I think you're the only person I've ever met who thought that the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment was absolute and unrestricted. I take it you think that laws against child pornography are unconstitutional?
Those prohibitions apply to the state not private citizens or entities.
A government which routinely allows private citizens to murder other private citizens is obviously not preventing those murder victims from being deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. That language is not just a negative prohibition but also imposes a positive obligation on government. That's what federal civil rights laws are all about.
any of them are fine as long as they don’t go against some explicit” right” in the constitution, such as the right to exercise your religion.
So you're seriously proposing that someone can shoot up a school and kill a bunch of kids, and expect to be let off on constitutional grounds by claiming that shooting innocent kids is part of his religion?
Yeah, right. Thanks for playing.
“So you’re seriously proposing that someone can shoot up a school and kill a bunch of kids, and expect to be let off on constitutional grounds by claiming that shooting innocent kids is part of his religion?”
I’m not proposing anything, just reading the first amendment.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...”
If you’re a strict constitutionalist, that phrase protects the FREE EXERCISE of religion, and if a religion has a rite that involves some type of human sacrifice, then the constitution literally protects that.
You might say that’s not what they meant, and I agree, but it is what they said. Of course that was written when, for all practical purposes, the only religions in the US were various branches of Christianity, and it probably never occurred to them that one day some “foreign” religion would come to these shores that called for the killing of blasphemy, the stoning of adultresses and honor killing.
I wonder how they would rephrase that amendment today.
How would you rephrase it?