Slashdot Mirror

Well, that quote is accurate, but requires further explanation. When we say "lower court was simply incorrect", the use of the passive voice doesn't indicate what was incorrect. For what is described, what is incorrect is not the binary decision of whether the plaintiff or defendant should prevail, but rather some point of law that was used to make that decision. For example, in the recent Texas death-row case, the Supreme court found that the appeals court didn't use the correct criteria in their judgement and told them to redo it with better criteria.

The simplistic case would be something like: "you read that word wrong in the law, read it more carefully and try it again".

So yes, the article is accurate in that when the point a "simple" error, they correct the error and send it back to the lower court to be retried. The cases that SCOTUS tends to actually take and decide on their own is when it can't be sent back. For instance, if multiple appellate courts have come to different decisions on the same issue. There are numerous cases that have frustrated individuals because they thought they had some kind of game-changing case, but it wasn't controversial or common enough to reach SCOTUS. Then the ruling ends up standing only for a region, and then other test cases need to come up in other regions until there is a conflict.

If all the regions that a given issue is litigated in turn out to agree (which is common case, since most cases are mundane rather than controversial), then the point in question would not even need to reach the supreme court to become the law of the land.

Oh please. No one outside the Catholic Church thinks that Plan B is an abortifacient, and even most inside are beginning to accept reality.

I still don't get this. The employer offered health plan is basically an incentive to work somewhere. Not liking your work health plan is like not liking your salary. If you want a better healthplan work somewhere else.

If they have a religious objection to offering health care to Jews, black people and liberals (however they choose to define them), you still okay with it? I mean hey, they can always choose to work somewhere else, right?

Being part of a free society under democratically elected government (another argument, not to digress) means having to play by the same rules as everyone else. You don't get a free pass just by waving a and saying you want to opt out. No one ever said the employees have to take them up on it, and I would assume the truly devout practitioners of would not, but they have to cover it like everyone else.

Note: I strongly suspect, based on available evidence, that "truly devout" covers a single-digit percentage of the congregation for most religions in America. I cite the fact that the average Catholic family size in the U.S. is 2.6 people, the same as the overall average. http://ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/us-catholic-parishes-growing-size-and-diversity You can claim a lot of things, but claiming a organization called the National Catholic Reporter is biased against Catholics seems to be a stretch to me. :-)

Obviously this isn't strictly children, but overall family size. But if you are assuming devoutness, we have to assume no or few divorced parents, and statistically speaking few widows/widowers. I'm not seeing the 5-7 children more normal in Catholic societies outside the U.S. So unless we're drastically less fertile than average, it looks like birth control is pretty widely used by Catholics. Mainstream Protestants are even more relaxed about birth control. Evangelicals are all over the map, so it's hard to characterize their views briefly.

The current pope was the man put in charge of shuffling the pedophiles around and keeping it out of the press. It is highly unlikely that things have grown safer for children under his watch.

That's mistaken about the history. Cdl. Ratzinger's department did not start out with jurisdiction over these cases. Most were handled (or mishandled) by local bishops, and the few that were appealed to Rome went to canon-law tribunals. But in 2001 Pope John Paul II changed the church's internal laws to make all credible accusations go to Rome; and to have them go to Ratzinger's department (CDF). Ratzinger read the dossiers on virtually every sex-abuse case in the world and came out of that with a thorough understanding of the problem. No wonder he later spoke about the "filth" in the priesthood.

Source (article by expert reporter John Allen, 2010): http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/will-ratzingers-past-trump-benedicts-present

John Allen, probably the best English-speaking journalist has written a few articles, trying to set the record straight:

• Keeping the Record Straight on Benedict and the Crisis
• Is Middle Ground Possible on the Pope
• Cardinal Castrillon Must Feel Trapped

John Allen, probably the best English-speaking journalist has written a few articles, trying to set the record straight:

• Keeping the Record Straight on Benedict and the Crisis
• Is Middle Ground Possible on the Pope
• Cardinal Castrillon Must Feel Trapped

John Allen, probably the best English-speaking journalist has written a few articles, trying to set the record straight:

• Keeping the Record Straight on Benedict and the Crisis
• Is Middle Ground Possible on the Pope
• Cardinal Castrillon Must Feel Trapped