And what about Equal Protection Under the Law? If men get autonomy in all of their reproductive choices, so should women. Seems pretty clear-cut to me, but I’m no legal scholar.
Interesting (horrifying) historic fact: with the exception of Louisiana, no state that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment recognized married women as legal persons independent from their husbands. They were considered femme covert at law - the act of marriage resulted in the wife’s “civil death” except where then-radical “Married Women’s Property Acts” (gradually adopted from the 1830s to early 1900s) granted statutory rights to own property. But such statutory rights were, and so far as the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned still are (under an originalist lens), entirely gratuitous.
Now, if I were to argue for womens’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment today, given the Supreme Court’s originalist majority, I would choose a test case involving an unmarried, or better yet, a widowed woman.
~Max
I would have thought it speaks directly to the question of federalism versus states’ independence. But if you simply don’t get it, it isn’t worth fighting with a moderator about. Subject dropped.
Which is not the subject of this thread. It’s a diversion. You may feel it has bearing on your own opinion, and that’s fine. But it’s not a perspective on the issue under discussion unless you personally feel that it is. If you do, then it’s on you to show the relevance and how it has bearing.
They didn’t used to. For people convinced that all laws were written to favor men, it may be surprising how vehemently condoms used to be condemned, even though those were a primary tool for men to avoid the consequences of impregnating women. Apparently morality laws against “fornication” were taken dead seriously, regardless of gender.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. As Wikipedia puts it, " The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States."
What’s precise is to say that the USA’s national government is a federal government, because that is a correct description of the structure of our national government. But to claim that that federal-government structure means that no US national government exists is not precise, and not even accurate.
I don’t want to create a hijack on this issue, so this is the last I’ll say on it: if you want to say the federal government is the national government, I won’t quibble about it. But it’s a rather hollow & meaningless argument, as we rarely call it a national government. A good question to ask yourself is, why do we call it that?
Condoms were illegal? Really?
I guess I’m not surprised given our puritanical culture.
I think it’s easier to make sense if you understand that one of those situations was legitimately about the freedom to live one’s life, and the other is probably at least 50% about fundraising and political grifting.
Actually, while there have been arrests for the possession of condoms, it is because police are trying to crack down on prostitution, and females are being arrested because police see the possession of condoms by them as evidence. When Having Condoms Gets You Arrested – Mother Jones
Wow. I had no idea. Of course they are targeting trans women.
And for decades after they weren’t flatly illegal anymore, they were sold under the prescription “for the prevention of disease only”.
In fact the objection to abortion being about “killing the unborn” is mostly a post-Roe concern. before then abortion was legally considered of a piece with laws banning contraceptives.
I didn’t know (or forgot) this history.
And were these restrictions on condoms finally removed by Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) due to an infringement on the right to privacy?
From the link:
Reiss said. “It’s about legal capacity: you wake up on your 18th birthday with legal rights of adulthood.”
It never occurred to me that legally married minors are not automatically emancipated. That they cannot file for divorce in many (all?) jurisdictions.
This site has quite a bit of information, including all of the variations per state:
https://www.unchainedatlast.org/
If any law shouldn’t be left to 50 individual states – this is it.
Come on now. There are obvious benefits in a central government delegating powers and responsibilities to smaller constituent entities. The US didn’t invent it, nor perfect it, nor does it need to think about getting rid of states.
Where the US is unique is the exaltation of the State’s powers and sovereignty, and this is 100% because slave states wanted to maximize their power to resist abolition. There is no other reason to pretend that an administrative division of a nation is actually a nation unto itself. All of this stuff about states being the “laboratory of democracy” or whatever, the only experiment anyone really had in mind was slavery abolition (or preservation or expansion depending on perspective).
That’s one reason the deification of federalism in the abstract is so distasteful to me. When you realize that it was mainly a strategy for protecting slavery, and you see states’ rights consistently used for similar oppressive policies toward women and other minorities, why insist on hardline support for it in every case? Why do “states’ rights” always seem to be argued in furtherance of limiting the civil rights of certain of its inhabitants? Why do we have to keep maintaining artificial national divisions that enable oppression and inequality simply because certain regions want to deprive civil rights from its inhabitants?
“That’s what was written on the parchment 250 years ago” is not an acceptable answer.
The states are NOT “administrative divisions” to whom power and responsibilities were “delegated”. It was originally the other way around: the states agreed to ratify a constitution forming a federal government, which did include the states formally ceding many sovereign powers (Article One, Section Ten), but said federal government was sold as having no powers not delegated to it. Governments being what they are the Fed has aggregated a lot more power to itself than originally anticipated, either by approved constitutional amendment or else by realpolitik. If you’ve ever read the Anti-Federalist Papers, a lot of the fears they voiced and which the Federalists poo-pooed as paranoid in fact came true.
The people ratified the constitution, not the states themselves. See McCulloch v. Maryland (1818). States, however, ratified the amendments - except the Twenty-First Amendment, which was ratified by the people.
~Max
What if the citizens of that state want Asians to be slaves (because we can’t do the Black ones any more)? What if the citizens of a state want all trans people executed for being evil? What if the citizens of a state want divorce to be illegal and anyone who travels to their state is still married in their original marriage? That can make life a living hell for some people, but it’s what the citizens of that state wanted.
And your twisting of the use of choice is noted. Liberals support the individual choice, not the majority choice to limit everyone.
We originally had a government of individual states working together. That was the Articles of Confederation. It worked so well that within 10 years the collective states had to convene another Continental Congress to fix it, which they did by replacing it with the Constitution.
The Constitution was explicitly written to give primary authority to the national level in matters under its jurisdiction.
The Constitution does legitimately limit federal powers. However, the history of this nation has been the recognition that equal protection of rights should be extended to all citizens everywhere, and that the federal government should protect the people against the tyranny of the states as much as the states protect against the tyranny of the nation.
This is a legitimate question. Can anyone provide an example where states rights has been an argument to defend anything that does not oppress some segment of the population?
I think not. States occasionally do extend greater protections than the federal government, but that’s never termed “states rights”. It’s “liberal overreach” or “treason”. States’ rights is a right wing political term.
The climate and geography of California can create unusually severe problems with air pollution. It is normal for there to be no rain for eight months straight. The air is trapped by some pretty serious mountains. We have many special regulations of automobiles to address those issues.