Shrubbery asks a question:
How is voting not thinking? How is a restriction on voting rights different from hate crime legislation? Correct me if I’m wrong but are you not opposed to hate crime legislation?
First, let me state that confusing one thing with another unrelated thing is very common on the Internet and is a warning sign of imprecise thought. Usually it is obfuscated slightly through the use of weasel words such as “really”, “basically” or “virtually”, for example the quadrennial notion that voting for X is “really” a vote for Y when simple addition demonstrates that it is nothing of the kind.
Now to the question. It is eminently clear that voting is not thinking. One is a private mental act with no ramifications for anyone else, the other is a public act with potentially fatal ramifications for everyone else. The hate crime analogy is a particularly weak one, as a hate crime is an secondary crime added onto an ACT that is already a crime based solely on what the prosecution believes the criminal was thinking. It is pure thought crime; the crime is based solely on the perceived thoughts.
Voting restrictions such as I have defended are not based on anyone’s thoughts, they are based on the statistical probability of an individual’s actions. The individual’s thoughts are completely irrelevant, as he, (or as we’ve mostly been discussing, she), may want to vote for the socialist because a) the socialist candidate is cute, b) the socialist candidate promises a chicken in every pot, c) the socialist candidate promises a new Medicare entitlement for the children, d) the socialist candidate is a woman. It doesn’t matter, far from being any sort of thought policing measure, the thoughts are absolutely irrelevant.
Pretend we’re not talking about voting for a moment. Substitute purchasing for voting and the smallpox virus for socialism. The right to buy and sell private property is far more fundamental than the so-called “right” to vote; it can actually be found in the Constitution. And yet who would argue that anyone should be allowed to purchase the smallpox virus, much less those who have reliably demonstrated for eight decades that, if given the chance, they will purchase smallpox and distribute it to everyone at the first opportunity?
I wish that the states were still a laboratory of democracy, as I think it would be extremely informative for everyone to see what would happen in two neighboring states, one where only women were franchised and one where only men were franchised. What most people don’t realize is that historically speaking, there is an example of the latter in pre-1971 Switzerland, and as one might expect, Switzerland was significantly less centralized than any Western democracy and is still less centralized today although since 1971 it has joined the UN, modified its national constitution to grant the federal government the right to pass gun control laws, legalized abortion, is considering getting rid of the national militia that has defended it for centuries and has an elected government lobbying the people to pass a referendum approving the goverment’s decision to permanently open its borders and labor markets to the entire European Union.
This will, in all probability, kill the country’s economy, its banking system and its high standard of living. But hey, at least they’ll have the consolation of knowing their frauleins were voting.