're (unless your views are extreme) unlikely to be always in the minority, and vice versa, you're unlikely to be always in the majority. So you get quickly exposed to "being on the other side of the fence". This IMHO doesn't happen in the U.S. because it is deeply divided according to party lines.
> we should similarly not forget that Proposition 8 was the result of referendum
Similar thing to Prop. 8 happened to Switzerland, you just need to give people time, because they are generally conservative (meaning "cautious", not in political/religious sense). I think this was case of some benefits for disabled people, first it was shot down in the referendum by similarly thin majority, but few years later the referendum was repeated and the proposal passed.
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