# Fake Marine in full uniform at his High School reunion is found out by classmate & arrested With pic **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 12, 2009, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fake-marine-in-full-uniform-at-his-high-school-reunion-is-found-out-by-classmate-arrested-with-pic/517292 "2009-11-12T06:52:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 111
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2009, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fake-marine-in-full-uniform-at-his-high-school-reunion-is-found-out-by-classmate-arrested-with-pic/517292/111 "2009-11-13T23:08:16Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > But you’re not the one who gets to decide what those rights are. > > As it happens, we have a system to do that. You can CLAIM the Constitution protects the right to impersonate a member of the armed forces or wear military medals you didn’t earn, but Congress doesn’t agree with you, and neither did the federal court that has considered the issue. See, there you go again, pretending that a moral and philosophical issue can always be reduced, in its entirety, to a legal one. I can recognize that your principled objection to abortion should not be dismissed out of hand simply because the issue has been determined by the Supreme Court. I appreciate that your moral objections to the practice transcend the question of whether the practice is legal. I recognize what the Stolen Valor law IS, that it was passed by Congress, and that it has been upheld by a federal court. But this does not preclude an argument that the law itself still violates the _principles_ of freedom of expression enunciated in the Constitution, and the general ideals of free speech that Americans usually claim to hold dear. I believe that it does, and while i recognize that Congress and the federal courts are the ones who determine the law, i am still at liberty (i assume, although with **robby** around, you never know) to disagree with their judgment on this issue, from a basic standpoint of what i believe constitutes an appropriate level of freedom of expression. It is possible to speak of rights in a sense that does not rely on the Constitution, on the Congress, or on the federal court system. One of the important contributions of the Enlightenment was the notion that rights come from nature or the creator, and are not something to be endowed by magistrates or monarchs. While i recognize the need for some enumeration and definition of rights within the legal system, i think it is still possible to speak of, and to understand, a concept of rights outside of that legal system. I’m not arguing that Congress didn’t make the law. I’m not arguing that the federal court didn’t uphold the law’s Constitutionality. Hell, i’m not even arguing that most Americans don’t support the law; for all i know, they do. I’m simply arguing that the law violates my understanding of what the basic principle of freedom of expression is, or should be, about. If there’s no actual fraud involved (in the sense of actual material gain by deception), i don’t think wearing medals should be illegal, and that doing it should, on principle, be protected as freedom of expression. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fake-marine-in-full-uniform-at-his-high-school-reunion-is-found-out-by-classmate-arrested-with-pic/517292)._