What are your thoughts on the death penalty and should it be brought back?
In the USA, not all states have removed it. Texas, for example.
I think the death penalty is entirely appropriate for certain Wahabbi sect extremists who like to slice off the heads of others. They need to be stopped and I guarantee you, if you cut the head off of a Wahabbi extremist, he will never again decapitate anyone.
On the other hand, the death penalty is overapplied to too many groups. I would say that we need to tightly limit those cases where death is the penalty and must also require both direct evidence (=testimony of MULTIPLE witnesses) and supporting (=forensic) evidence.
This willingness to keep the death penalty is because sometimes society needs to be able to say, "This person is like a cancer and must be cut completely out of society forever." If a state WOULD allow a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole, pardon, commutation, or compassionate release - and MEAN it, I might be less in favor of the death penalty. But in the end, society has to be able to tell someone, "You cannot stay in contact with our society."
Now, if we do like Robert A Heinlein's novel
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and send all criminals to exile in a lunar penal colony from which there is no escape... maybe I would say we could abolish the death penalty. Maybe.
What are your views on animal rights?
Many people ask atheists if they have any firm moral principles. We do. One is "Do no unnecessary harm to others." Note that we don't specify the species of those others. By the way, most of the world's religions have that in one form or another. In Christianity, it is the Golden Rule. It also appears in Buddhism.
Has health and safety gone too far?
Only because litigious yammerheads have sued the pants off the governments at national, state/province, and local levels. There is no excuse for selling something that you know to be unsafe. There is no excuse for misrepresenting something as having a health benefit when you know it does not. But what do you do when you realize that there will always be that fringe element for which "stuff happens"?
If you had a choice, What laws would you re-instate or abolish?
I would abolish the Affordable Care Act if there was something reasonable waiting in the wings to replace it. I would reinstate campaign finance reforms. There are quite a few laws that have been warped by societal forces that I might try to unravel. The Patriot Act and other acts that allow the U.S. Government to perform surveillance without a bit more stringent judicial oversight - simply has to go away. No questions about it.
OK, now to another topic: Is prostitution a victimless crime? According to some, yes. According to many others, no - the prostitute is the victim of her pimp and of the societal pressure to sell herself to survive in a world where money rules too many parts of your life. When you see a woman on the street corner and she is wearing "working girl" clothes, she might be doing it for herself - but she might also be an immigrant who has been lured into a life of degradation by broken promises of bright futures. Typically, for those cases, the women answer ads, come to their new countries on a visitor visa, and suddenly have no paperwork at all - because their pimps have confiscate their passports, visas, driver's licenses, and whatever else they had. Then they are forced to sell themselves, with promises to get their papers back after X number of years. But it doesn't happen because they either die first or get discarded when life has turned them from the flower of femininity to the stubble of a field that has been plowed too often.
Before you characterize prostitution as "victimless" you should first find out whether the working girl is self-employed or pimp-owned. And yes, all too many pimps think they DO own their girls - like they would own any other livestock.
We have to take classes in this if we work for the U.S. Government because of the risk of being compromised if we use the "services" of one of these working girls. The training makes it clear. Sometimes the girls are just out making a living for themselves. Sometimes the girls are out making money for someone else who will beat them to a pulp if they don't produce.