Democracy is when the indigent and not the men of property are the rulers.
I don't think marriage is a civil right but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.
What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals that allow them to be to transfer property between partners to make certain that they're not discriminated on the job.
Property is intended to serve life and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
I do have two data identities. I have my name Bruce Sterling which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.
Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source and so on.
In the present state of our knowledge it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is however sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it and an essential property of matter?
Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own.
It is remarkable that jealousy of individual property in land often goes along with very exaggerated doctrines of tribal or national property in land.
With the world as it now presents itself there is something perverse and probably dysfunctional about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome the school-lottery migration the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?