The US finally begins to crawl out of the third world
You support the US killing its criminals, and not providing everyone with healthcare (in effect killing the innocent)? It has been proven that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent (crime actually rose during the Bloody Code in England), and people have been proven innocent after their execution.
As for healthcare, I don't understand how anybody can oppose diverting some government funds to keeping people alive (after all, the US seems all too happy to deliberately kill millions in violation of international law: Iraq, for example).
2 is true for the UK, yes, but that does not mitigate its effects on the US.
The Third World comment was meant to indicate the backwards and uncivilised nature of Proposition 8 (note that I am not implying that all third world countries are savage and uncivilised—some, however, are, such as Uganda), and was therefore a comment on the policy, though I admit that the discussion has been somewhat sidetracked.
I think I'll decline to take this conversation yet farther afield. I'm not the one who introduced these issues, I just indicated my range of opinions on them to illustrate that I'm willing to side with things associated with the "Third World" on some issues and not on others. There's no reason to lump any of these together or to say that something is bad just because it's associated with less economically developed countries.
To comment on heath care, A lot in part is opposition from the GOP, who don't like spending much.