Why not legalize prostitution?

Originally Posted by Soluzar

No. They are based on rights. There's no room to disagree here, if you disagree you're wrong. The facts support me when I say that these laws are based exclusively on the principle of safeguarding rights. Morals just don't come in to it. It's not illegal to discrimate against black people because that would be wrong. It's illegal because the constitution states that we all have equal rights.

Thats both arrogant and dishonest.
You're arguing that the letter of the law is the spirit of the law. You're stating that the legal application of "rights" is the be-all-end-all. Perhaps legally speaking, yes you are correct. But it seems apparent that KP is leading to the wider context. By your assumptions, we would not have any need to reinterpret and reapply the constitution in any other contexts but the ones that it was established in.
However, the legal application of these "rights" is directed by, and subservient to, the morality of the greater public(though this concept does have a feedback influence on which direction the public morality moves).
Lets put it this way. Jim Crow laws weren't violations of legal rights until the greater public, and by extension the courts, felt that it was morally abhorrent, and in turn legally unacceptable. Given that our country's legal system operates on a system of natural rights, it was inevitable that these rights were used to justify the ban, and legally establish the greater morality.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not here defending killerpineapple. (Frankly, it looks like he just wants to get the last word.) I just can't sit around and tolerate that farce of a statement to stand.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Soluzar

I'm speaking legally, since we are discussing the law.

If you are speaking of the law, then you are wrong. If you are completely limiting the discussion to that within the legal system, then I concede your point.

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KP's application of a wider context is nothing but a smokescreen to justify taking the rights of free men. It's precisely the same kind of absurd truthiness that the governments have been forcefeeding British and Americans for years now.

You seem to be misunderstanding me, or maybe I'm just sucking at explaining myself. Officially, the legal systems must remain independent of the transient morality of its constituents. However, to say that the creation and application of the law is irrefutably independent of public morality in real life is pretty naive. What those in my government have been trying to pull off is attempting to make that sort of thing official, which is exceptionally wrong, while doubly being misleading on what the public morality even is. (I don't know whats going on in England at the moment.)

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If you think I'm wrong, that does not trouble me. If you think I'm being dishonest about my views, that would bother me a lot.

I think you're being dishonest to the nature of law, not your views.

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Not true. The Jim Crow laws were always in violation of the basic rights with which all men are endowed. All men are considered equal, it says so right there in the constitution. The Jim Crow laws were an obvious violation of the constitution.

Hindsight is 20/20.

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The law takes no moral position. It is nowhere stated that racial discrimination is wrong, or that racism is wrong. It is stated that racial discrimination is prohibited because the principles of a free society state that we may exercise our freedoms only in so far as they do not infringe on the freedom of others. That's all. If the principles of law were intended to serve morality, then racism itself would be prohibited, as would many other things which currently are not.

I half agree with you there. A law cannot justify itself by reference to any morality, as it is separate from the bounds of the legal system. However, on a philosophical and historical level, the very nature of jurisprudence has been moral. From the first origins in religious code, to modern conceptions of rights-based jurisprudence, legal systems were established to address moral and ethical issues in society.
"Rights" are just another human theoretical construction attempting to codify a universal morality which aims to please the largest number of individuals.

So to answer the original question, laws prohibiting racial and sexual discrimination, while not legally justified by reference to morality, are still, by extension of the nature of law itself, and by the nature of real-world pressures to create and enforce these applications of "rights," moral in nature.

There's nowhere I can't reach.