In what way have I given you reason to believe that you are not at liberty to disagree with the judgment of Congress and the federal courts on this issue, mhendo? Or are you just taking further random shots at me?
Fake Marine in full uniform at his High School reunion is found out by classmate & arrested With pic
Your analogy is massively flawed, IMHO. Running a red light in the middle of the night because you weren’t paying attention is dangerous- “Driving without due care and attention”, as it’s known here. There might be someone else coming that you didn’t see- a pedestrian, a cyclist, even a horse and rider in some places. The potential is there for injury and the fact of the matter is you aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing whilst in charge of at least half a metric tonne of motor vehicle.
Dressing up as a soldier hurts no-one and has the potential to hurt no-one unless the imposter starts trying to use their costume get things that normal members of the public would not normally be entitled to. As soon as that happens, all bets are off. But otherwise, the worst that could possibly happen is someone says “Hey, that guy was in the military. That makes him cool.” That’s not in the same league as someone running red lights at 2am because they weren’t paying attention.
However, nobody gets commissioned as an officer right out of high school. You’d have to subtract at least four years for college, so these folks would have no more than 16 years of active duty, not 20. This is still just (barely) enough time to make O-5, though, so your basic point stands.
Airman Doors’s larger point about phonies upselling their fraudulent “service” certainly holds true with the fraud being discussed in this thread. As astro pointed out in the OP, the fake had a completely unbelievable number of awards and decorations. He’s wearing some 28 different ribbons, with devices indicating multiple awards for some of the medals. The sheer number is unusual in and of itself, but he went beyond the pale when he pinned on the Navy Cross.
The Navy Cross is very rare. It is second only to the Medal of Honor in order of precedence. Fewer than 7,000 have ever been awarded, and most of those were in WWII. According to this page, only 17 have been awarded to Marines in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is few enough that that the names and citations of awardees are easily researched. Most of the awardees were enlisted Marines, leaving just two Marine officers. Guess what? This guy wasn’t one of the two Marine officers who have received the award in the past decade. :rolleyes:
This guy is a complete idiot. He sent up so many red flags that I’m sure the Navy Commander he ran into knew instantly what was up.
A closer analogy might be one about wearing masks in certain Southern states. One of the various laws meant to suppress the Ku Klux Klan was to make it illegal for adults to wear masks in public (I’m sure there are some local exceptions like during Halloween, but where I live in Virginia generally does not). Somebody walking down the street wearing a mask minding their own business isn’t much, and the worse somebody might say is “hey, that guy’s wearing a mask”, but a common element in the Klan’s activities was a bunch of people roaming around the neighborhood at nighttime wearing masks up to no good. After anti-mask laws were introduced, you could arrest people for that, and the Klan’s membership dissolved. I don’t know the history of the law against civilians wearing military uniforms, but I imagine it’s something similar to that.
You folks are focusing too much, IMHO, on the idea that impersonating a member of the military has no consequences other than getting things and looking cool.
Can none of you see that the federal government might have a valid interest in not allowing impostors to impersonate members of the nation’s military at any time?
One reason why we prohibit people from impersonating police officers at any time is that it would otherwise make members of the public wonder if the person pulling them over is actually a police officer.
Just three years ago, after Hurricane Katrina hit, some 58,000 National Guard troops from all over the country poured in to Louisiana to assist with the disaster response and to help reestablish order. Just like the police, do we want the public wondering if the guy giving them instructions is actually a military officer, or just dressing up as one? I can think of a lot of worst-case scenarios potentially resulting from people blatantly ignoring or disregarding orders from troops in such a situation, and none of them have anything to do with how cool the soldiers look.
Switching gears now, in a war zone, putting on a uniform makes you a combatant. Putting on a fraudulent uniform can get you executed as a spy. It’s a serious business, and more than just playing dress up.
Just extrapolation, i guess.
You believe it’s fine to throw someone in prison for a form of expression that you disagree with, merely because that particular expression happens to be offensive to you.
There was nothing random about it.
That was (and to a lesser extent, still is) a serious problem in Iraq. Some of the groups of people running around in Iraqi Army and police uniforms were actually Shia death squads. Certainly a negative outcome.
On the contrary, I’ve only expressed my opinion that impersonating a member of the military should be illegal, which in fact it is. I’ve not expressed any opinion regarding the appropriate penalty for violations of the law.
And once again, particularly with respect to impersonating a member of the military, my objection does not stem from the fact that such behavior is offensive to me. I don’t see it as a freedom of expression issue.
You seem to be making a number of erroneous extrapolations here.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it seemed pretty random to me. You weren’t even responding to a comment of mine.
Well, it’s been long enough since I was a 1L to really care about Civ Pro traps, so I’ll retract and concede. Bricker was right: if tomorrow, Congress passed a law (oops, sorry, if Congress passed a law and the President signed it) that said “We, Congress, hereby establish Christianity as the national religion, prohibit the free exercise of any other one, and abridge the freedom of speech of the people and the press to complain about it,” then it would be wrong to claim that it violates the Constitution. I may be able to refer to the “ideals” of the Constitution, but because every case is different, and the makeup of the court changes over time, that is all I could reasonably say. Whatever was I thinking? :rolleyes:
(Actually, it’s kind of funny that you like the 1L games of contextual hyper-specificity and pedanticism, but if you look closely, the quotes you chose really weren’t responsive to the question **mhendo **posed to you.)
Silly little games aside, this is a law that criminalizes offensive speech, something that much more often than not is found to be proscribed by the First Amendment.
Two rationalizations have been brought forward: the speech is offensive and the law is public safety. While many laws have passed judicial scrutiny because there was merely pretence at public safety, and many areas of law give absurd amounts of deference to legislative rationalizations, First Amendment cases generally face a much higher burden.
Consider the reactions and focus of the vast majority of comments (here and elsewhere). The predominant theme is one of offence and affront. Consider, even, the title of the bill: Stolen Valour. The reasoning, from the text of the bill, is to prevent “damage the reputation and meaning of these medals.” The law covers not only passing for a member of the military, but merely claiming to have been awarded a medal: “Whoever falsely represents himself … to have been awarded any decoration or medal… .”
Trying to pin (heh) claims of public safety on preventing grandpa from inflating his war record — especially in First Amendment jurisprudence — is going to be very difficult. Aside from legal argumentation, pushing public safety claims strikes a strong note of disingenuousness — unless the zombie apocalypse is almost upon us (2012 anyone?) pretending that your primary concern is for public safety echoes Glenn Becks crocodile tears.
As for the distinction between this and laws prohibiting impersonating a policeman, it doesn’t take a 3L to see a host of legitimate public safety concerns with that conduct, and understand how a balancing test between unfettered police impersonation would affect society much differently than unfettered false claims to have won a particular medal. Soldiers, ex- or otherwise, and especially ex-medal winners, hold no civil authority. Again, zombie apocalypse aside, a member of the military may get certain perquisites volunteered to them or discounts (falsely claiming military status to claim such is a different story), but they are otherwise ordinary citizens, absolutely powerless. (Yes, for the pedantic among you, there are a small subset of wild hypotheticals involving states of emergency, but bootstrapping those once again pulls you into absurdity.) Contrast that with the role of the police in society, and the difference is stark — speech can be Constitutionally curtailed for strong, legitimate public safety concerns.
Another argument that is slightly less specious than the claims of public safety is the harm to the reputation and integrity of the medals and service. I can’t put RhythmCola in a Coke can and expect to make a First Amendment claim. Medals and service awards/acknowledgement are the property of the government and lying about them tarnishes the ‘brand image’ of military service and its awards.
Advancing this line, however, runs dangerously close to preventing criticism of the government — a very sensitive area of First Amendment law. If this is a particular motivation, then the Swift Boat crew and their ilk, which have done much more to denigrate awarded medals than some pretender could ever manage, should be subject to a much higher degree of attention than private Loser from Loserville.
So, go ahead and call for banning speech that offends you. Great. But if you really need toilet paper, please just go to the store and buy some Charmin; the Constitution isn’t that appropriate.
“Are you impugning, sir, that this uniform might be for sale? This uniform that bears the three stars that indicate my ratings? Bedecked with ribbons that represent every theatre of war? Who wore it last in our proud company? This full-dress uniform, W-2565, seen in Our Finest Hours, in Ruthless Combat, in Dogfights Over Broadway, and worn out finally, here on this spot, in Parallel Hell. What is it worth? How much do I hear?”
No substantial difference whatsoever. You believe it should be illegal, which means that you believe a person should be arrested and dragged in front of a court because they do something you find offensive.
But you’ve also said that you believe the simple wearing of the medals should also be illegal. To wit:
Your attempt now to focus only on the uniform issue (which you have provided no compelling case for, anyway) is rather instructive.
Nope.
Whatever you were thinking, it apparently was powerful enough to blot out from your mind the many cases that would tend to discredit the idea that such a law would be constitutional.
No. It’s a law that criminalizes false statements of fact,which have historically been given vanishingly small doses of Constitutional protection.
Well… THREE. The speech is false, which society has an interest in curtailing.
The Court has upheld fraud laws against First Amendment challenges. The Court has upheld tort claims of false light even when there’s no showing of actual damage to a reputation. Lying to government officials is in many cases a criminal act, even without the requirement of being under path. (And of course it’s trivially true that perjury is punishable). The intentional disparagement of the quality of property – trade libel – is not protected by the First Amendment either. I assume you’re equally outraged by these blatant attempts toconvert the Constitution to Charmin. :rolleyes:
Now, I will grant you the confusing case of R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992). In R.A.V., a law used to charge the person who burned a cross on an African-American family’s lawn was overturned as violative of the First Amendment. But even R.A.V. identifies a number of exceptions.
Credit goes to Prof. Volokh’s blog, where a post a couple of years ago summarized the above ideas quite well. Wish I could find it.
Says you. I disagree.
But that’s not what you said the first time. You wrote that I allegedly “believe it’s fine to throw someone in prison [emphasis added]…”
As I responded before, I’ve only expressed my opinion that impersonating a member of the military should be illegal, which in fact it is. I’ve not expressed any opinion regarding the appropriate penalty for violations of the law. Specifically, I have expressed no opinion regarding whether prison time is warranted, so don’t put words in my mouth.
You know, when you cut off someone’s sentence midstream, it is customary to use an ellipsis instead of a period. The rest of my sentence that you left out goes on to state: “…if we are going to discuss the merits of the laws in question, it would be helpful to discuss the two issues separately.” In that post, I then went on to discuss the two issues separately.
The only person who keeps attempting to conflate the two issues is you.
I find it absolutely amazing that people can seriously be arguing that there is a constitutional right to impersonate members of the military, so my focus has indeed been directed there in recent posts.
In both of these issues, while I do find the behavior offensive, that is not the reason I believe the such conduct should be illegal. I’ve given several justifications for why I think that impersonating members of the military should be illegal, and at least one for why wearing unearned medals should be illegal, none of which involve me being offended by such conduct.
Spurious, then.
But those "justifications’ are so clearly ridiculous, and so clearly self-serving and illogically-argued, that they can surely only be attempts to (poorly) rationalize your distaste.
Wrong.
Again.
What’s clearly ridiculous is you trying to characterize the impersonation of a military servicemember with intent to deceive as somehow being constitutionally protected free speech.
Also, in what way have any of my arguments been “self-serving”?
You continue to make spurious claims regarding me and my motivations. Or are these more “extrapolations” of yours?
I’m in a different country, where the reaction to someone wandering around in an Australian Army uniform saying “I’m in the Army!” is likely going to be “Are you? That’s nice.” Now, wandering around New Orleans in a military uniform directing traffic or ordering people about after a disaster when you aren’t a soldier is obviously not on, and I don’t think anyone is arguing otherwise. What’s being argued is that someone at a social event pretending to be in the military isn’t really hurting anyone, and although it’s a dickhead thing to do, it shouldn’t be illegal until they start trying to use their impersonation to get things that non-service personnel would not normally be entitled to.
As to your other point: We’re not talking about warzones, we’re talking about parties, social get-togethers, and high school re-unions in Anytown, 1st World Country. Different kettle of fish entirely.
Yikes, I’ve been beaten by 1L games and so have wholly changed my opinion on this. It seems that while one can’t make a claim that banning offensive speech would run into First Amendment issues, because, you know, that would turn from the nebulous to the concrete, one can say that they won’t (no contradiction there!). So then:
Society has an interest in curtailing false speech. I’m not sure where a textualist would find Constitutional authority for the Federal government to criminalize false speech, so I’ll just hang it on the good ol’ commerce clause. Yes, any falsehood, no matter the situation – from job interviews to purely social situations – will have an impact on commerce. No matter how slight that impact may be (heck, if a corner plot of wheat counts, certainly so should a fib in a bar at 2:30 AM), all lies should have criminal repercussions.
Call in sick at work so you can catch a football game? Uh-oh, that’s a lie and a misdemeanor.
Come back from a camping trip in a national forest and tell a tall tale about the fish you “almost” caught? Oh my, that’s a misdemeanor!
Match.com et al are going to see a flurry of activity right before the law kicks in, since any false statement (especially ones made over interstate telecommunications lines) is going to be criminalized. Are you really 5’11"? Better double check!
Oh what a civilized nation we’ll be!
1L games? You’re beaten by high school debate rules.
How did you leap from the question of is it Constitutional to the assumption that it should be illegal?
Or are you one of these folks that Believe the Constitution is Holy Writ, and we must look to it as the cure to all woes?
You’ve wildly conflated several issues here. The federal nexus for specch regarding federal military awards and service is clear without recourse to the Commerce Clause and WWII-era wheat growers. The issue regarding fraud in speech in general doesn’t necessarily have a federal connection – state laws may criminalize fraudulent speech, where federal laws could not, but must still obviously pass federal First Amendment muster. And you seem to be trying clumsily to suggest that my argument is: because they are constitutional, they are wise social policy.Nothing could be further from the truth.
So go review your high school debate handouts, and once you’ve mastered those concepts, perhaps you can tackle something at the 1L level.
When it comes down to it, I think the government has an interest in maintaining the legitimacy of certain symbolic effects that are issued by the government for a specific purpose. For example, 18 USC 713 prohibits the use of the seals of the President of the United States, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and Congress from unauthorized use. I think extending the same protection of legitimacy to military medals is just fine.
Beyond seals and medals, I have a hard time thinking of any other items or images that warrant protection. Perhaps the use of certain titles or ranks, such as judge, senator, or military ranks, even insofar as they should be reserved for those who actually earned them, rather than by someone who simply wants to call himself Chief Justice of the United States Cecil Adams, or whatever. But really, I don’t see the adoption of such titles as a current problem, the case cited in the OP notwithstanding.
On thinking about it, soldier is really one of those jobs for which adequate monetary compensation is impossible: If it were just about the pay, we wouldn’t be able to pay people enough to travel around the world and get shot at. So we, as a society, have put in place other compensations for soldiers. One of those is prestige: Genuine veterans are, for the most part, given more respect than non-veterans. A non-veteran who feigns military service is appropriating that respect from the real veterans, and so it’s just as appropriate for the government to punish such a person as it would be to punish someone who’s trying to fraudulently draw a veteran pension.