The US finally begins to crawl out of the third world
The laws and policies of the United States do share several important traits with a variety of "Third World" countries usually considered less advanced, among these: 1. The United States has not yet abolished Capital Punishment, and it is extensively practiced and legally sanctioned in 39 states. 2. Domestic surveillance on US Citizens without due process, while technically prohibited by the nation's constitution, is indeed widely practiced and has been given retroactive approval by the US Congress. 3. Homosexual citizens are legally not endowed with the same rights as Heterosexual citizens, and as such are treated as second class citizens.4. Creationism - a religious fundamentalist doctrine -is legally taught alongside Evolution in some U.S. Public Schools. 5. Racial profiling is legally enshrined by the U.S State of Arizona with regards to inquiries by law enforcement into a person's immigration status. 6. The United states has no universal publicly-funded health system for its citizens, usually considered a mark of a "Developed" nation.
You've produced a real mixed-bag there. Some of those things aren't true or are only half-truths (4, 5), others are true but even more true of other "Developed" countries (2, which is spot on for the U.K.), some true and unfortunate (3, though you've accompanied it with severe exaggerations), and others I fully support (1, 6). I don't, however, see the point. Why should I care? Why should anybody care? This whole idea of adducing similarities to Third World countries is just a red herring when the ultimate question is the worthiness or unworthiness of particular policy positions.
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.
It would be interesting to hear how 4 and 5 are "half-truths" as you've put it. Creationism is legally taught in the U.S. state of Kansas (look it up if you don't believe me), while Arizona has recently passed a law requiring all police officers to inquire as to the immigration status of persons who they "suspect" may not be U.S. citizens or legal U.S. Immigrants while conducting other routine law enforcement activities, such as roadblocks and traffic stops. The very nature of such a law forces police to resort to superficial ethnic/"racial" characteristics, such as skin/hair colour, dialect etc. as guidelines for whom is considered "suspicious".
As for the comparisons of U.S. policies to "Third World" countries, it is a quite valid rubric for Americans to consider, especially as the United States conducts an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy which -although driven by geopolitics- is largely sold to the public in terms of promoting "democracy" "freedom" and "Human rights" in countries around the world. Such presumed moral authority is easily challenged if objective criteria are used to Compare the U.S. own domestic policies to those of other nations, both "Third World" and "First".