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Idaho Law Against Recording Abuses On Factory Farms Ruled Unconstitutional
onproton writes: An Idaho law that made it illegal to record and document animal abuse or dangerous hygienic practices in agricultural facilities, often referred to as an 'ag-gag' law, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge on Monday. The judge concluded that the law restricted constitutionally protected free speech, and contradicted "long-established defamation and whistleblowing statutes by punishing employees for publishing true and accurate recordings on matters of public concern." Idaho is just one of several states to pass this type of law, which allow food production facilities to censor some unfavorable forms of speech at their convenience. Under the Idaho statute, an employee that witnessed and recorded an incident, even if it depicted true and life-threatening health or safety violations, could be faced with a year in jail and fines of up to "twice the economic loss the owner suffers." In his ruling (PDF), the judge stated that this was "precisely the type of speech the First Amendment was designed to protect." This decision has raised questions about the constitutionality of these types of laws in other states as well, and it's likely that there will be more legal battles ahead.
OK, I'll bite back.
It's murder when a living human is torn apart for body parts. The rest of your diatribe is irrelevant.
The issues with the Planned Parenthood videos are their surreptitious nature, recording somebody under false pretenses and then editing the content to advance anarrative.
This would be distinct from an employee recording actual events.
You do know that the "edited" nature of the videos is to just make it newsworthy. The FULL unedited videos have all been posted and are available for you to watch and see that the CONTENT of what was said is indeed accurately represented in the shortened edited versions of what was publicly released to news organizations.
As I've heard absolutely ZERO people saying that the full length video says something totally different who has provided specific examples of how the original was edited to advance a specific narrative, I'm going to dismiss this "They are heavily edited" as an excuse. No they are not, the full hours long videos say EXACTLY the same thing as the news reel clips do.
I encourage you to have a look at the full videos and let me know how the clips really misrepresent what was actually said.... Bet you won't, and if you do, bet you won't find any of what folks who support PP claim is there...
Babies are born. In that respect, they are covered by the 14th Amendment.
Fetuses are not babies and never have been. Even born babies haven't always had completely human status. In many societies they aren't even named until it's shown that they will survive.
If anything, newborns are little more than external fetuses that are highly dependent and terribly fragile. They're nothing like any of their counterparts in the rest of the animal kingdom.
If it can't survive without the mothership then how can you really call it a separate legal entity?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.