I think the courts have never seen it that way, nor the founding fathers who passed both within a few years of each other.
Then that just means they were violating the constitution from the beginning, not that such a thing is okay. Remember when the US had slavery from the very beginning, and that was seen as okay by many people? Well, that doesn't make it okay just because they were there from the start.
Of course, the first line of the 21st Amendment which abolished prohibition is "The Eighteenth Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed". Kind of makes clear that it intended to remove enforcement of the earlier amendment.
That's utterly irrelevant. If an amendment says, "Congress shall make no law that does X" or anything similar, then that is also quite clear. It doesn't need to be explicitly said that it overrides a previous part of the constitution.
Or do you think it should be constitutionally protected to walk down main street with sarin gas grenades strapped to my chest (2nd Amendment) shouting that I will go to the local school and throw them at kids (1st Amendment)?
Yep, I do. Until you people amend the constitution, all you're doing is ignoring it for your own convenience.
Except when you start taking into account the spirit of the constitution. Then this NSA nonsense is screwed. Any judge who says otherwise is complicit in the crimes against the American people, and many of them have been exactly that. There are no excuses, including 'ambiguity.'
Courts have also ruled that the right to free speech (or rather the right to be free from governmental restraint on speech) can be balanced against other competing factors, including those that arise from the "necessary and proper" clause of Article 1: Congress can pass laws that abridge speech when it is necessary and proper to their function, such as criminalizing libel, or attempts to incite panic or criminal behavior (the canonical shouting "fire").
Then they're freedom-hating scumbags, to put it simply.
It only works in my favor, because I'm pro-freedom. Since we're supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," there is no room for debate as to what kind of country this is supposed to be. If they want their police state, then they can move to one. It's quicker and more rational that way, you know?
I do not believe that the Constitution is interpreted as what comes first overrides everything that comes later.
What? That's not what I said at all. Look, the amendment that created prohibition was later overridden by the one that canceled it out. That's kind of the point of an amendment to the constitution; it amends the constitution, thereby changing it. Since the first amendment came later, it overrides everything that came before it in the relevant areas.
Even if it didn't, it's plainly obvious that such surveillance would have been made quite explicitly unconstitutional had it been used against the founders, like what basically happened with other issues.
Other may feel differently given a significant threat from foreign groups hellbent on harming the US, which is also a valid belief.
Nope. That's not a valid belief. We're supposed to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'; free and brave people would never sacrifice their fundamental liberties for such things. Anyone who says otherwise should move to North Korea.
So if a person gives aid and comfort to the enemy (Article Three, Section 3) by revealing state secrets, let's say in print in a paper, during a war as declared by Congress (Article One, Section 8), which right wins: the constitutional definition of treason, or the right to free speech contained in the First Amendment?
The first amendment is an amendment to the constitution, and it comes after article three, section 3. Remember how constitutional amendments are supposed to work...? Apparently, no one does.
All that shows is that we're not the 'land of the free and the home of the brave,' and never have been. Of course, things like slavery made that obvious anyway. Our government is and always was full of freedom-hating scumbags.
"We must give up our freedoms for safety!" -The land of the 'free' and the home of the 'brave'.
Huh. Strangely, I don't see anything in the constitution that allows for this. And strangely, that doesn't sound like something free or brave people would say. Hm...
So large corps or non-religious beliefs, the decision does not apply.
Which is discriminatory and disgusting.
Also the belief has to be part of some sort of established and recognized religion, you can't just declare yourself a jedi and say jedi's don't believe in abortion.
So, in other words, not only do people of specific religions have more rights than the rest of us, but some religions are more equal that others. Do you really want the government to be able to decide which religions are True Religions? What makes one bullshit religion any less valid than any other? That's complete tyranny.
Well, religion does have special rights according to the Constitution.
And there's also supposed to be a separation of church and state, but no one seems to care about that. This is what you get when you have a bunch of religious nutters as judges, rather than people who truly care about secularism, fairness, and the constitution.
This should have nothing to do with religion. Anyone should be able to deny paying for others' birth control, or no one should.
You seem to be an expert in false argument strategies.
You seem to be an expert in straw men.
Would you say equating tolerance of murders/rapists with tolerance of folks with religious beliefs is more of a false equivalence or more of a reduction ad absurdum?
There was no equating. There was only an example demonstrating that intolerance is not always a bad thing. Why are you unable to understand such a simple concept?
Regardless, you sound like an intolerant bigot...
Intolerance of what? That's what makes all the difference. Stop with your black and white thinking; intolerance isn't always bad, as I've already demonstrated. Being intolerant of irrational behavior should be true of everyone.
And your equating tolerance of murderers and rapists with tolerance of those with a belief in god is as big a straw man as I've come across in many a day.
That's actually a straw man on your part. Learn the difference between examples intended to demonstrate something and comparisons. The intent was to show that intolerance is not always bad.
I can be friends with people with deep religious beliefs just as easily as with atheists, and judge people by what they do...
It's not impossible for them to be intelligent, but it does seem unlikely.
You seem very intolerant of people with different beliefs than your own
You're an ignoramus. This has *nothing* to do with tolerance (Why would I tolerate stupidity, anyway?), and *everything* to do with fairness and the separation of church and state. If religious people can get exceptions due to their religion, then everyone else should be able to do the same. Basically, the rules should apply to everyone, regardless of their religions. Why is this so difficult to understand?
Tolerance is a good thing, and I expect in other regards (say acceptance of gay marriage) you'd demand it.
Tolerance is a good thing? Do you tolerate murderers or rapists? I'm intolerant of many things, such as stupidity in general. I demand tolerance when it comes to gay marriage because there is no rational reason to oppose it, not because tolerance is always a good thing. And it just so happens that believing in a magical sky daddy with no evidence to support such a thing is ridiculous.
Perhaps next we should make the Hobby Lobby folks and those nuns from Little Sisters of the Poor actually perform abortions personally, that'll teach em.
Straw man. Stop that. I never once said I supported the whole forcing people to buy contraception for others thing. Just because I don't like this decision doesn't mean I support that.
If IQ testing was not valid, it wouldn't have so much correlation for income and success.
'Success' is subjective. Income != intelligence. In fact, we don't even truly understand intelligence, and yet we can have someone take a poorly-designed test with all sorts of inherent biases and assumptions, and then crank out a simple number that's supposed to quantify their intelligence? Bad science at its best.
You do know that in the case at hand, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a law giving them privileges, right?
Yes, and it's absolute garbage. What's your point?
Unlike many in this thread I think the Hobby Lobby folks beliefs about abortion are not irrational. That I don't agree with them doesn't mean I can't see their point of view. Many people have ambivalence about abortion, and forcing Hobby Lobby owners to pay for one (by their definition) rubs me the wrong way.
The entire point is that everyone should have the right to not pay for others' abortion, or no one should. You shouldn't get some magical exception just because you're part of some bullshit religion.
What about non-closely held corporations? What if they're fundamentally opposed to providing such birth control, but aren't really religious? Do they get a special exception too, or are religious people part of certain kinds of corporations more equal than the rest of us?
In reality, our rights exist because our government's power is limited. They don't come from the government itself, as you can't really give people concepts. They exist as long as our system isn't completely corrupt. No 'creator' needed.
I'm not big on religion, but I am on freedom, and I can't get outraged at this result.
You should be outraged, but for a different reason. Religious people shouldn't be able to have special privileges granted to them by the government. They should have the same rules applied to them that everyone else has.
The real problem is that this gives special privileges to people of certain religions. If there's a corporation that's not really religious at all, they should have all the same rules applied to them that a 'religious' corporation would, and no one should be getting any special exceptions. It's a violation of the separation of church and state, as far as I'm concerned.
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I think the courts have never seen it that way, nor the founding fathers who passed both within a few years of each other.
Then that just means they were violating the constitution from the beginning, not that such a thing is okay. Remember when the US had slavery from the very beginning, and that was seen as okay by many people? Well, that doesn't make it okay just because they were there from the start.
Of course, the first line of the 21st Amendment which abolished prohibition is "The Eighteenth Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed". Kind of makes clear that it intended to remove enforcement of the earlier amendment.
That's utterly irrelevant. If an amendment says, "Congress shall make no law that does X" or anything similar, then that is also quite clear. It doesn't need to be explicitly said that it overrides a previous part of the constitution.
Or do you think it should be constitutionally protected to walk down main street with sarin gas grenades strapped to my chest (2nd Amendment) shouting that I will go to the local school and throw them at kids (1st Amendment)?
Yep, I do. Until you people amend the constitution, all you're doing is ignoring it for your own convenience.
but not to the paranoid extent you are taking it.
Paranoid? Companies and governments wanting to conduct surveillance on us is a simple reality that has repeated itself many times.
Except when you start taking into account the spirit of the constitution. Then this NSA nonsense is screwed. Any judge who says otherwise is complicit in the crimes against the American people, and many of them have been exactly that. There are no excuses, including 'ambiguity.'
Courts have also ruled that the right to free speech (or rather the right to be free from governmental restraint on speech) can be balanced against other competing factors, including those that arise from the "necessary and proper" clause of Article 1: Congress can pass laws that abridge speech when it is necessary and proper to their function, such as criminalizing libel, or attempts to incite panic or criminal behavior (the canonical shouting "fire").
Then they're freedom-hating scumbags, to put it simply.
Yes, they were anti-freedom in a number of ways too. What of it?
It only works in my favor, because I'm pro-freedom. Since we're supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," there is no room for debate as to what kind of country this is supposed to be. If they want their police state, then they can move to one. It's quicker and more rational that way, you know?
I do not believe that the Constitution is interpreted as what comes first overrides everything that comes later.
What? That's not what I said at all. Look, the amendment that created prohibition was later overridden by the one that canceled it out. That's kind of the point of an amendment to the constitution; it amends the constitution, thereby changing it. Since the first amendment came later, it overrides everything that came before it in the relevant areas.
I've written an income statement before. You want to try?
Having certain knowledge is different from not being stupid/being intelligent.
Even if it didn't, it's plainly obvious that such surveillance would have been made quite explicitly unconstitutional had it been used against the founders, like what basically happened with other issues.
Other may feel differently given a significant threat from foreign groups hellbent on harming the US, which is also a valid belief.
Nope. That's not a valid belief. We're supposed to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'; free and brave people would never sacrifice their fundamental liberties for such things. Anyone who says otherwise should move to North Korea.
So if a person gives aid and comfort to the enemy (Article Three, Section 3) by revealing state secrets, let's say in print in a paper, during a war as declared by Congress (Article One, Section 8), which right wins: the constitutional definition of treason, or the right to free speech contained in the First Amendment?
The first amendment is an amendment to the constitution, and it comes after article three, section 3. Remember how constitutional amendments are supposed to work...? Apparently, no one does.
All that shows is that we're not the 'land of the free and the home of the brave,' and never have been. Of course, things like slavery made that obvious anyway. Our government is and always was full of freedom-hating scumbags.
"We must give up our freedoms for safety!" -The land of the 'free' and the home of the 'brave'.
Huh. Strangely, I don't see anything in the constitution that allows for this. And strangely, that doesn't sound like something free or brave people would say. Hm...
So large corps or non-religious beliefs, the decision does not apply.
Which is discriminatory and disgusting.
Also the belief has to be part of some sort of established and recognized religion, you can't just declare yourself a jedi and say jedi's don't believe in abortion.
So, in other words, not only do people of specific religions have more rights than the rest of us, but some religions are more equal that others. Do you really want the government to be able to decide which religions are True Religions? What makes one bullshit religion any less valid than any other? That's complete tyranny.
Well, religion does have special rights according to the Constitution.
And there's also supposed to be a separation of church and state, but no one seems to care about that. This is what you get when you have a bunch of religious nutters as judges, rather than people who truly care about secularism, fairness, and the constitution.
This should have nothing to do with religion. Anyone should be able to deny paying for others' birth control, or no one should.
You seem to be an expert in false argument strategies.
You seem to be an expert in straw men.
Would you say equating tolerance of murders/rapists with tolerance of folks with religious beliefs is more of a false equivalence or more of a reduction ad absurdum?
There was no equating. There was only an example demonstrating that intolerance is not always a bad thing. Why are you unable to understand such a simple concept?
Regardless, you sound like an intolerant bigot...
Intolerance of what? That's what makes all the difference. Stop with your black and white thinking; intolerance isn't always bad, as I've already demonstrated. Being intolerant of irrational behavior should be true of everyone.
And your equating tolerance of murderers and rapists with tolerance of those with a belief in god is as big a straw man as I've come across in many a day.
That's actually a straw man on your part. Learn the difference between examples intended to demonstrate something and comparisons. The intent was to show that intolerance is not always bad.
I can be friends with people with deep religious beliefs just as easily as with atheists, and judge people by what they do...
It's not impossible for them to be intelligent, but it does seem unlikely.
You seem very intolerant of people with different beliefs than your own
You're an ignoramus. This has *nothing* to do with tolerance (Why would I tolerate stupidity, anyway?), and *everything* to do with fairness and the separation of church and state. If religious people can get exceptions due to their religion, then everyone else should be able to do the same. Basically, the rules should apply to everyone, regardless of their religions. Why is this so difficult to understand?
Tolerance is a good thing, and I expect in other regards (say acceptance of gay marriage) you'd demand it.
Tolerance is a good thing? Do you tolerate murderers or rapists? I'm intolerant of many things, such as stupidity in general. I demand tolerance when it comes to gay marriage because there is no rational reason to oppose it, not because tolerance is always a good thing. And it just so happens that believing in a magical sky daddy with no evidence to support such a thing is ridiculous.
Perhaps next we should make the Hobby Lobby folks and those nuns from Little Sisters of the Poor actually perform abortions personally, that'll teach em.
Straw man. Stop that. I never once said I supported the whole forcing people to buy contraception for others thing. Just because I don't like this decision doesn't mean I support that.
If IQ testing was not valid, it wouldn't have so much correlation for income and success.
'Success' is subjective. Income != intelligence. In fact, we don't even truly understand intelligence, and yet we can have someone take a poorly-designed test with all sorts of inherent biases and assumptions, and then crank out a simple number that's supposed to quantify their intelligence? Bad science at its best.
You do know that in the case at hand, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a law giving them privileges, right?
Yes, and it's absolute garbage. What's your point?
Unlike many in this thread I think the Hobby Lobby folks beliefs about abortion are not irrational. That I don't agree with them doesn't mean I can't see their point of view. Many people have ambivalence about abortion, and forcing Hobby Lobby owners to pay for one (by their definition) rubs me the wrong way.
The entire point is that everyone should have the right to not pay for others' abortion, or no one should. You shouldn't get some magical exception just because you're part of some bullshit religion.
How much does Microsoft pay for you to post that?
By showing them the source code. See how that works?
What about non-closely held corporations? What if they're fundamentally opposed to providing such birth control, but aren't really religious? Do they get a special exception too, or are religious people part of certain kinds of corporations more equal than the rest of us?
In reality, our rights exist because our government's power is limited. They don't come from the government itself, as you can't really give people concepts. They exist as long as our system isn't completely corrupt. No 'creator' needed.
I'm not big on religion, but I am on freedom, and I can't get outraged at this result.
You should be outraged, but for a different reason. Religious people shouldn't be able to have special privileges granted to them by the government. They should have the same rules applied to them that everyone else has.
The real problem is that this gives special privileges to people of certain religions. If there's a corporation that's not really religious at all, they should have all the same rules applied to them that a 'religious' corporation would, and no one should be getting any special exceptions. It's a violation of the separation of church and state, as far as I'm concerned.