Posted on 06/28/2003 12:38:52 PM PDT by shred
I think there are many Freepers who are tired of this constant bashing of the Supreme Court for Lawrence v. Texas. I think they did a great job and stuck a knife in the heart of big government.
Individual liberty is at the heart of what conservatism is all about - the individual having primacy over the state. It disturbs me that there are so many who wanted to see the state prevail in its desire to regulate private, individual freedoms.
I say, good job, to a consistent, conservative SC! You did exactly what you're supposed to be doing.
Neither of them was "unconstituntional." It is the job of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution. By definition, their interpretation is correct, as the Constitution grants them that authority.
When you have phrases like "due process" in the docuement, you are going to have humans interpreting what that means. There really isn't a well defined meaning for many of these Constitutional phrases.
Your idea that the Constitution is some perfectly clear inerrant document is naive. People on this very forum, kissing cousin conservatives, disagree on its meaning.
You keep repeating that falsehood after the error has been pointed out to you. You need to start backing this up. Not even the supreme court itself states that its interpretations are correct "by definition".
Try violating a decision of the Supreme Court, see what happens, and then tell me again their definitions carry no weight.
Andrew Jackson did that once. Nothing much happened to him, though it should have for disobeying them. Talk to any Cherokee about "The Trail of Tears" and Andrew Jackson defying the courts ruling in Worcester vs Georgia in 1832.
...Uh, by telling the State of Texas (and by extension, 49 other states) they had no right to develop and enforce community standards?
Hysterical, isn't it?
The SC arbitrarily crushing the Tenth Amendment right to self determination is now refered to as a blow against "Big Government"
I don't know who spins better, the liberal democrats or our liberal freepers.
"Again"? When did I tell you this the first time?
Falsehoods can most certainly carry plenty of weight. How do you think the liberals have had such control over the media for so long?
Scalia believes basically, that he needs to psychically transport himself back to 1781 and figure out what the framers would think of a due process issue. He would oppose the end of slavery, and women's suffrage on the grounds that the framers opposed it. He would oppose homosexual rights because the framers opposed it. Basically, it is a sound position, but it is not a universal one.
Others believe that trying to divine how James Madison believed about internet porn in libraries is ridiculous because there are several angles legally culturally that the founders didn't have to come to grip with 200 years ago.
One can agree with either position without accusing the other side of bad faith. I think there is a subtle difference between Thomas' views and Scalia's views. Thomas wants to limit the constitution to it's bare bones, but Scalia is more into the philosophy of the framers. They came to the same decision, but for different reasons. They often rule the same, but not due to exacting philosophies.
Both Scalia and Thomas would have voted for Dred Scott. Scalia would have argued that the framers didn't believe Slaves were equal to whites therefore they weren't. Thomas would have said that the document didn't protect blacks, even though it should, so with reluctance he had to render his verdict the way he did. I much prefer Thomas' outlook than Scalias. Any prejudice of the framers, Scalia takes as his beacon of truth. Thomas looks at the document, and reads it on it's face, without prejudice.
If the framers said for example, all people who are born here are citizens, but later in non binding letters said that what they really meant was those who were born of citizen parents. Scalia would give that more weight than Thomas would, because that isn't what the document says.
It is a subtle difference, but i think it is powerful.
Look back at Bush v. Gore. Misguided as they may have been, millions of democrats genuinely believed that the Supreme Court rigged the election for Bush. However, they basically backbite, they didn't run amock and threaten the stability of the transition.
Look at Roe V. Wade, there have been isolated incidents of violence on the part of pro-lifers, but for the most part, it has been a non violent struggle. We have a tradition of accepting the decision of the court, and then trying to elect president's who will appoint justices with views more to our liking. It is very mature of us as a nation.
If a court in France ruled that farmers blocking streets to protest the lack of farm subsidies, were illegally blocking commerce and arrested them, there would be riots in France.
Here, there would be grumbling and a resolve to change.
I dissagree.
Private drug use has a way of spilling over into the public. Like when that guy last week used drugs in private, then killed his roommate, ate part of her lung and then walked down the street with blood dripping from his mouth and shirt.
According to SCROTUM (Supreme Court, Rulers of the United Mandates) The killing and the eating since it was in private is ok, walking down the street bloody well that's reprehensible.
Prostitution on the other hand. The state needs a "compelling interest" to regulate it. If the spread of disease which is clearly more prominent in homosexual circles than in prostitution isn't a compelling state interest. If morality isn't a compelling state interest. Then what the heck kind of interest could the state possibly have in regulating it.
The only thing the state can do now is license it, tax the heck out of it and burden it with rediculous amounts of paperwork. That's the way the kill anything good in society.
I started looking at Carribean real estate again. Sigh.
Oh, come on. People who drink alcohol privately never venture out doors? We are punished by acts of harm towards others while drinking, not by drinking itself.
I am going to spend another week-end refraining from drinking, smoking, or taking drugs. It is my choice. If I chose otherwise, I would like for the government to leave me alone until the point I impacted another.
There is an argument to make that when one drinks or does drugs at home, one can be a jerk to one's minor kids. If that is the argument one wants to make to ban drugs I say fine, if it includes alcohol. That is the big rub for me. If people do the craziest things imaginable on alcohol, just being unhypocritical requires that either it be banned or pot be legalized. I prefer that pot be legalized, but the state of hypocrisy we live in is the third best option.
You can name anything that somebody on illegal drugs does, the damage it does, and you know already Danny that I can show you statistics that alcohol abusers are doing far worse.
For me, the pot and alcohol thing would be like banning ford escorts for causing greenhouse gas emisions, but allowing SUV's to remain legal. It's absurd to ban either for adults, but you don't ban the escort and let people drive around in the Explorer.
Good point.
Or make it too expensive for anyone but the elite to engage in.
Have you considered what may have been gained by this decision? Homo stuff aside, consider it's implications in limiting how much the government on all levels can intrude into your private life. I think there may well be future rulings based on this decision that will highly please many 'conservatives' (whatever a conservative is).
One of the main reasons Prohibition ended in 1933 was that there was a serious decline in federal tax revenues in the Great Depression. Once alcohol was available, it was taxed heavily. (In fact, soft liquor was already made available in FDR's Hundred Days in early '33 before the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th was ratified, by a change in the statute -- things like beer became available, and were taxed.)
Also, if prostitution is legal, it can -- and should -- be regulated. I understand there is very little venereal disease among prostitutes in Nevada, where prostitution is legal and regulated.
But hey, it severely weakens states. Considering that you're such a big fan of the (federal) IRS, maybe you like that.
As for equal protection (assuming that it does also mean equal treatment - which seems to be the prevailing doctrine), there's simply no violation in the Texas statute. It simply outlaws sodomic acts between people of the same gender. It doesn't distinguish between homosexuals and heterosexuals - two heterosexual men commiting such an act would be punished the exact same way as two homosexual men doing it.
With regard to your more general questions of constitutional interpretation, I think Scalia's approach has the most merit. One needs to look at the words of the document, and to look at the historical context in which those words were written, in order to deduce their meaning. To me, that's the most commonsense approach. Yes, it would mean that in some ways, we'd see the Constitution as less than perfect. That's why we have amendments (such as the 13th, which outlawed slavery, and the 14th, which provided some protections against excesses by states). But simply having judges rewrite it because we want it to say something different is not the way to go. That gives them way more power than they ever should have.
One can agree with either position without accusing the other side of bad faith.
I don't know about that. Your point about internet porn may make a certain amount of sense, because that's truly a new issue (though we really need to use the older principles in dealing with it to every extent possible, until we decide to come up with new laws or constitutional amendments). But the sodomy issue is no different now than it was when the Constitution (and the 14th amendment) was implemented. If the Constitution didn't protect it then, then it doesn't protect it now. I think even those justices who voted in favor of this ruling, when pressed, would acknowledge that they were basically ruling that the Constitution had always prohibited these types of laws, and that they had only now just discovered it. If instead they were to say that the Constitution had in fact changed over time, without an amendment changing it, then they'd basically be admitting that they were acting in bad faith, and I think most of the legal community, on both sides of the issue, would agree that they were.
Well, sorry for the long post, but sometimes, when you take a whack at a beehive...
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