While these lawsuits are indeed rather frivolous, I am a firm believer that the conservative insistence on leaving everything up to personal responsibility must be moderated to a certain degree.
I will now provide the following hypothetical anecdotal examples since that's what seems to work when conservatives try to prove anything:
- It's not the governmnent's responsibility to force car companies to continually make their vehicles safer. Don't think your car is safe enough? Okay, take the bus. If the free market that doesn't actually exist but we can continually assume does in rhetoric demands safety equipment then the car companies will build it.
- Don't like the bacteria, rust and lyme in your drinking water? The nonexistant free market for water provides you with choices other than the pipes provided by whatever municipality your house is in. Drink the bottled stuff or move somewhere else.
- Want to eat healthy? Figure it out for yourself stupid, we're not going to use the government to force the food industry to put nutrition labels on food.
Where does relying on personal responsibility alone end? These are all real stances conservatives have taken in opposition to things like automotive safety requirements, water standards and nutrition information.
Just like the rhetorical ideal of the free market, which has never existed in this country and will never exist in this country, personal responsibility is one of those tenets of conservatism which exists out in the ether but only can be applied in its pure form with limited benefit.
I'd say most of the politically active thinkers, the people actually doing something in some way to shape policy other than vote, regardless of their views or beliefs have some kind of ingrained distrust of people in general. Conservatives lament the lack of personal responsibility, liberals like myself say that the average human IQ is 100 and that ain't exactly very smart. The difference lies merely in that liberals want to provide some kind of safety net for people in spite of their lack of what conservatives would call personal responsibility, to use that rhetorical concept which to repeat my earlier assertion, doesn't actually exist in its pure form. If government took it upon itself to truly leave people up to their own devices there would be no government.