To give high school coaches something to do with their spare time, maybe?
Because it’s interesting. Or, to deepen understanding of the culture and other cultures. NOT to pretend to be able read tea leaves and predict the future or fashion current policy - that is, to turn history into pseudo-science at best or propaganda tool at worst.
I don’t think history builds your case, even if you want to use it that way.
But they don’t need to be, that is the point! We can achieve a good end and do it in a licit (not just legal, see below) manner. They didn’t do it the “right” way because it maintained slavery. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t practical to keep slavery, but it wasn’t the “right” way.
I don’t know what this means. You can suggest other alternatives to them in a fantasy game. But you can’t predict the consequences would have been of those untaken roads. I personally have no idea what the “right” decision was. The only way you can say it wasn’t “right” is by ignoring the reality they were faced with.
Let’s say a spouse commits adultry, and soon thereafter the couple divorces. Then the Church gets involved to decide whether the marriage should be annulled. You can say the adultry is wrong, and the divorce is wrong - but you don’t know what caused those wrongs to occur. I have written statements for friends in annulment proceedings, and there is a great deal of inquiry as to whether the couple should have been married in the first place, the maturity of the couple, etc. If the Church grants the annulment, what is the wrong? Is the adultry worse than the divorce? Does the fact that the couple didn’t adequately reflect remove the wrong from the divorce? You can tell each person to do it “right” next time, and that seems to mean mainly reflecting carefully before marriage. The problem with that is love is blind, for all of us - no one really reflects deeply enough (or we’d probably all be single, truthfully), and if we are not reflecting carefully, we are the last to realize it. So, lack of reflection doesn’t seem to be a sin, although apparently it explains or mitigates sins. You can criticize the divorce, the adultry, the marriage itself, the lack of reflection, whatever fights occurred, but you can’t unravel it, and you can’t say with any specificity what was the “right” way. That doesn’t mean that adultry and divorce aren’t sins. It just means that humans can’t unravel history, personal or collective, and neatly apply moral lessons. Saying adultry is wrong in that case is like saying slavery is wrong for the founders - it doesn’t illuminate.
This isn’t relativism or lacking ethics, but appreciating the difficulty of humans making hard choices in a fallen world.
You seem to be confusing licit with legal.
When we are talking about the law, there is only legal.
Finally, law is philosophy.
No, law isn’t philosophy, and politics isn’t ethics. I think this is the crux of our debate.
Every question has some ethical dimension, if you take the time to torture it out. The ethical dimensions of a city council deciding where to put stop signs, however, are secondary. War, abortion, and capital punishment have huge ethical dimensions, but aren’t free of practical considerations either. Politics and law are practical, messy, imperfect fields.
To imbue every practical choice with a primarily ethical gloss is counter productive. The scope of the federal government isn’t a moral issue. Too much centralization may have a moral dimension, and dropping services below a certain level may have a moral dimension, but I just don’t see that whether we have the Federal Reserve or NASA is primarily a moral question. I don’t see the point in debating them in those terms.
It is precisely this attempt to divorce ethics from law that has led to such disastrous rulings like Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade.
Those are very different cases, of course, but I don’t know what you mean here. Specifically, I think one mistake of Roe was to hold privacy, which is an ethical value, as a legal principle.
It’s called reductio ad absurdum
Which is usually a bad argument. If I want to say that we should lower the speed limit to save lives, you can say “then why don’t we just eliminate cars, if you’re so concerned about being safe?” Reductio ad absurdum sheds little light on most questions and leads you nowhere. It usually isn’t good argument (as opposed to a means to score a point when you are out of real arguments).
I consider something that is likely unacheivable in the next generation as an unrealistic goal. There may be reasons, in rare circumstances, I might continue to pursue a few select unrealistic goals. That isn’t “hyper” pramatic, or utilitarian, or unusual.
We can only hope they state their views loud and clear or someone does it for them for Americans to hear in time. But if not by Nov hopefully by 2012. Peace to you.
There is no rude awakening. The party in power historically loses seats in a President’s first midterm regardless of party. Reagan did. Clinton did. And lo and behold they both were reelected 2 yrs later. More people vote in Presidential yrs too. Don’t you guys get too excited about 2010. Thank God 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 are all light yrs away when it comes to politics. 
Everytime someone predicts the demise of one side, it re-emerges. That’s the history of American politics. We bounce back and forth between the Dems and the Republicans.