For the Record: I am neither “a liberal” nor am I pro-choice. Since you’ve got such a nasty habit of misrepresenting the law I figured I should set the record straight about something else you were misrepresenting.
Enjoy,
Steven
Irrespective of your personal opinions, it has to be acknowledged that there is no connection between financial obligations and PRIVACY.
Let’s hope you don’t confuse the two in real life.
Bill collector calls: Pay the light bill.
Razorsharp: MY BODY, MY CHOICE! STOP VIOLATING MY PRIVACY YOU STUPID BILL COLLECTOR
Ok, this is getting silly. I tried to chime in earlier by pointing out
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The biological/socail inequities that a system of law that favors the woman is designed to correct, and
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The fact that courts ARE sensitive to rampant injustice, and to the extent they come up with unjust opinion, they are trapped by difficult policy decisions or shoddy laws handed down from the legislature.
I know it’s alot more fun to tear into people who take issue with your more elusive points- that the two cases conflict or not, most noteably. But this is a fruitless pursuit. You’re both arguing about procedural/precendental problems in the law, but that’s not what you both really care about.
Razorsharp would not be happy if Gomex was decided on different law or didn’t exist; he’d still have an issue with legislatures that didn’t read Roe as freeing men from child support. (Yea, I know that’s a gross generalization, but work with me.)
Razor’s opponents arn’t going to prove jack, because there are OODLES of conflicting Supreme Court cases. Take a look at the sequence of Takings cases that pit Justice Brennan against Justice Scalia, for example. Each case, starting with Penn Central flies in the face of the opinions before; disingenious nods to dare stasis abound.
What I’m trying to get at here is that the technical, legal argument you folks are making is just a proxy for moral sensibilities. The court opinions are irrelevant except as a device to explain these moral sensibilities as they play out in reality. Let’s stop playing lawyer (even those of us who ARE lawyers). We’re not in a court room- we don’t need to argue with the proxy of case law. Take off the gloves and argue your beliefs on the merits.
-C
astro: I would not bet that the David A. Roberts from ACFC is the same as the person on this board who claims to be named David Allen Roberts. ACFC appears to be dedicated to father’s rights and does not appear to have a deadbeat-wannabe agenda in any way similar to that espoused by our new friend. There are pro-deadbeat organizations out there, however, including the group that runs the web site with those court cases I linked to on page 2.
Good post, Max C. However, I disagree with:
I think it is perfectly clear that Roe and Gomez deal with different issues and do not conflict. Your takings example is wrong - each case is dealing with the same topic. If you compared a takings case with a Right to Counsel case, then said they conflicted with each other, you’d be more along the lines of what Razorsharp is trying to prove. Seeing as how that point was the title of the thread (Roe’s “Dirty Little Secret” was that it “conflicted” with Gomez), it is an important issue. And it is not merely an issue of moral sensibilities, but an attempt to educate Razorsharp and others, who may actually listen, in the actual law. Fighting Ignorance and all.
Sure there are moral issues underpining the arguments, but they are not mutually exclusive from the legal arguments as you imply. You could easily think that Gomez and Roe don’t conflict and still feel that child support laws are unfair to men.
As for rubbin’ liberal’s noses…, I wasn’t intending to single you out. If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t force it on your foot.
I am not misrepresenting the law, I am exposing a gross inequity in the law through, I admit, my own personal conjecture with regard to conflicting interests.
As for misrepresenting the law, we need look no further that the Supreme Court in its ruling in Roe v Wade.
See, the whole issue of “privacy” is one of those “fairy-tales” I was referring to.
Now certainly, “privacy” is a penumbral Constitutional right of the individual, but that was not really being addressed in Roe, it was more or less an excuse put forth by plaintiff’s counsil that was used to justify the Court’s ruling to satisfy the politics of feminism.
The real issue was that the State of Texas had a law that forbade a particular medical proceedure. This law was, in no way, a violation of anyone’s “right to privacy” anymore than a state’s law against gambling is not an infringement of one’s right to privately spend their own money as they see fit.
A “right” to an abortion? The fact that a second party must perform the proceedure negates the concept of a “right”.
However, the plaintiff retained every" right" to go to the closet, get a coathanger and privately go to work on the problem at hand.
Oh, how insensitive of me!
Blalron, I gotta give you some credit, you really have been putting forth that old “college try”. You just haven’t been able to really put your finger on the issue.
See, when one enters into a consentual relationship with the local utilities provider, a mutual agreement exists between the two parties. The utility company agrees to provide a service and the customer agrees to the “financial obligation” to pay for the services rendered.
This differs greatly from a consentual sexual encounter between two seperate parties. See, if a pregnancy accidently results, the woman is under no obligation to the man’s expectations. It is a “private” concern of the woman’s.
Ergo, under “the rule of law”, the foundation upon which the American legal system is founded, a second party, not bound by a contractual agreement to the first party, is under no obligation to the “private concern” of that first party.
As concerned with the issue of “freedom of choice”, the fact that the second party is obligated to the first, while the first has no obligation to the second, creates an inequity that is not compatible with the American system of “Equal Justice Under the Law”.
You are exactly right and, although we haven’t seen eye to eye on all aspects of this issue, I would like to commend you on your intelligent responses and your admission of there being two viewpoints to consider. Unlike others who suffer from an ideological myopia.
Thanks,
David Allan Roberts
(speaking of myopia) There most certainly is a conflict.
Do you not think that the wages that one earns through the labor of one’s person should not also fall under the umbrella of privacy?
See, if the Constitution provides a penumbral right of privacy, that right extends to all Americans.
Ok, we’re going away from points of law? Then I may end up switching teams, we’ll see how it goes. The law is fairly clear on the issue, but if the law is what it should be is another arguement. I was arguing against Razorsharp not because I disagree with him(I mentioned earlier that I’m pro-life) but because he was simply wrong on points of law. Here are the propositions for the reproductive rights arguement. All of this assumes consensual adults.
It seems a clear distinction needs to be made. Do we, as a society under the rule of law, wish to seperate the act of sex from its potential biological consequences? Right now the laws have been written in a way that does NOT make this seperation. There is no official “opt out”. For BOTH parties the decision to have sex is the same as the decision to accept the consequences of pregnancy, should it occur. This is the position of the law.
Now, Razorsharp, and some others have argued that legal, safe, elective abortions have put an unofficial(although they insist it was official, I contend they just misunderstand the intent behind the law) “opt out” into the process for the woman. The point they’re missing is that abortions were NOT made legal so women could “opt out” of the consequenses of sex. Abortions were made legal so a woman could retain her autonomy. Her right to be sovreign in her own body. This sovreignty can ONLY be challenged if exercise thereof would cause harm to another being. The courts have decided that protection of law does not extend to the unborn(the piece I disagree with), so a woman has a choice, thanks to her biology giving her control over the biological process of pregnancy in the post-sex, pre-birth timeframe. This choice does NOT exist to give the woman an “opt out” of parenthood. This is a side effect of the greater goal of giving the woman sovreignty over her body.
So now people are claiming that there is an imbalance. Women have an “opt out”, an implicit one, under the law and men have no such thing. A decision needs to be made. Are we, as a society under the rule of law, going to divorce sex from its biological consequenses of parenthood? If so, then both parties need an explicit “opt out”. If not, then something needs to be done to educate the population to understand that a woman’s ability to get a legal elective abortion is not an “opt out”. It is a side effect of a right she has always posessed combined with the nature of human reproduction having the woman as the carrier of the child.
Overall I’m not sure which way we should go. I already see lots of good pre-conception “opt out” opportunities thanks to improved methods of birth control. All of these pre-conception options make it more and more common to enjoy sex without consequences, and I’m a big fan of sex myself. The less strings attached to the act the better IMHO.
OTOH I’m absolutely NOT a fan of the one post-conception “opt out” that currently exists(well, adoption could be considered a second “opt out”, and I’m fine with it). I can’t say that I see good arising of allowing men to “opt out” of financial support post-conception. Higher tax rates, more welfare recipients, and bitter lawsuits seems to be the most likely outcome of such a decision.
Enjoy,
Steven
I’ll stick with the law. Up until now criticisim of Roe as a mischaracterization of the law hasn’t been the subject of the thread. The thread has been about the contention that
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The Supreme Court conspired to delay the Gomez decision because
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It would have undermined their decision in Roe.
They didn’t, and it doesn’t. First, both decisions were 7-2, but it wasn’t the same 7 and the same 2. White and Rehnquist dissented in Roe; Stewart and Rehnquist dissented in Gomez. This means White would have been inexplicably participating in a conspiracy to protect a decision with which he dissented, and Stewart refused to do so. Only Rehnquist remained firm, although he inexplicably failed to ever mention the conspiracy in dissent in Gomez. This makes the moon hoax look plausible by comparison.
Secondly, just because one perceives an apparent conflict in the law doesn’t mean there is one. Me, for example, I think that the fact that you can vote or die in a war at 18 but you can’t drink a beer until you’re 21 is stupid and the laws are conflicting. That’s not a legal argument, however, and if I tried to take it to court couched in those terms it would get dismissed so fast I’d get the dizzies. They seem to be in conflict and offend my sense of equity but actually deal with different areas of the law, different state and federal issues, etc.
It’s the same with Roe and Gomez. They may offend your sense of fairness, but legally, they aren’t in conflict. They deal with different areas of the law. Any constitutional scholar and any constitutional law hornbook will tell you the same thing. At least six lawyers posting to this thread are telling you the same thing, and they aren’t in the habit of agreeing with each other. Rather, they are paid to do the opposite, and having to all be in agreement irritates them like an hour they can’t bill. It has nothing to do with ideology. Those two decisions deal with different areas of the law.
Chicken 
It’s not that, it’s just that I hold no personal opinions whatsoever. 
Damn, that’s a good idea!
Okay, that brief hiatus was rather plesant, but now it is time to revisit the “points of law”, so to speak.
Now I will clarify why the Court was in error in hearing Gomez vs. Perez under the pretext of an “equal protection” issue.
First, let’s acknowledge that the politics of feminism was in high-gear during the Supreme Court sessions of 1972 - 73, and the Supreme Court was sympathetic to the cause.
Being sympathetic to the feminist agenda, the Court agreed to hear Roe vs. Wade under the pretext of a violation of an individual’s penumbral “right of privacy”.
As previously illustrated, there was no violation of privacy involved in Roe. The Texas law in question was a law that forbade a specific medical proceedure.
This law was, in no way, a violation of anyone’s “right to privacy” anymore than a state’s law against gambling is not an infringement of one’s right to privately spend their own money as they see fit.
The pretext of “privacy” was the issue put before the court by those pushing the agenda. The Court, sympathetic to the “agenda”, accepted the pretext.
Now that it has been established that the Supreme Court will prostitute itself for an “agenda”, is it really that hard of a stretch that the Court would hear Gomez, another “agenda” based case, under an equally non-existant pretext? I think not.
First, the institution of marriage existed long before the state of Texas or any Texas state law.
A child born within the institution of marriage was automatically a party to that marriage contract and had two parents.
A child born outside the institution of marriage only had one parent and was not a member of marital contract.
Then came the state of Texas.
Texas law recognized the institution of marriage and had to deal with the issue of divorce.
Children born within a marriage were privileged to certain benefits that children born outside of marriage did not have. This had nothing to do with the legislature of the State of Texas. Texas law dealing with the issue of divorce only extended provisions that already existed for children classified as “legitimate”.
Texas law did not create two seperate classes of people, the two classes already existed independent of and prior to Texas law.
Now, the State of Texas did not violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution, therefore, the Supreme Court was in error in taking on Gomez under the pretext of an “equal protection” violation.
That issue, like “privacy” in Roe, was just the tool used to facilitate the “agenda”.
Why do you bring Roe vs Wade into this? Even if Roe NEVER HAPPENED, the man would still have no choice in the event of pregnancy. Neither would the woman, who carries the child in her belly for 9 months. Should we take away the womans control over her body just to make things fairer for you?
Bless your heart, no one is taking away any “control” that a woman has over her own body. And nothing I have said during this whole thread even suggests such a thing.
I don’t understand your statement, would you please clarify?
Still gettin’ viewed, must have been the coup de grace.