Back up a minute. In post #5, you made the following claim:
Bolding mine.
Where is your cite for this? Remember, this is General Questions, where factual responses are required. A friend told me… is NOT a factual response.
It’s “factual.” I don’t have an impartial external searchable cite for it, but what I said was absolutely “factual.” You chose the wrong word to base your cavil upon.
However, that ain’t what I came here to say: my city councilmember never answered my inquiry, and I promised I’d bump to tell if that happened.
Then show that it is factually true, as opposed to false.
This raises an important general point. What you said wasn’t a fact: it was a sentence.
Your friend may have said this sentence. You may have accurately relayed that sentence. (We don’t know that either of these is true. You may have misheard or misremembered what was said. Your friend may have misunderstood the case or been making wild accusations to put the blame elsewhere. There is a long string of time and people involved and error may have crept in at any point.)
Even if you accurately gave us the original, it means nothing. A mere statement by a layman isn’t the law. Worse, you have done no research or put in any effort (except one failed phone call) to determine what the law actually is. You can’t provide backup for the truth of the statement. In fact, people have shown that other similar cases were allowed.
You’ve been insisting that a FOAF communication is a fact, that the person who said it must be knowledgeable, that it must be considered evidence of a larger truth, and that all our counterevidence and skepticism must bow before it. You haven’t built a castle on sand; you built it on air.
That the fact in question is so small and meaningless actually makes this a good case study. If people will go to this effort to insist that a ridiculously trivial statement must be true just because they want to believe in it, then think of the lengths they’ll go to while “proving” that some important, emotional, religious, or political statement “must” be true, especially in the face of unified opposition.
That’s a major reason why I like the Dope so much. People can’t get away with that sort of nonsense here. Whether the items are big or small doesn’t matter - and shouldn’t. The mindset behind one is the same as the other, and the tools used to battle them are equally similar. The refusal to admit defeat no matter the evidence is the same as well.
I hope you walk away from this knowing a fact is and isn’t. Even if not, everybody else will. And that’s the big victory.
And, indeed, it was a phone call to someone who would be very unlikely to be able to resolve the question definitively.
I can’t…but neither can anyone prove it false. It’s anecdotal evidence, which, while of limited use, is not “contra-factual.”
If someone asks, in GQ, “Is X possible,” one of us might answer, “Yes, it is, and I have done it.” That’s a factual answer, but, alas, nothing any of us can verify. It can be added to the balance of evidence. If someone else quotes the New England Journal of Medicine saying “X is not possible,” then the preponderance of evidence is against X, and the personal testimony has to be viewed as unsupported.
That doesn’t make it “non-factual.” The NEJM has been wrong before. Anecdotal evidence is not false for being hard to support. The claim is still factual.
We don’t get to say, “The NEJM says no, so you were lying.” We only get to say, “There may be something wrong with the way you performed the experiment, and we have questions that you aren’t able to answer here.”
Skepticism is good. Calling each other liars is way bad.
Here’s an example. You’re wrong. You have stated something that is factually incorrect. It is not a lie; but what you wrote, there, is untrue. I did research. I did not succeed in my research, but I did Google several municipal code cites, and read through a lengthy section of municipal code having to do with signage.
(Also, my contact with my city councilmember was via email, not a phone call, so you’re wrong there, too.)
I do not get to call you a liar. I do get to say that what you just said is false.
(Email…) Yes, that is a valid statement of a true problem.
One thing I forget to mention in my case study and regret.
Absolutely has to have the last word.
A common example is municipal codes that require a fee for signs, but waive that fee for church signs. That would be unconstitutional because it is not content-neutral (signs saying certain things get the fee waived), and probably would also be unconstitutional because of giving recognition to religion.
But this kind of exception is common, I think, and hardly ever challenged. Probably because any business who complained that they had to pay a fee while the church down the block didn’t would likely be boycotted by the members of that church (and probably other churches in town). So business realities prevent them from complaining.
Just like the comments about government regulators dealing with a store employee wearing a “piss Christ” t-shirt – the whole idea is silly; it would not happen, because long before government got involved, the store owner would make the employee change the offensive shirt. Lots of employers have dress codes, that prohibit much more mundane clothing choices than that. And you follow them if you want a job.
I think how that is normally handled is by waiving the fee (or making some other exception) not for churches, but for non-profit organizations in general ( which includes but is not limited to churches). For example, in my city the Dept of Sanitation collects garbage from residential buildings, properties exempt from real estate tax and some non-profits located in buildings that are not exempt from real estate tax. Businesses must arrange and pay for a private sanitation service.
Trinopus, you are failing to understand what people are criticizing in your argument.
You have done research that is irrelevant to the question people are challenging you on. That is pretty much the same as not doing research.
Here’s the problem: Assuming every fact in your anecdote was true. It would still not be evidence for the legal assertion you have made. Do you understand why?
You’re not being accused of lying. You’re being accused of not understanding what you’re talking about.
I’ll be totally honest: no. I don’t understand what you’re saying here, and it is entirely possible that I don’t understand what I’m talking about.
I had what I thought was valid stories from more than one source that indicated that the First Amendment was limited in its application to company names and store signs.
This was settled in the affirmative in the earliest posts in this thread, to one particular regard: the city can charge you money for the right to put up a sign over your store-front. So, right from the get-go, the matter is shown to be correct.
If my experiences and those of the people I’ve talked to are incorrect, okay, I’m wrong. If I’m so confused that I don’t even comprehend the matter in question, well, help me out. Make it clear.
But don’t accuse me of “not doing any research,” because that is not true.
Simply saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about” is not fighting ignorance.
People in this thread—including me—have tried to explain it to you in a dozen different ways. And you have kept repeating the same thing regardless of what anyone has said. It’s too late to say that people haven’t tried to fight your ignorance.
And frankly I’m tired of trying to find another way of explaining it when all the evidence is that you won’t pay attention to what is actually being said.
But I’ll try one more time: evidence of what a city is doing or has done in the past or what is written in a city ordinance or what a city official thinks the law is is not by itself evidence of what the First Amendment allows a city to do.
You are starting from the wrong end of the question.
When asking what a principal of constitutional law is, you don’t go looking for anecdotal examples. You look for statements of constitutional law by an authority that has the power to make such statements, namely, a court.
Do you understand that?
Missed edit —
Your anecdotes have no evidentiary value unless they end with a court saying “yes, this city ordinance is constitutional and its enforcement in this case was also constitutional.” Or “no …” etc.
Without that, it’s merely something that happened. It’s not evidence of what the state of free speech law is under these circumstances.
To be honest, not entirely. If a city does and can infringe on the content of a store’s signage – and hasn’t been struck down by the courts – then it seems that the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
(Please note, at this point I’m only saying “if,” because all of my specific examples appear to be wrong.)
What do you do when there isn’t any clear verdict from a court? Even before the Miranda decision, we had the right not to self-incriminate, but we didn’t enjoy that right, because the police could take our statements as self-incriminating. When the police can do that kind of thing, how am I supposed to think, “Well, it isn’t constitutional?” It must be constitutional: the police do it every day.
How do we hold discussions of this type, here, in this forum? Is everything we say vacated, because it doesn’t come from a court?
Thank you for trying to be clear, but there are still questions I don’t know the answers to.
You’re wrong. Courts only intervene in certain circumstances. If an issue hasn’t been brought to a court in the proper way, the court has no power to say anything.
The proper conclusion is not that the First Amendment doesn’t apply. The proper conclusion is only “that particular city action has not been tested in the courts.” Period. You can make no conclusions of law beyond that, because the law has not spoken.
You say, what I said above—“That particular city action has not been tested in the courts.”
Then what you do is find a court ruling* in a similar circumstance and say, “Because this is how a court ruled in Circumstance X, this is how it might or might not rule in Circumstance Y, because of a, b, and c similarities and differences.”
What you don’t and cannot do is assume that what the city did is constitutional—just because no court has said it is or it isn’t—and try to invent a principle of law or exception that accounts for its being constitutional. That’s absolutely, 100 percent wrong.
*Or some other authoritative source, like a memorandum of law by an attorney general.
And take this into account—local governments are violating people’s constitutional rights all the time. It’s just that it takes time and effort and money and help and expertise to realize it and to stop them from doing it. So the fact that a local government is doing it says nothing about whether it’s constitutional.
I’m very glad you added this! I was getting worried that the Constitution had meaning only when decreed by the courts! That would make the profession of “Constitutional Scholar” impossible.
I can dig that.
I do apologize for being befouled here; some of it is that this is very complex; some of it is simple disagreement; some of it is that I may have been given bad examples by people I know. The only thing I want to close with, in my own defense, is that I have honestly tried to do the research, and I have NEVER posted anything I did not believe was factually true. Any accusations against me contrary to that are factually wrong.
Remember, however, that until a court adopts the reasoning, it’s still only someone’s opinion about what the law should be or probably is. Only a court can definitively state what the law actually is.
A constitutional scholar’s opinion carries more weight than yours or mine, but if the court disagrees with him or her, then that opinion doesn’t actually state what the law is.
As a practical matter, only a court can give the constitution meaning. That’s how our system works. Until a court speaks, it’s pretty much all just yakking.