Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
As soon as I heard of this, I knew you would be on it like a cat on a loose shoelace. Let me try to convey to you the rich deep irony of a British BDSMer springing to the defence of the SOR.

For those not swayed by moral arguments, the best reason to support universal human rights is the Niemoller principle. If you connive at unjust laws and unfair practices, because you believe the Powers That Be (and their tame media) when they tell you that these will only be used against bad people, never against respectable citizens like you... then you have nobody else to blame when you discover that they lied, and you are next. Because governments always take more power than they admit, and never more so than with laws like the SOR rushed into effect on the heels of a moral panic.
There is another side to that Niemoller Principle though ... when you speak up to protect child molesters and axe murderers from the consequences of their crimes, it doesn't help. Really, the root failing of both police states like Hitler's or Hussein's and botched legal approaches like the ECHR is the failure to distinguish between guilt and innocence. In recent years, we have seen politicians releasing convicted mass-murderers for political and financial gain, foreign killers allowed to walk free because sending them back to their own home would "infringe their rights" - and yes, we see those same authorities persecuting over non-crimes which harm nobody. Our current system fails in both directions.