He’s terrified an adult will read it.
I agree that thus far the right to fornicate has fallen under the umbrella of influence by legislatures. I disagree that it ever should have been. When I evaluate what has more impact to individual liberty, choosing who we love is so fundamental I see it not as a right of citizenship, but one of being human. The desire to love and be loved doesn’t start and stop with heterosexuals and constraining that bit of human nature should be beyond the power of the government because it should never have been ceded to them.
I said definitely more than the right to vote, and maybe more than speech. I think of it this way, would I be more impacted if the government said that I could not speak out against the KKK, or a local parking ordinance, or some other thing that I disfavor, or would I be more impacted if the government said I was not allowed to marry my wife? Certainly disallowing my marriage would be more impactful, more harmful to my sense of individual liberty than any of the speech related restrictions. Now if those speech restrictions encompassed limiting redress and the ability of self governance such that oppression or totalitarianism were possible, then maybe the scale flips the other way.
Certain other countries have more restrictive speech laws than the US. I criticize those laws but I still believe they are generally consistent with a free country. All other things being equal, I could conceivably live there and get along just fine. If instead, those countries adopted the US laws around speech, and instituted marriage restrictions such that I could not be married to my wife, then I could not live there.
Speech is fundamental to good governance, but marriage is fundamental to being human. Again, I don’t wear a black robe to work, so that’s just my take on it.
You are pointing out that if there are other operative principles that bar six year olds, then there can also exist other operative principles barring same sex marriage.
This argument isn’t persuasive because the comparison is not on point. Underlying every transaction (including marriage) is an element of consent. Since children cannot consent, generally, children cannot marry. The idea of consent need not be raised when discussing equal treatment because the idea of marriage without consent cannot exist It would no longer be marriage - it would be coercive oppression just as when a slaveowner marries their slave - they are not truly married in any sense of the word, they have enslaved them.
I’d like to know what his real reasons are. It’s possible he could say something to convince me this tactic is wise.
But as it stands now, I think it’s a very poor practice. It continues the “You put one of ours in the hospital, we put one of yours in the morgue,” escalation in response to perceived Democratic abuses when the Democrats were in the majority. I don’t support it.
That’s not precisely what I am pointing out. I am pointing out that “equal treatment,” alone is not the rule, so any reply that merely says, “Equal treatment,” is incorrect.
You add the idea of consent. “Equal treatment of consenting persons,” is not the rule either. The government does not permit an adult consenting father to marry his adult consenting son, even if the two only knew each other as adults and no inherent consent issues might be inferred from the times the son was under age.
I am asking what the actual principles are, and then I am going to ask how we know them and who gets to define them.
I’m assuming that “perceived” implies “not actual” in this case, given that everyone had ample time to read and analyze Obamacare before it was passed. But yay, we’re in agreement there.
Yes – although there was certainly some perception of chicanery afoot. The Democrats passed what amounted to a phony House bill in order to take advantage of reconciliation rules, and the challenge of merging the House and Senate versions gave rise to then-Speaker Pelosi’s famous “But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it…”
So I’d say it was a clever and entirely legal use of Congress rules, but one which the GOP regarded as cheating, because “cheating” happens when the other side uses the rules cleverly to achieve a result you don’t want. When you do it, it’s clever. And the GOP response is now to inflict an even more abusive (but still legal) process on the Democrats. I don’t favor either, but again, the Democrats put a guy in the hospital, and the GOP is responding by putting one in the morgue.
All of this is great, but it is interspersed with phrases like “I see it” and “should never” and a lot of other subjective phrases that simply reflect your view of how society should treat same sex marriage claims. That’s fine for an individual, but when you are a judge, there needs to be more than “it seems like the right thing to do” because that is something that We the People decide.
I think a judge needs to find support for a belief somewhere other than his own personal opinion.
Further, we are playing definitional games with the term “marriage.” All of those prior cases assumed that the definition of “marriage” required the parties to be of the opposite sex. It’s linguistic juggling to say that two men should be able to get “married” on the authority of Loving et al when those cases meant something entirely different by the word.
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Exactly. It’s not a “new right”, it’s a better, more modern understanding of what constitutes pre-existing rights.
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Okay, this one is the winner for linguistic juggling. Who has this “better, more modern understanding”? Judges? It’s certainly not the voters of the 30+ states who passed constitutional amendments limiting marriage to opposite sex couples. All those voters don’t count because their view is not “better”? Better than what? More modern than what?
What makes a view “better” and “more modern”? That you personally agree with it? So long as it is handed down by the Democratic Party? The question of a better view should be decided at the ballot box and not handed down from our lords on high.
Well, let’s just say that egregious cases of unequal treatment – the ban that some states had in place – is not acceptable.
You bring up some amusing and very extreme examples that no one actually favors, so, yeah, “sanity” is also a criterion.
Wake me when West Virginia permits black six year olds to marry but denies the right to white six year olds.
I didn’t actually say “equal treatment alone.” You added that part.
Well yes, I am aware that the law as interpreted doesn’t support my personal view, so I’m making statements about my own view intentionally. Remember, this line of thought stemmed from discussion about PorI. Native to PorI are things like natural and pre-existing rights, things that are not codified specifically. In those instances, there would be an expectation of some amount of reasoning along the lines that I engaged in.
Here is what you said:
My arguments addressed the last sentence.
You added:
If you made some argument other than “equal,” so that you now object to the word “alone,” as a summary, I don’t see the words in your post. Could you highlight them?
You’re imagining a position that no one holds.
The right to vote and the right to own firearms can both be denied to people who have been convicted of felonies, or who are ruled to be insane. “Equal protection” does not constitute a total blanket ban against any such discrimination. No one here has said it does, and your imaginary projection is unwarranted.
Meanwhile, equal protection does protect interracial marriages, and, for almost exactly the same reasons, same sex marriages. There is no valid reason for any prohibition of these, and the efforts to ban them run afoul of the equal protection clause.
You really aren’t making a valid point here, because you aren’t making any point at all. No one here is arguing to allow murderers to vote or own guns; no one is saying the equal protection clause covers all imaginable circumstances.
Well, you did.
But you’re now saying that’s not what you meant, and I certainly accept that.
So now the questions are: what circumstances does it cover, what circumstances does it not cover, and how may an observer distinguish between the two?
Obviously these are questions courts have addressed. Do you adopt the existing legal framework as the correct one?
That does about sum up the differences in philosophy between the parties when it comes to health care.
Democrats want to put sick people into the hospital.
The GOP bill will put them in the morgue.
As far as your arguments that a six year old cannot get married, I dunno about that. You’ll need to talk to my 7 year old niece. She married her 8 year old neighbor. There was a ring and a ceremony, and all her favorite stuffed animals attended too.
If you are talking about whether or not she could enter into a legal contract, that’s a different matter.
You know people are steeped in conservative bullshit when they pull out the Pelosi quote and argue it was about the legislative process. But that is wildly biased historical revisionism, as is obvious from the full context of the quote and the contemporary reporting from non-tabloids.
The Democrats had a lengthy and open process. Their bill was debated in multiple committees. The President met with Republicans on CSPAN to debate the bill. The Senate debated it longer than any other bill in Senate history save one. What happened with the ACA was not some effort to hide the bill from public scrutiny. What happened was that Ted Kennedy died. So the Democrats were unexpectedly forced to use reconciliation–effectively having to pass an old bill instead of a new one, which is pretty hard to spin as a transparency-reducing maneuver. But nice try.
Pelosi’s comments have nothing to do with reconciliation. She was saying that the GOP had so badly misrepresented the bill that people had all kinds of wrong ideas about what was in it. She posited that once it was passed and people saw the effects they would understand that it didn’t include death panels and all the other lies.
She was right, of course. The ACA is now more popular than ever, the further we get from all the lies the GOP has told about it.
Thanks for pointing that out – that phrase is gonna be in Pelosi’s obituary, and most politically aware Americans seem to miss the point of it.
To be scrupulously bend-over-backwards fair, Pelosi did mention the GOP process complaints in her speech:
It’s hardly the focus of the speech, though, nor of her infamous quote. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/15/the-long-and-surprisingly-happy-life-of-nancy-pelosis-pass-the-bill-gaffe/
And … I guess it is not wholly inaccurate to say, as Bricker did, that “the challenge of merging the House and Senate versions gave rise to” Pelosi’s statement. She said it during the reconciliation process (March 2010), and so without that challenge she wouldn’t have had reason to say it. Causality demonstrated, sort of. Maybe that’s what he meant.
But I do think it’s misleading to say that the controversy over the reconciliation process “gave rise to” the quote without context *because the quote is so frequently (and easily) misunderstood as being a quote advocating nefarious subversion of the democratic process. * And it’s not.
Yeah, it was about process in the sense that she and other Democrats believed at the time that the GOP had elevated a bunch of smoke and mirror issues to cover up the fact that the core of the bill was very popular.
It was not about process in the sense that she was saying or acknowledging that the bill was not public but that people would discover its content only once they passed it.
That latter interpretation is just objectively wrong, both on the underlying fact claim of secrecy and on the fair interpretation of Pelosi’s statement. I’m not saying Bricker raised it in bad faith. A lot of people believe it because the conservative media was really successful in misrepresenting it.
This is always how I understood the quote so it was strange to me the objections of its use saying that it was taken out of context. I still think it was a tone deaf dumb thing to say. Pelosi was either implying that the people opposed were stupid or the congress people were stupid, or both.
People don’t have to be stupid to be misled.
Republicans really did mislead people about what was in the bill. Her point was that it’s easy to misrepresent pending legislation. It’s harder to misrepresent facts on the ground.
I think she has been at least partly vindicated. Certainly, she was right about how people would come to understand coverage for pre-existing conditions and the insurance market regulations like no lifetime limits.