Which of the following should (in your opinion) be illegal?

[Sinergy 3]

i voted pro-wrestling

[Queen Jenn 0]

I am not sure if there is a different law for bars here since I don't go in them, but in FL it's illegal to smoke inside restaurants and malls and etc now. I love it, you don't have to smell like smoke after leaving a restaurant or bowling alley or a convenient store. (http://www.floridasmokinglaws.com/)

Same thing in Utah. And I love it. I have asthma and cigarette smoke ALWAYS triggers an attack. It's nice to be able to go to public places and not have to worry about whether or not I'll end up in the ER afterwards.

[Kazan' Tiger 1]

I chose, "Smoking In Bars" I have a right to breathe relatively clean air in a public location. Imagine if people entered a public place and began circulating asbestos dust in the air. Would you want to breathe it in?

The rest are either personal choices, expressions, or religious practices that do not directly harm public health. I am not a fan of some of those other items. However, they need not be laws.

[Nancy2015 2]

There are 2 people who think political dissent should be illegal. Wow.

I find it disturbing.

[PlatyPius 5]

I voted "Female circumcision"

Although I dislike some of the other choices, I still believe that there are some things that should be dictated by a person's conscience. I don't think one should legislate personal responsibility and doing so is just leading to a society that is unable to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. You have a generation of people who look to government to tell them what they should (and should not) do. I'm really sad to see America, the land of the free, becoming the land of diminishing liberties.

The only one I voted for also.

While I may not agree with Aryan propaganda, it's covered by freedom of speech. Seatbelts.... don't even get me started on that #######. The people who are in favour of that.... they need to have ALL of their freedom taken away. It is NONE of the governments' business if I am buckled up or not. Maybe they'll require knee and elbow pads for all pedestrians next. Are y'all ok with that? How about having ALL men use condoms to stop the spread of disease? Sorry....you can't have a kid. Gotta wrap that rascal so you don't catch a disease and hurt yourself or someone else.

[PlatyPius 5]

I chose, "Smoking In Bars" I have a right to breathe relatively clean air in a public location.

You have no more right to "clean air" than smokers do to smoke in a bar if they wish. It should be up to the bar owner - not the government. Just another case of surrendering more and more of our freedoms/control of our lives.

[DeadPoolX 9]

Like many here, I only voted for "female circumcision." My reasoning for that is there's no benefit to it; if anything, it's to the detriment of the woman. It's designed to reduce -- or in some cases, even eliminate -- the feelings of sexual pleasure that a female receives. The original idea behind this was that if the woman didn't "get off" in sex, she'd be more likely to remain a virgin until marriage.

It's one thing for a culture to want women to marry as virgins, but it's something else entirely to mutilate their sexual organs and render them virtually incapable of sexual pleasure -- through oral sex, masturbation or intercourse. I just find this practice to be completely barbaric.

As for the others on the list... depending on which item, there may be positive aspects to it, may be protected under the First Amendment ("Free Speech") even if I find it repulsive, or up to the individual in question to be responsible for themselves. In those cases, I don't see making any of the others "illegal."

[JVKn'CVO 11]

*Both Female and Male circumcision

NotJustSkin.org

*Islamic and White/Aryan/Nazi supremacist propoganda

Saludos,

Caro

[Stabu 0]

I voted for banning both male and female circumcision, since there are the only clearly violent acts. Neither parents nor the state has any right to practice these upon a child as they don't own the child. Of course a child is the parent's child in the sense that you can talk about "your children" just like you can talk about "your husband" or "your mother" or "your cousine" but you don't own your children just like you would own "your car" or "your house" or "your garden gnome". In a sense circumcision is de facto banned as it fits under the assault laws defined as "an attempt to cause or purposely, knowingly, or recklessly causing bodily injury to another; or, negligently causing bodily injury to another with a deadly weapon". Knifes are deadly weapons and in these cases they cause knowingly bodily injury. For some weird reason people don't seem to understand involuntarily genital cutting as an assault and thus many countries in the West have had to ban these procedures separately. In Finland, for example, male and female circumcisions where both banned under the assault laws, but as people didn't understand it they had to make a separate law against female circumcision and when male circumcision became more common (as Muslim immigrants moved in, of course no other Finns are circumcised) they had to change the assault law in the style of "okay, we all know that male circumcision is clearly an assault but if you do it for religious reasons we're just going to shut our eyes and pretend that nothing happened". And no, this issue has nothing to do with alleged benefits or damages. A human has no problems living without one finger, a few toes, an eyelid, half a lung, a kidney, half a liver, the gallbladder, the caecum, nails, nipples (in the case of a male), teeth, hair etc. but for some reason only human genitals seem to be up for a weird utilitarian calculation where the parents ask at birth "does that baby really need his whole genitals?". If some benefits like this where the reasoning it would be smarter to remove both male breasts at birth, since breast cancer is a far more deadly disease for grown up males than ####### cancer or AIDS combained.

I also wonder the rational about banning smoking in bars. Foremost those who want to ban it are non-smokers who don't like the smoke. Fair enough, but if you live in any decently sized city you should be able to find a bar without smoke if you just look hard enough. I have one in my city and its population is 180 000. Furthermore who's said that bars should be healthy, they are after all places where you enter in order to become intoxicated. If you really want to be healthy, don't go into a bar, go into a gym.

I kind of do understand that people would want to ban Islamist/Nazi propaganda, since in some reasons they are problematic. If for example an Islamist/Nazi would say "Jew X should be killed" (both of these groups could actually say that) then it's clearly a death threat towards Jew X and thus it should be considered as a violent threat, which is already illegal regardless who says it and for what reason. If they come up with theories such as "all Jews should be exterminated" I would say that it would still fits under the freedom of speech, since seriously, the world is full of hollow threats like that that don't threat a single individual but a distant poorly defined group. If this should be banned so should the common green cry "there are too many people in the world, 90% of them should die". Seriously, most sensible men wouldn't even take these threats seriously. I personally consider Islamist/Nazis as disturbing but also something which I tend to laugh about when I occasionally run across some pictures of their rallies.

Ouh and btw. it's interesting to see how little things the popular vote in here would actually want to have banned and how much of the things on the list actually are banned. It tells a rather sad story about the current situation of our liberal democracies.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Ouh and btw. it's interesting to see how little things the popular vote in here would actually want to have banned and how much of the things on the list actually are banned. It tells a rather sad story about the current situation of our liberal democracies.

Well, to be fair to our representative form of government, the population that responds to a poll on VJ is hardly representative of the US voting population as a whole.

[KarenCee 3]

Same thing in Utah. And I love it. I have asthma and cigarette smoke ALWAYS triggers an attack. It's nice to be able to go to public places and not have to worry about whether or not I'll end up in the ER afterwards.

I have asthma pretty bad too and I'm glad there's a ban in public places like restaurants and such. In the past I've just had to avoid those places because of the smoke. I don't do bars though...smoke or no smoke. Not my scene.

[Sinergy 3]

i love smoking

fortunatly i dont smoke indoors, not at resturants, bars, malls, not even in my home

im a conciderate smoker

[~*Maria*~ 1]

I voted for:-

I also have bad asthma and have too many visits to the ER

driving w/o a seatbelt

possession of marijuana

pornography (especially if it relates to children)

smoking in a bar (i have severe asthma)

Female Circumcision

Islamic supremacist propaganda

white/aryan/nazi supremacist propaganda

Edited September 18, 2007 by MariaDane

[doodlebug 3]

Female circumcision.

[mawilson 2,133]

I voted FGM - everything else should be legal.

(VJT - you forgot shooting cows, dog fighting, bestiality, necrophilia and child porn.)