Slippery Slopes

Today I received an email forward with which I disagreed from a friend. I am one of those people who have good friends who fall on both the far right and the far left of the political spectrum. As a moderate, while I respect my friends on both sides of the spectrum and often am better informed after exposure to their perspectives of the issues, I find myself somewhere in the middle of their ideologies.

The email was in support of the Arizona Immigration law and began with the statement “I’m a legal American citizen and I must show my ID when…”, followed by a list of times and places when legal citizens must show their IDs to argue that the immigration law is not prejudicial. I’m going to ignore the fact that most of them are irrelevant comparisons to being legally bound to carry papers at all time to avoid jail. (In the examples listed, the ID is being shown not to stay out of jail, but to receive benefits or privileges, like insurance or a driver’s license.) Instead, I’d like to focus on the law itself.