"It's a matter of principle"

WHEN YOU HEAR someone say "it's the principle of the thing" be on the look out for bullshit because easily 7 out of 10 times the "principle" is not going to be anything that benefits anyone because it will never happen.  And often it's not a matter of principle but of hot air.

NO, IT'S A MATTER OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE AND, MORE SO, WHAT WILL GET US ALL THE EQUAL JUSTICE WE ALL NEED AND NOT FIFTY MORE YEARS OF REPUBLICAN-FASCIST GANGSTERISM. 

"The principle of the thing" is a tool of those who are looking for some personal, temporary and often imaginary advantage, what will get everyone what they need is generally at odds with that.  That's a true for asserted "justice" that will never be had as it is for idiotic and counter-productive bullshit that is the stuff of so much of the professional atheist legal jockeying of the last seventy or so years.  They might have gotten the idiot Supreme Court to go with them but it cost the cause of equal justice infinitely more than it got in imaginary justice for them. 

 

Update:  In the end, so also at the beginning, the ONLY reason to support any political or legal or social policy is to make real lives better in reality and anything that can't be brought to that end is worse than a waste of time, especially if it has the opposite effect from making lives better.   I don't care about any theoretical goodness or rightness of anything unless it has that result in reality, if it can't get done and it can't be sustained it may as well not have happened, if in reality it leads to the enemies of equality and democracy, the common good for everyone, gaining power then it is worse than useless, it is bad.