Every time the Supreme Court lays down a decision expanding rights, such as in Citizens United, Heller, Roe, the Hobby Lobby case, there’s always a hue and cry from various quarters depending on whose ox got gored. We’ve got another such case coming up, the Colorado bakery case. Smart money, IMO, is on the baker. 1st amendment almost always wins when the result is in doubt.
So enough already. Unless you subscribe to the idea that no rights are absolute and the government can limit them in any way it sees fit as long as it has a good reason, then shut up. Our system requires the government to meet a very high bar before allowing any limitation on our basic rights and liberties. Chances are, as an American, you hold at least one right to be near absolute. For some of you, it will be reproductive rights. News flash: other countries regulate abortion. Many actually require you to seek permission for a 2nd trimester abortion. Some of you like freedom of speech to be absolute, at least as it applies to art. Well, other countries don’t recognize that right either. If you offend someone or question the social order, in addition to social ostracism you can face government coercion. Many countries ban flag burning. In France it is illegal to boo the national anthem or “insult” the President.
We have a culture of liberty here and it’s time to celebrate it, or at least accept it with dignity rather than whining every time some social issue you consider important gets subordinated to the quaint concept of liberty. Our system defends the rights you hold sacred, so accept that it will also defend rights you don’t consider as important.
You have the right to be obscene, to express hateful ideas, to get an abortion, to own a gun, to practice your religion even when it’s inconvenient for others, and you can speak out for your chosen candidate as much as you want and spend as much money as you want doing it. You can even blaspheme! You can burn a flag, or a Bible, or a Koran! If all this liberty upsets you, there are 200 other places on Earth where things are doine more to your liking.
Ah, so if SCOTUS decides we again need the right to own other people, we should shut up about it? SCOTUS rules that law clerks don’t have to give marriage licences to same sex couples? Repeal of all child labor and workpalce safety laws?
You’re a fucking moron. I thought you were getting more reasonable, but no. Same old idiot.
You have a narrow view on what rights are. Telling a bigot he can deny services to gay people is an advance for the rights of bigots - and a reduction for the rights of gay people. Conservatives love to expand the rights of people whose views they agree with.
It’s not very smart to take a concept to unreasonable lengths. There is no conceivable Supreme Court that is going to allow slavery or let government workers opt out of doing their jobs.
We have a culture of liberty that our Supreme Court strives to uphold. If you want them to look at rights cases differently, then advocate for that. But you can’t expect them to observe your particular preferences on an arbitrary, case-by-case basis. The same court that says you can donate $5 billion to elect a candidate also says you can get an abortion without government interference. If you give up one, you give up the other.
In that particular case, it’s relgiious freedom, which is a core, enumerated right, vs. the right to be served at every cake shop, which is a mere statute. Statutes < enumerated constitutional rights.
The ‘right’ to freely spread hate, in the form of lies and misrepresentation + a willfully ignorant per cent of population, has the potential to cost you your nation. History is littered with the evidence, ignore it at your peril.
The right to speak and spread hate against others, is a big part of what is currently threatening to tear your nation apart. It has put a liar in charge. Who spends his time discrediting the media, so that they will be disbelieved when the time comes. And the time IS coming. You should be afraid, not proud, of the path your nation has chosen, in my opinion.
There are ammendments to your constitution for good reason. And there will be more. Your attitude guarantees it, I should think.
Defending the right to spread and be hateful reflects very badly on you as a person. But I doubt anyone here is surprised.
If a SCOTUS ruling can’t make us suppress our opinions*, why should we defer to you, of all people?
If you don’t like these discussions, your logical course of action is to just stay out of them. Or complain about them if you want, and we’ll comment on them and you as we see fit.
*speaking generically, of course - I’m a Canadian, in Canada. SCOTUS rulings have no effect on me, though I’ll casually express my opinion if the issue interests me.
Just recognize that people you don’t like have rights, and becuase they have rights, you have rights. Limit theirs, and yours will also be limited. If you want a system like Britain’s, where Parliament can pass any law it wants, then all it takes is one amendment to grant Congress supremacy.
But I think you know what rights would fall by the wayside if we did that, and they wouldn’t be the ones you want to be limited.
I partly agree with OP. The anger directed against his reasonable opinion reminds of the politically correct extremism that is polarizing our country … and making it harder for Democrats to win elections.
In the first quoted paragraph, adaher correctly rebukes the absurd “slippery slope” used against him. But in the second paragraph adaher is the one who is absurd: If we want women’s rights, we have to allow political campaigns to be controlled by the kleptocrats? Nonsense!
The following post goes much too far in its condemnation of adaher, but still makes an important point:
Contrary to the stinking drivel belched from right-wing orifices, the Bill of Rights are not eternal truths presented to Moses by Yahweh. Let’s examine the (gasp!) facts that led to the adoption of the First Amendment.
During the Revolutionary War, it was the rebels who suppressed royalist newspapers. I trust that even right-wing morons could grasp, had they open minds, that the First Amendment arose in a very different environment that that of today.
Today, we have thousands of opinions mostly wrong — available to us. And pompous lying morons installed in the White House using their “free speech” to tell us what news is truthful and which is Fake. It is right-wing lies, lately by the government itself, that impede the flow of information today. At election time, whichever kleptocrat blares its lies the loudest often prevails. This is a travesty, a reductio ad absurdem of “free speech.”
Yet adaher would have us believe that laws promoting kleptocracy are the price we must pay for allowing 2nd-trimester abortions?
I’ve changed my mind, and will join in the condemnation. @ adaher — These days, you often seem intelligent, informed and good-spirited. But here your mind has lost its grip.
The two are of course not directly related, since one decision was decided by a mostly liberal court and the other by a mostly conservative court.
However, both decisions were only made possible by a legal culture that prioritizes rights over the desires of government and society. In most countries, you cannot donate as much as you want to political campaigns AND you can’t get a 2nd trimester abortion without permission. you can’t own a gun without permission, you can’t say anything hateful(and the government decides what is hateful), and if you’re Muslim, you might not even have the right to dress appropriate to your faith. Needless to say, anti-hijab laws are a non-starter here. Of course, we could change that for the sake of making bakers serve gays.
Again: if you think whether or not bakers are forced to serve gays is on the list of major issues threatening our once-great country, then I suggest you have your psychiatrist adjust your dosages.
So, adaher, in your view when the Civil Rights Act of '64 said you couldn’t refuse someone a public accommodation based on their race, was that simply a removal of rights? After all, it didn’t make any exception for those with a sincere religious belief that Blacks and whites shouldn’t eat at the same lunch counter. Or do you perhaps acknowledge that the act recognized and protected a right to live free of (some forms of) race-based discrimination?
In any case, your characterization of this as one side being in favor of protecting people’s rights, and the other being about taking them away, is reducing the argument to a strawman. Nobody is saying “gays should have rights but religious bakers shouldn’t.” They’re saying (A) religious freedom should have limits, and (B) one of those limits should be you can’t use your religion as an excuse to deny people their civil rights.
On (A), I would hope you already agree. You might disagree with (B), but at least you could argue that point rather than pretending anyone is actually making the patently absurd claim that “people we don’t like” shouldn’t have rights.
Were there people with sincere religious beliefs who objected to racial mixing? Were any cases brought to the court system based on religious objections?
I have found no reference to religious concerns to civil rights laws based on race from the time period. By contrast, Presidential statements and the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage acknowledged that there would be sincere differences on the issue based on religious belief. Which in turn means that sometimes there would be conflict between religious practice and gay marriage. And sure enough…
I’d also note that this same argument came up in the Hobby Lobby case, and that issue had nothing to do with civil rights. In that case, it was something as minor as free birth control(as opposed to cheap birth control) vs. religious freedom. And many thought religious freedom should lose there as well.
So exactly when WOULD you favor religious freedom over a law?
The main argument people seem to be using against my view here is that maybe the Supreme Court might someday decide a case in a really awful way. But my argument centers around what has actually happened recently and what is likely to happen in the future.
But I think that there are three aspects to every actual SCOTUS decision expanding rights:
The stakes for the class objecting to the expanded liberty were much less than the stakes for the class receiving the recognition of their liberties.
Both the left and the right have consistently lost whenever they stood against rights and liberties. The presence of a swing court has been a very good thing for liberty vs. statism.
Despite the hue and cry, the effects of these rulings have been extremely small or nonexistent for the class that didn’t directly benefit. Heller hasn’t increased gun crime. Corporate influence has not risen in politics, if anything the bases have more influence now than in the past. Women are not suffering from lack of access to birth control because a few companies are exempt from the mandate. Not even at the companies in question. And gays will continue to have no challenges getting people to help them with their weddings.
The only participants in a gay marriage are the couple, the state, and (if necessary) the officiant; the couple obviously agrees with it, the state may not legitimately disagree with it, and I do not know of any attempts to force private officiants to marry same-sex couples.
Kind of amazed that in a thread where you’re apparently extolling the virtues of our system of government, you can make this statement with what I assume is a straight face - in favor of the very thing which is disassembling our system of representative democracy as we speak.
When you allow someone to spend $5 billion to elect someone, you are effectively raising the bar for who can participate in democracy from 325 million people, to the handful of millionaires and billionaires who can afford to pay the cost of admission to have their voice heard. There’s a word for that… it’s not a republic, or a democracy.
It’s an oligarchy. Or, if you like Mussolini’s definition, a fascist state - the merger of corporate power and governmental power.
I tend to agree with you in principle - I am against laws which strip away rights of the majority. AND any law which strips away the right of a minority group - if that right does not cause harm to any other group (IE, ingesting harmful drugs, walking into a public park and unrolling your prayer rug to howl at the moon at 2AM, consensual polygamy, flag-burning, gun-ownership, and on and on.)
Permitting unlimited, unrestricted campaign contributions does not fall under that category, however. All it does in practice is grant rights to a tiny, tiny minority, at the expense of a right for everyone else - the voting franchise. It doesn’t matter if 99.9% of the people vote one way or hold one opinion, in a democracy - if only one individual or handful of individuals’ opinion results in a politician staying in office or being booted out.
Anyone having to attend is also part of it. While not important in the cake case, that is going to hit the Supreme Court in regards to photographers, florists, musicians, etc.