D’oh! :smack: That should be “the two are NOT necessarily related.”
Quoted by me earlier
If I say Iraq is 96% Arab Muslims I’m not saying they’re Muslim because they’re Arab. I’m not saying that Arabs can’t be Christians Atheists or Pagens. It’s just an observation about that area.
It really doesn’t seem all that confuseing, but no matter.
We’ve had a group hug and we’re all better now right??? Good!!
It makes sense that in some cases the sentance to attend worship services might seem completely ineffective yet I feel it has a decent chance of doing some good. I’ve seen people sentanced to counciling that went reluctantly with no intention of taking it seriously but really confronted their issues. A dose of religion could well stir up something in certain criminals. I repeat my earlier question. How many people would it have to help to be a significant improvement over our current system?
But the question of how many people it might help is irrelevant when its constitutionality is considered. If it violates the first amendment, it violates the first amendment even if it gets people off drugs.
True, but I thought that it was as yet undecided if it violates the first amendment or not.
I don’t see that it does, but then again it’s not my call.
I’m a Christian, but I hated going to church. Parents made me go and the only thing I remember are the times I fell asleep on my feet when we were in prayer. I think the directed worship option is only as usefull as a deterent can be, no more or less than jail time. At least the county has a chance to save some money.
I don’t see how it doesn’t violate the First Amendment. It’s a classic Unconstitutional Condition, as far as I can see. If there is serious argument as to whether requiring someone to attend AA is unconstitutional as an establishment of religion or a violation of the free exercise thereof, (which there is, and I think usually judges offer a secular alternative, however inconvenient it may be; I also don’t see the present Court accepting a challenge to this sort of thing), then surely telling someone he has the choice between going to Church and going to prison is clearly unconstitutional. At least you can make the argument (not sure how accurate it is, I have never been) that the religious or thest element is tangential to AA. It pretty clearly isn’t to a Church.
While there may be valid secular reasons for prohibiting a defendent from consuming alcohol, there are no valid secular reasons for coercing a defendant to attend religious services.
It’s more than two, Guin. They’re not just white; they’re rural Appalachian white. It just so happens that that demographic is overwhelmingly SB and PH. Typically, the higher classes are SB, and the lower are PH. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes things just correlate, and sometimes those things involve race and ethnicity. If you know, for example, that an area is densely urban and predominately black, then you can bet $10 against $1 that there is an overwhelming opposition in the area to gay marriage. It’s not NECESSARILY true that EVERY SINGLE PERSON fits the typical case, but that’s not what’s being said.
My interpertation of the 1st amendmant is that it prohibits the government from promoteing sanctioning a specific religion. It does not mean that the government can’t be associated with religion under any circumstance. The arguement can be made that distanceing government from any and all religous association supports atheism as a religous belief. Being completely nuetral seems impossible. We will have to continually examine and redefine the boundries as we are doing now.
The difference here is the mandatory factor. It would be wrong to make attending worship services mandatory which is the objection to AA. In this case it’s a choice. I assume that this is used only in minor offenses {relatively speaking} The sentances should be as equal as possible, as in hours of Jail time vs. hours in church. Perhaps a third choice of community service should be included.
The title of the thread indicates that the judge should be fired for even trying such an offensive alternative. So offer an effective alternative in it’s place. Don’t have one? Didn’t think so.
Participation in an alcohol abuse program that includes evaluation, treatment and follow-up, with treatment to be either out-patient or residential depending on the evaluation report.
And with that third choice, this would stand a much greater chance of being constitutional. Your interpretation of the First Amendment is pretty close to the court’s, just not in this area. A tax on going to Church would not make it mandatory not to go to Church. It would, however, be unconstitutional in that it would establish an unconstitutional condition - in order to exercise one’s constitutional rights, one would have to pay a penalty not applicable to those who exercised the opposing right (the right not to go to Church). The self same thing is at work here. People are presented with a choice between exercising their constitutionally protected right to attend or not to attend religious services. The actions of the judge place a burden on those who chose not to attend religious services that it does not place on those who chose to attend such services - the burden being incarceration. And therein lies the First Amendment violation. That’s why the AA ‘sentences’ do tend, as far as I have seen, to give a third option. If this doesn’t, and it appears not to, it’s a violation.
One thing I like to try doing to see if there is a Fist Amendment violation is to turn it around - if the judge was saying people had a ‘choice’ between going to jail or stoppign attending church. Would you be so quick to call that constitutional? What if they changed it to reading go to jail or go to this specific place of worship? Do you really think it would not be unconstitutional to only offer Baptists, for example, the right to worship at the place they chose as opposed to going to jail?
You cannot look at things in isolation like this. The First Amendment Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses do not have opt outs for matters of criminal justice that hypothetically work better this way. There are other values that those clauses are intended to protect that are denigrated by forced attendance at Church rather than jail time. It simply doesn’t make a difference if this is the most effective way of rehab or not. If it ain’t constitutional, it ain’t constitutional. Solve that issue first, then look at what the most effective method of rehab is.
How is it coercive? The defendant is free to do his time in the county jail.
That would be the coercion.
You do realize the difference between saying a community is 96% white, WAPSs and rural white Appalachains? Each of those is a distinct group in society that are not interchangable.
No, doing the time in the county jail is a consequence. A consequence* of the crime*, not of refusing the option of church (or AA meetings or other treatment options).
That seems like a viable alternative. We’re still left to wonder if such a program has any better success rate than just going to church. There’s also a question of availability of such a program and how many it will accomadate. Didn’t we decide it can’t be AA because they’re too religious?
Doing time in jail is a consequence of the crime. Being offered to go to religious services instead of being punished for the crime is coercing someone into participating in religion. Being offered to go into a non-religious rehabilitiation program instead of being punished is also coersion, but not of a form that the government is specifically forbidden to practice. Any situation in which you are told, “Do X or bad thing Y will happen to you,” is coersion. Prison itself is a form of coersion, for that matter. “Behave, or we send you to jail,” is one way we coerce people into avoiding anti-social behavior.
FTR, the word “coersion” now looks totally wierd to me.
[nitpick ON]
That’s because it’s “coercion”, with a second C.
[nitpick OFF]
Fuck! I wrote the whole post like that, then went back and changed it at the last second, because it didn’t look right anymore. Dammit, I even had it right in my first post to spooje! Arrrgh!
How successful have the death penalty or life imprisonment been as deterrents ?
The judge in question may very well be at that point which any parent of a teenager knows all too well…He’s willing to try anything because nothing seems to have any positive effect.