No, those protests do not offend my sense of morality at all, they offend my sense of propriety, which is an entirely different sense altogether.
And if it looked like I was casting about for multiple reasons in my defense, it may be because I was about the only defender of the law in that thread, and was responding to numerous people.
Is it proper for people to codify their sense of proper societal behavior? Sometimes. In this case I think it probably is - again, vast majorities of both major parties agree, and the legislation seems to have been well crafted so as not to unduly inconvenience others.
In any case, criticizing me for waiting until page 4 of the thread wasn’t especially fair. I was convinced from discussions in other threads that this was in fact constitutional, and was discussing case law throughout the discussion.
Perhaps legal training didn’t enter into it, but you certainly were implying that I wasn’t debating honestly by saying what you did. That didn’t seem at all fair to me, and I think you ought to clarify or retract that.
This isn’t fair. “Reasonable justification” is something that Moto (and any of us) can have without resorting to a court case to tell us it is so.
Nobody thinks funeral restrictions are needed because other rights are subject to restriction. People think that funeral restrictions are not unconstitutional because of a variety of similar restrictions that are considered legal. This is the way to respond to people telling you the restrictions are illegal.
Better then to give up the idea entirely because someone comes up with a potentially incorrect complaint that it is unconstitutional?
Agree with him or not, Mr. Moto believes that people who are burying their loved ones shouldn’t have to deal with a crowd of protestors who want to use that death as a PR stunt. Not only does he believe it, he put in the effort to find cites to back up that belief in the face of many people telling him the restrictions would be illegal.
Mr. Moto: Fine. It was not at all curious that it took you four pages to get around to mentioning *Grayned v. City of Rockwell * in defense of your position.
Justification? Protests at funerals hurt the bereaved. Doesn’t take a lawyer to figure that out.
Reasonable impingement on a constitutional right? Lots of case law, but ultimately it comes down to finding a balance between protecting bereaved from being hurt and limiting restrictions on a person’s right of free speech. Doesn’t take a lawyer to form an opinion, one way or ther other, on that either.
Lawyers can help form questions, structure arguments, and provide precedents, but they do not have the corner on opinions on what is reasonable when two important issues collide.
In the continued interests of clarity, I wish to emphasize once more that I never stated, believed, nor intended to imply that only lawyers can have opinions about legal discussions. This thread title is the result of an hallucination.
This is pretty much what I wanted to say, except much more cryptic and unaccessible. So I’ll note for the record that I’m technically doing a “me too” here.
The average citizen, specifically non-lawyer, is a critical part of discussions of US law. Authority for laws flows from these citizens, and their consent to form the government established in said laws. They need to be involved to give their views of the law in question. How it represents their wishes or offers them some benefit. Legal frameworks are often cryptic, so they need to learn exactly what has been done, or is being done, in their name by their representatives. Those who focus, full time, on the law(lawyers, and politicians) tend to be too close to the issue to see it clearly. They need the perspective of the man on the street. So it’s about both ownership and education. The people own the law, and they should participate in its maintenance.