I wonder how long the list of things Democrats should have done for the handful of weeks they had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate will be by the end of the year.
Actually, his post was closer to, “we should really cut down on the number of things that we consider civil liberties,” and then he got lambasted. Which, of course, is a substantive difference from the way you described it.
But honestly, I was expecting some reference to Obamacare in the OP.
This is not new. Journalists, pundits, bloggers etc. all make nonsensical leaps with language to support their own positions or to tear down opposing positions. Been there, done that. Not gonna change…primarily because of freedom of speech.
The Hobby Lobby case had to do with RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. Would you care to expand upon the distinction between “religious freedom” and “freedom of religion”?
The RFRA directed that “strict scrutiny” was to be the standard applied in determining whether general laws unduly burdened the free exercise of religion. That has direct bearing on First Amendment jurisprudence.
As to your sneer about “free abortifacient birth control,” what do you see in the SCOTUS opinion that would prohibit a similar business from deciding they had a religious objection to chemotherapy or blood transfusions or any other even vaguely controversial medical procedure or therapy?
Huh? The second quote is from the OP. It’s a misrepresentation of what the OP’s cite says.
No, he’s making the point that expanding civil liberties is a bad thing.
The posts, including yours, were indeed somewhat smarmy. Only yours contained no actual content related to the argument being made.
First of all, the US has no “Left” with any legislative power or representation. The Democrats are, at best, a centrist party. Now, what the hell is “abortifacient birth control”, other than induced abortion, either surgical or medical? The morning-after pill does not cause an abortion, and neither do LARCS (Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives/Contraception, i.e. IUDs and implants).
In fact, subsidizing LARCS has been empirically proven to collapse the abortion rate and pay for itself. It’s fiscally conservative! That’s exactly what Republicans want, right? Or are they just a bunch of prudes whose sexual hangups override anything resembling sense?
No, not really. First Amendment jurisprudence says that generally applicable laws are enforceable even if they happen to impinge on religious exercise. See Employment Division v. Smith.
The RFRA goes much farther than that.
If the Hobby Lobby case had been decided under First Amendment standards, Hobby Lobby would have lost.
Well if the conservatives would stop getting it wrong, they wouldn’t need to be lambasted :rolleyes:
Asked and answered.
First Amendment jurisprudence imposes differing levels of scrutiny on different sorts of infringements (strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, rational basis, etc.). The RFRA says that the courts must always apply strict scrutiny to cases within its purview. Strict scrutiny, while otherwise not mandatory for every case, is frequently applied; it’s not something separate and distinct from “First Amendment standards.”
I didn’t mention the latest NFL scores, but that doesn’t mean I’m “ignoring” them.
Equal protection for the law is pretty obvious – when it is interpreted in the same way by pretty much the entire judicial system. “Defense of marriage” laws have been struck down by courts in all the districts and by the Supreme Court.
Equal protection, like a lot of other legal terms, ultimately means what the courts say it means.
All of our freedoms and laws are meaningless, in that they are human constructs, and subject to corruption at any time.
If you’re looking for God-Given rules, unambiguous, graven in stone, that everyone agrees to and everyone follows…you belong to the wrong species.
Yes, right now, five Supreme Court Justices could destroy all the gains made by gay marriage advocates. Five Justices could nullify the 13th amendment and make slavery legal again also. All of our rights are always contingent, and tyranny is always on the doorstep.
Things are not rights because the Constitution says so. We put things in the Constitution because they are rights. People in Saudi Arabia or North Korea have all the same rights that we do, by virtue of being people. Their governments just don’t recognize those rights.
Indeed. I often hear conservatives complain that gay marriage advocates are “creating rights out of thin air” seeing as how the right to marry is not explicitly granted by the Constitution (i.e. the government).
But I would contend that the way we create rights is by listening to and empathizing with those who claim that theirs have been violated (usually a minority group).
I know when one of my rights has been violated. There’s something I want to be able to do that is very important to me and which does not place a significant burden on the rest of society. Over time enough people will be fair-minded enough to agree that I should be able to do it and a new right will have been born.
So where do rights come from? God? Are they eternal and all of civil rights have existed since the first human and we are just discovering them throughout history (and we may have hundreds of other rights waiting to be discovered in the future)? Or are rights created by society and then rise to the level where they are given legal recognition?
Certainly not true in all cases. The US government could decide that all citizens have a right to a home with four sold walls and a roof and amend to constitution to codify it. Does that mean every one in the world has a right to it? Did Americans really have a right to it before the law was created?
Those standards are typically applied in Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process and Equal Protection cases.
Can you provide any examples of “rational basis” being used in a First Amendment context? How about “intermediate scrutiny?”
You seem to be arguing in terms of “natural rights.” Is there a universal “natural right” not to have soldiers quartered on you in peacetime, or to jury trial in a lawsuits where the matter in controversy is more than $20?
(emphasis mine)
Is that you, Antonin Scalia? This is the same bullshit that comes up every time any of these cases is discussed that continues the systematic dismantling of what little is left of campaign finance regulation. Citizens United is probably the most egregious example, but there have been about half a dozen such rulings in recent years, basically confirming that the traditional corporate stranglehold on the legislative and executive branches is now firmly entrenched in the Roberts court.
The operative concept here is invidious equality, a state of affairs that looks terrific on paper but is in fact and reality actively and malignantly discriminatory. Like the application of the First Amendment to corporate spending or, say, the personal spending of the Koch brothers. The First Amendment plus the requisite number of millions of dollars will get you the political candidate of your choice and the likelihood of getting the laws that you want. The First Amendment alone, absent the magic millions of dollars, gives you the inalienable right to bother passers-by on street corners and possibly scare small children. Corporations don’t spend billions on Washington lobbyists, political contributions, advertising, and PR without knowing good and well that they’re getting value for money. And the result – a Congress that is entirely devoted to the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and a large segment of the public which perversely believes in all the same things that corporations and the wealthy want them to believe – were inevitable. The idea that no one can influence this group of ostensibly highly intelligent and well informed citizens to vote in any particular way is part of the same absurd right-wing chimera, the single greatest fallacy in this Age of Persuasion.
(emphasis added) How many of these “fair-minded” people are enough? It cannot be 50%+1 because then the law would be changed and no need to recognize a right. So it must be something less than 50%.
What you are advocating is minority rule. That is good enough when it involves fundamental rights. We have a right to criticize President Obama or Speaker Boehner even if 73% of the population think we should not. That right cannot be taken away by law, and IMHO no just society would ever attempt to remove such a right.
The question the OP poses is “What else is just like freedom of speech?” The answer to that question cannot possibly be simply when a requisite number of “fair-minded” people agree. The whole idea of having rights is so when supposedly “fair-minded” people want to strip a person of those rights they are unable.
Personally I like the test adopted by the Supreme Court (which is only uses when it suits their purposes) that to qualify as a fundamental right, the right must be “deeply rooted in the nation’s history” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Although the Court has used substantive due process to recognize these rights, it could just as easily use the 9th amendment.
Things like heterosexual marriage, the right of parents to the care and control of their children, the right of extended families to live together, and the right to procreate are all things which meet this test and are not explicitly mentioned in the constitution. Things like physician assisted suicide, recreational use of drugs, and same sex marriage (the first two by the Court, the last IMHO) fail this test.
I think that this approach advocates by the conservative justices on the Court adequately protect the unenumerated rights but also prevents personal opinions from creating new rights from whole cloth.
Keep on fucking that chicken, man.