Item (iii). You do not have a right to be free of “emotional distress” caused by someone else’s speech.
No more “mischief” than any qualifier meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits. If you cause someone to miss 2 seconds of a lecture, I hope he can’t sue you. If you cause him to miss 2 weeks, I hope he can.
No, not legally, for the same reason that the teacher can’t lead the class in prayer or teach that dinosaurs were Jesus horses.
I rather admire the quest for semantic precision, but it is especially needful in matters of law, it seems to me. If the law is to say “Thou shalt not…” then it must also be entirely explicit about what it is I shan’t.
TG, IANAL but that word to me says “This will go before a judge, and he will decide what the word ‘substantial’ means in the present circumstances.” Which offers the wrenching scenario of having to be busted for something before you can find out if its legal or not. You don’t go to court to get clearance in advance, yes?
“If it please the court, I should like to enquire as to the following statement I intend to address to Johhny Jones, a local middle school student, to wit: “Yours is a sinful lifestyle, and cannot be approved under my religious beliefs”. Is that a ‘significant’ assault on his dignity? No? Ah, well, then, alternatively, I might go with ‘You’re a worthless emo pansy, and ought to go kill yourself’. Would that be ‘significant’?”
More like that sort of mischief.
Interesting that you skip items i, ii and iv while coming up with an irrelevant point. No, we don’t have a “right” to be free of emotional distress, this is why we have to pass laws to protect students from emotional distress at school.
Except of course if that emotional distress is caused by a religious or moral belief, that’s totally cool.
Sorry to continue the hijack, but:
I suspect you and Lobohan are using two different definitions of “acceptable” here. To borrow a random online dictionary definition:
If we answer “no” then it is “acceptable” for the person to die in the sense that it must be accepted as inevitable for all practical purposes and senses, but it is not “acceptable” in the sense of it being something we’re okay with. I accept as a necessity that there is an economic cutoff point for healthcare (private or public) but I don’t have to like it.
Carry on.
Correct. It’s not ideal, it’s not desirable, it’s not wanted, but given the realities of available resources, at some point it is inevitable. By the same token, it’s acceptable for people to die in airline crashes because we won’t spend the money to make airplane travel safer. We could outfit each passenger seat with ecapsulating foam and its own shoulder harness and ejection system. That would, conceivably, save more lives in the event of a crash… but it would make air travel insanely expensive. On the other hand, if we stacked bodies in the aisles or had standing-room-only flights, we could probably fly cheaper. Our current model represents the result of the cost-benefit decision concerning flying. And health care, no matter where you draw the line, will also have to have a cost-benefit decision associated with it. And no matter where you draw that line, there will be a person on the other side of that line, and we as a society willl have to say to him, “We accept that you are going to die because we won’t pay for your treatment.”
This is not monstrous or un-Christian. It’s a fact of economic reality.
The definition says “DOING ANY OF THE FOLLOWING”. I noted one of the following actions, and you call that “irrelevant”. Do you know what the word “ANY” means? Hint: It does not mean “ALL”.
Ok, let’s try this again
Me: Doing i, or ii, or iii, or iv is defined as bullying, except if you do i, or ii or iii or iv through a sincerely held religious/moral belief. (note the clever use of the word “or” instead of “and”)
You: You don’t have a right to avoid iii
You didn’t address i or ii or iv, which as you note, are each individually sufficient to be considered bullying, so your response is incomplete. Second, the fact that we don’t have a “right” to avoid iii is the reason legislatures create laws to protect children from iii. This is what makes your comment irrelevant, we know that there is no federal right to this protection, which is why the state is passing a law.
Whereas I suspect Lobohan is reading that as you saying “It’s not all that bad that someone will die for lack of funding”, which has a somewhat nastier tone to it. I’ll leave it to Lobohan to confirm that interpretation, of course.
Which is exactly what they do! Abortion is de facto illegal in many US states because most people don’t have the knowledge or resources to appeal to the Supreme Court over state laws that conflict with their Constitutional rights. This will likewise be the case with the new Michigan law. The fact that, on paper, the law violates the Establishment Clause (which is in and of itself troubling for any number of reasons even if the law is never enforced) does not mean that the law will not be applied within Michigan. Real people will have their real rights violated for a long time until the ACLU or some wealthy parent can manage to get a federal court to intervene, assuming that happens at all, and assuming that they don’t draw a Scalia type who becomes physically aroused when a gay child is beaten and votes to uphold the law anyway.
How exactly does it do this? It does not say that expressions of sincerely held religious beliefs are immune from all consequences, but that such statements are not bullying. Lots of things are not bullying. That doesn’t make them all legal. Heck the law even states
Seems like that would run both ways as far as not forcing students to be proselytized to by a teacher. It does seem odd that section (8) protects statements by teachers, etc, when section (9) goes on to define bullying as only between pupils anyways. Seems a teacher that tells a gay student that he is a fag that will burn in hell was never at risk under this law anyway.
No, Lobohan is not. Because this discussion has already taken place at least twice before, and it’s beyond the bounds of credence to imagine he didn’t read it. Indeed, he makes sideways reference to it by saying above that I complained he “didn’t include the context,” even though that complaint “wasn’t true.”
To the contrary, the law doesn’t violate the Establishment Clause at all – unless you’re offering up some personal, idiosyncratic view of the Clause. But the law doesn’t offend current Establishment Clause jurisprudence.
And what it provides is required anyway by existing Supreme Court jurisprudence. In Tinker, for example, the school involved tried to stop students from expressing opinions about the Vietnam War, and the Court ruled that they could not.
This precedent is the first case I quoted above, and it begins to lay out the line under which schools can curtail their students’ First Amendment rights; the resulting guidelines are the ones I provided.
What specific cases do you rely on in concluding that the Establishment Clause is violated here?
Stop being willfully obtuse. As you well know, the Establishment Clause issue is involved when agents of the state, the teachers, use their positions over people who are required by law to attend school to advance their religious beliefs. The issue of the free speech of the student homophobes has nothing to do with it.
Could you name the states where [ul]
[li]abortions do not occur[/li][li]there are no pro-abortion lawyers[/li][li]and whose laws on abortion have never been challenged?[/li][/ul]
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Shodan
The quoted passage is just the old confusion of freedom of religion and the Establishment Clause that conservative posters on this board and elsewhere like to make. “What about MY RIGHT to be a Christian?” when being a Christian is defined as abusing homosexuals or whatever. When acting as an agent of the state your expressive rights are limited to an extent, because you may violate the EC (a separate part of the First Amendment).
So what they’re saying in the eighth section of the law is “since it would violate your right to practice the central tenet of Christianity (yelling abuse at gay teenagers) to restrict teachers from yelling abuse at gay teenagers, we’re explicitly allowing teachers to do so and defining any attempt to restrict this as a violation of the laws of Michigan, federal Constitutional precepts to the contrary be damned. If you don’t have the fortitude to sue to overturn this law and withstand the sort of physical and economic attacks that will be directed at you from local Christians when you are labeled the ‘fag lawsuit anti-Christian guy,’ then you’re shit out of luck.”
No, I’m not interested in doing research for you on three questions with no relevance to what I posted.
So actually backing up what you claim is not “relevant”.
Wasn’t sure if you were stupid or not - thanks for clarifying.
Regards,
Shodan
You too, you vile piece of human trash who wants to see women die and probably beats up gay teenagers in your spare time.
OK, so you’re not worried about what other students might say – you’re worried about what teachers might say. Specifically, you contend that this law allows teachers to use their positions to advance religious belief in violation of the Establishment Clause.
Correct?