Laws are often just social signals in writing. A law indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad. Often times people find it easier to just agree with a law rather than navigate the mental gray area around behaviors that aren't black and white.
That understanding really breaks down when partisan politics are involved - if it's us vs. them you can do a lot of stuff without your base raising a stink as long as it's posed as being against your opposition.
>>A law indicates that a large group agrees that something is bad.
No, it only indicates that a potentially very small group who has gained power agrees that something is bad.
This is especially true in a system that does not require runoff elections (or an Instant Runoff voting system) so that the winner must gain a majority of votes, or where various forms of voter suppression, skewing, or not playing by the rules happen (e.g., sham elections as happened in Russia).
Exactly this. It's unfortunate that in the United States today, my initial reaction to new law is: "what money is behind this". It's not the standard that laws are being made for protecting citizens, but instead a minority of the wealthy with vested interests in playing unfairly through their capital and relationships.
Of course it doesn't represent all mindsets. That's what elections are for. All Floridians participate in the vote to elect a desired philosophy into power and then the winning party hopes that philosophy will reflect in the laws and policies created in the near future. You elect a like minded leader to act on your interests so you don't have to micro manage the governance of a state.
The alternative could be to have every piece of legislation go to popular vote rather than elected officials. I feel this could be wrought with problems though as the public could get vote fatigue and weird laws would slip through simply through low turnout or "social media fueled" outliers for extreme turnout on specific bills.
I am well aware of how direct democracy vs representative democracy works, so I don't need you to educate me on the subject. My issue with your comment is that you assume that a large group of people agree with the law as if we're talking about direct democracy, which I believe is not true. I do not believe that a large number of Floridians (large enough to matter in terms of voting, I'm not saying large as in city-large) agree with requiring an ID to access social media. The same thing happened with reproductive rights. As it turns out, an even larger group of republicans don't really agree with banning abortion, although their representatives think otherwise.
