Posted on 06/28/2012 6:34:36 PM PDT by Lowell1775
Court tosses law about false claims on medals
Published June 28, 2012
Associated Press
WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a federal law making it a crime to lie about receiving the Medal of Honor and other prized military awards, with justices branding the false claim "contemptible" but nonetheless protected by the First Amendment.
The court voted 6-3 in favor of Xavier Alvarez, a former local elected official in California who falsely said he was a decorated war veteran and had pleaded guilty to violating the 2006 law, known as the Stolen Valor Act. The law, enacted when the U.S. was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, was aimed at people making phony claims of heroism in battle.
The ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ordered that the conviction be thrown out.
"Though few might find respondent's statements anything but contemptible, his right to make those statements is protected by the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech and expression. The Stolen Valor Act infringes upon speech protected by the First Amendment," Kennedy said.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/28/court-tosses-law-about-false-claims-on-medals/?test=latestnews#ixzz1z8p61pwm
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Just wait ‘til I show up in DC in a black robe and tell everybody I’m a Sooooopreme Court Justice!
Thank you for serving!
Kerry must be doing the happy dance tonight.
As far as I know, this guy didn’t claim anything of (monetary) value...
He filed a false VA Benefits application.
They should have handed his sorry butt over to the real Rangers.
Why the /s? It's probably very close to the truth.
Even if he hadn't, I'd still argue that his mischaracterization of his military service and awards should have been criminal.
Agreed.
You have to ask yourself.... Has any current Supreme Justice served the armed forces.
You are so correct.
I just realized that will each passing day obozo seems to offend or tick off someone or some group.
At the rate he is going there will not be a group offended by him. If we are lucky.
You know how to tell if a squid was a SEAL or not? If he was a SEAL he won’t mention it.
Thanks Lowell1775.
Good advice. I read them. Minority opinion asks my same question without a solution. How is it different? Justification by majority is fluff and banter. They uphold bad precedent. Factual lies like this do no harm they say.
A cow in fins does not a fish make as my drunken old rhetoric prof said ad nauseam. It has to be true as well as trendy. It must fortify the soul as well as please the ear.
Robert’s joined the libtards in this lawless modification of unwelcome reality as well.
They must feel God overstepped when He says lying is a sin. It is after all number 9 right after stealing, adultery, and murder...BUT man is so much smarter to rule differently. They correct God like a lower court.
It is just more contempt for what is holy, good, right and true by powdered capons and silken dandies. They revel and sin in the freedoms won by the blood of the heroes they mock.
We have become two nations. Divorce and dissolution is in the cards.
I’m not trivializing this one bit. The written law is enforced by hired law enforcers who act as proxies for the people to enforce the written law. However, the written law itself is based on the unwritten “social sanctions” that exist in all times and places, if varying somewhat in content.
The social sanctions can change over time, or even be in conflict with the written law, but they will always win out in the end because the vast majority of the public are its enforcers, not the tiny number of LEOs or government workers.
A good example of a social sanction would be for an adult male to walk down a busy sidewalk in the US, wearing a t-shirt that says “I like to molest children”. In much of the US, he would not get far before at first getting a strong negative reaction from those individuals he encountered, with a high likelihood that he would be confronted by one or more of them.
A judge might say that it is his right to do so under the written law, but the social sanction says otherwise. And because it is so very powerful, eventually this individual would either not wear that t-shirt, or suffer the consequences, to include violence.
I wrote this to explain how very effective the social sanction can be, both in the case of flag burning, and now with Stolen Valor. Even the high and lofty Supreme Court of the United States might decree that individuals may burn flags to their hearts’ content, or steal valor. But the SCOTUS is not going to be out there on the street where the social sanctions are enforced.
Today, in much of the US, if some creep burns an American flag in public as part of a legal protest, there are many citizens who are inclined to punch him out. And there are many LEOs who will decline to arrest this citizen for doing so, and many juries who will not convict him, nor give monetary remuneration to the flag burner for his injuries in a subsequent lawsuit.
So it really doesn’t matter what the SCOTUS thinks.
And the same applies, perhaps even more so, to the enforcement of the social sanction about stealing valor, when it is done by veterans.
As a final note, it is unwise to assume that the “trash” at biker bars and honkeytonks are any the less patriotic than those in “polite” establishments. In fact, many of them are not just patriotic, but intensely patriotic. And I know of at least one motorcycle club whose membership is exclusively combat veterans, many of whom have decorations for valor.
For some fool to pretend valor in their presence would be beyond dangerous, as these are men of action, not legal niceties.
Former SEALs are intensely proud of their service, as they should be; however there are few situations where they are comfortable enough with the venue and the audience to discuss their unclassified life and times. It is just too exotic and alien for most people to appreciate.
However, I will not credit them with any grace when it comes to their skills at interior design. If you are fortunate enough to visit them at their home, their decor is blindingly and unabashedly SEAL, over about every square inch of vertical surface from the waist up. (The same rule applies to other elite warriors.)
I think perhaps the most tight lipped of all prior service military are boomer submariners. They will not speak of any element of their service to anyone. But SEALs have a classified life and an unclassified life, and while guarded in casual conversation, they are not handicapped by it.
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