 |
| |
|
|
Whoha
|
 |
The TOC is supposed to be classified guys...
Dec 2001
time: 23:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Berzerker
Exactly! This is partly why Madison added the 9th Amendment, there are just too many rights to list so the Framers focused on those rights considered the most important and most likely to come under attack by tyrants. Guns, God, and speech...these were considered the most important and the rights tyrants would target first...
But when you hear someone say we don't have a right if it isn't written in the Bill of Rights, you're listening to someone who, for whatever reason, ignores not only the 9th Amendment, but the purpose of the Constitution - to limit government by granting it specific powers. It shouldn't matter if we have a right to privacy, only what enumerated powers government has to infringe upon our privacy.
While I'm no fan of Alexander Hamilton, he did raise a valid objection to adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution. He pointed out a BoR was not needed because the Constitution as it was written WAS a Bill of Rights - by limiting government to a handful of activities. And he added a warning and a prediction that has come true - he said if you add a BoR then there will be people who use that short list of rights to deny other rights we have using the very "logic" Bork and Limbaugh have used, i.e., if a right doesn't appear in the BoR, then it doesn't exist. How do these braintrusts respond to someone asking if that means we have no right to sleep, eat, or work when we want? These rights aren't in the Constitution either... Nor is there a government power to dictate when we sleep, eat, or work... |
Remember before Roe vs Wade when abortion was a state by state issue? the 10th amendment goes right by the 9th amendment for a reason.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
shawnmmcc
|
|
Berzerker, let's agree to disagree. I suspect you are a "pure" libetarian. If you are one of those who then carefully does not take advantage of any of the programs supplied via tax money (versus those who say I'll take advantage of them anyway, since they are taking my money), you've never taken any government check via a forced program, including unemployment insurance, etc. then you have my respect.
I'll still disagree, like I disagree with a Christian Scientist - I may respect them, but I think they're nuts. I've mentioned in other posts, I take a historical (which includes economics, sociology, the military, religion, etc.) viewpoint, and I try tend to look at thinks as complex interrelations. You and I have a basic disagreement. Whether taxes are a "taking" and essentially violate certain rights, or whether they are a necessity in all modern societies.
However, beyond this difference, there lies a danger in your rhetoric, and it's a shame you cannot see how it actually does your cause harm (especially when we share a certain commonality on the social side of it). When you talk about the US as closer to the Communist Manifesto rather than the constitution, and you get people who have lived in that type of totalitarian state, or are familiar with how life was in them, they will tune you out because they know it isn't nearly that bad in the US. Yet.
I will grant you, in every case you've made, that they each have the potential to be abused and turn the US into a totalitarian state (you will note I did not say communism, the same tools that Marx and Engels talk about can be abused by any group intent on seizing power). Most people don't realize that the reason Hitler siezed power so quickly were the flaws in the post WW1 German constitution, and that what he did until after he seized control was perfectly legal.
That's why groups like the ACLU, and libetarians, Judicial Watch, Consumer's Reports, having a state as well as federal structure, the Greens, the list goes on and on, but all of them are important to maintaining our liberty. We cannot go back to the pre-1900 world (taxes and government finance) that many libetarians espouse, first of all the world is to complex, and secondly we have signed treaties forbidding that type of financing (GATT - WTO and NAFTA, to name two). I'll be happy you are out there watching. Whenever you are tempted to ratchet up the rhetoric, ask yourself one thing - will it help convert those with open minds over to my cause, or will it be so inflammatory (based on what that person perceives as reality) that they tune me out. Take a nuanced approach, and state that those things are all threats to liberty. People will listen, many of them clearly are. Ratchet the rhetoric up and compare us to communism, and they will tune you out, even if you are sure you are right.
By the way, "Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state" I skipped because the US government has been divesting, not increasing those. Whether it's shutting down one of two uranium enrichment plants (the one in KY is shutting down) closing and/or privatizing munitions production, etc. the US government produces very little. Even if you can find one or two recent examples, go back to the 1970's, and then compare it to now as a percentage of the GNP - what the US government genuinely produces. You provide NO evidence (two words "corporate capacity" do not make any kind of case) supporting your claim about the first portion of the plank, so don't say "Your "rebuttals" contain no substance. " You give me nothing to rebutt except a bald assertion. Note that on the second half of that plank, where you do provide some evidence (which I am familiar with, as an old-style conservationist) I grant you point. That's what I mean about courtesy.
Ben Kenobi nailed me politely, and I tried to respond in kind. When I switched from detail to global statement while looking over the manifesto, examine why. Saying "it's silly" is much more polite than the statement "Corporate capacity is a lazy catch phrase that means nothing, permitting you to gloss over the fact that the entire first half of plank seven has not been met...". Then to continue "You are unilaterally CHANGING the phrasing to "controlled or subsidized" when the two are very different, when people can walk away from subsidies whenever they choose (my wife and I plan to home school), etc. Your control is based on the concept that any regulation, taxation, fee, or license is total control, which means that governments since the time of Hammurabi have been fulfilling the 7th plank of the communist manifesto - which they have been doing concerning encouraging the tilling of waste lands also, for a variety of reasons. There, I've added two large paragraphs, to very little point. Or, as I said initially - it's silly. 
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
 |
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:33
|
|
Just to set the record straight, the "right to privacy" is an aspect of "liberty" that is expressly protected under the 5th and 14th Amendments under the doctrine of substantive due process to invalidate statutes or procedural due process to protect the likes of Limbaugh. Read Stewart's concurring opinion from Roe v. Wade:
"MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring.
In 1963, this Court, in Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U. S. 726, purported to sound the death knell for the doctrine of substantive due process, a doctrine under which many state laws had in the past been held to violate the Fourteenth Amendment. As Mr. Justice Black's opinion for the Court in Skrupa put it: "We have returned to the original constitutional proposition that courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies, who are elected to pass laws." Id., at 730.(1)
Barely two years later, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, the Court held a Connecticut birth control law unconstitutional. In view of what had been so recently said in Skrupa, the Court's opinion in Griswold understandably did its best to avoid reliance on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the ground for decision. Yet, the Connecticut law did not violate any provision of the Bill of Rights, nor any other specific provision of the Constitution.(2) So it was clear [p168] to me then, and it is equally clear to me now, that the Griswold decision can be rationally understood only as a holding that the Connecticut statute substantively invaded the "liberty" that is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.(3) As so understood, Griswold stands as one in a long line of pre-Skrupa cases decided under the doctrine of substantive due process, and I now accept it as such.
"In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of `liberty' must be broad indeed." Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U. S. 564, 572. The Constitution nowhere mentions a specific right of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life, but the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment covers more than those freedoms explicitly named in the Bill of Rights. See Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners, 353 U. S. 232, 238-239; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534-535; Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390, 399-400. Cf. Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U. S. 618, 629- 630; United States v. Guest, 383 U. S. 745, 757-758; Carrington v. Rash, 380 U. S. 89, 96; Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U. S. 500, 505; Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116, 127; Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U. S. 497, 499-500; Truax v. Raich, 239 U. S. 33, 41. [p169]
As Mr. Justice Harlan once wrote: "[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment." Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 543 (opinion dissenting from dismissal of appeal) (citations omitted). In the words of Mr. Justice Frankfurter, "Great concepts like . . . `liberty' . . . were purposely left to gather meaning from experience. For they relate to the whole domain of social and economic fact, and the statesmen who founded this Nation knew too well that only a stagnant society remains unchanged." National Mutual Ins. Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co., 337 U. S. 582, 646 (dissenting opinion).
Several decisions of this Court make clear that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12; Griswold v. Connecticut, supra; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, supra; Meyer v. Nebraska, supra. See also Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158, 166; Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U. S. 535, 541. As recently as last Term, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438, 453, we recognized "the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." That right [p170] necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. "Certainly the interests of a woman in giving of her physical and emotional self during pregnancy and the interests that will be affected throughout her life by the birth and raising of a child are of a far greater degree of significance and personal intimacy than the right to send a child to private school protected in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925), or the right to teach a foreign language protected in Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923)." Abele v. Markle, 351 F. Supp. 224, 227 (Conn. 1972).
Clearly, therefore, the Court today is correct in holding that the right asserted by Jane Roe is embraced within the personal liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."
http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/410s1.htm
|
|
| |
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:33.
Apolyton Time is 00:33. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
13-01-2004 23:49
|