Monday, July 4, 2022

You Have No Right ...

Following the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent “abortion” decision (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), although you do have an explicit right to bear and keep arms, you have no implied right to a bulletproof vest. You have a First Amendment guarantee to publish whatever you want, but no implied right to read whatever you want. Because nothing in the Sixth or Seventh Amendments defines how many people are empaneled on a jury one person can be a jury. The list goes on.

 

These are among the many specious arguments put forward by the Court: 

The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, but several constitutional provisions have been offered as potential homes for an implicit constitutional right. Roe held that the abortion right is part of a right to privacy that springs from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. See 410 U. S., at 152–153. The Casey Court grounded its decision solely on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Others have suggested that support can be found in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the heightened scrutiny that applies to such classifications.

[...]

The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. The underlying theory on which Casey rested—that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty”—has long been controversial.

The Court’s decisions have held that the Due Process Clause protects two categories of substantive rights—those rights guaranteed by the first eight Amendments to the Constitution and those rights deemed fundamental that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.

[...]

Finally, the Court considers whether a right to obtain an abortion is part of a broader entrenched right that is supported by other precedents. The Court concludes the right to obtain an abortion cannot be justified as a component of such a right. Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.

Syllabus, DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, No. 19–1392. Argued December 1, 2021—Decided June 24, 2022.

In the logic of the court, because extra-marital and non-marital relationships have no historic support in US law, they can be outlawed today (or tomorrow). By the last sentence above, the fact that a substance is ruled "illegal" by legislation closes your right to challenge that law. The justices of the Supreme Court may know prostitution when they see it. I am not sure how it is different from "dinner and a movie" -- or marriage. 

 

You have no right to leave the United States or to travel within them. 

 

Just as medical devices are regulated and their ownership, possession, and use are controlled by law, so, too can any instrument or tool be circumscribed: electrophoresis, polymerase chain reactions, spectroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, radios, televisions, … In fact, radios have almost 100 years of regulation around them and nothing in the Constitution or US history establishes your right to a radio (television, computer). 


Whether a computer is a “press” would be an argument before a Court that seems well disposed to limiting any claims not supported by explicit text in the original documents of 1789 or 1868. 


Can a state require the licensing of a musical instrument?  

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

 

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment notwithstanding, states had laws against marriages across racial lines.  (Personally, I find no scientific evidence for the existence of "race" as a characteristic of human beings. Most of the rest of the world seems to disagree with me.)

“The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage. In a speech in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people". By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes. By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states. While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his relationship with a white woman, actress Kim Novak. In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence. 

“In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Richard and Mildred Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years. In 1967 the law was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

In a statement of sheer ignorance, Vice President Kamala Harris told NPR: This [Dobbs v. Jackson] is the first time in the history of our country that the United States Supreme Court has taken a constitutional right that was recognized … (Interview with Asma Khalid 28 June 2022 here.) It absolutely was not. To be generous, let us allow that Vice President Harris misspoke.

 

It was the law of the land that no Asian could become a US citizen. That fact was cited by “the great dissenter” Justice John Marshall Harlan in his reply to the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling affirming racial segregation. Harlan noted that by law, an Asian, who could not become a citizen would be allowed to ride in a railway carriage with White people, though a Colored person, born here, an Army veteran, perhaps, could not. 


World War I US Army veteran Bhagat Thind Singh was denied his citizenship. The Court affirmed that racially, as an Aryan, Singh was “White” but that to the common man of America, he was an Asian and therefore ineligible for citizenship. 

 

In 1935, Jehovah’s Witness Christians in Minersville, Pennsylvania, refused to salute the flag in a pledge of allegiance ceremony. They were expelled from school. In 1940, the Supreme Court upheld the decision: Minersville School District v. Gobitis. Freedom of religion is not absolute, the Court said, but is subsidiary to the need for national unity and therefore national defense. That decision was overturned in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). 


The fact remains - contrary to the opinion of the Vice President - that SCOTUS has taken away rights from people.


While the First Amendment promises freedom of religion, there is no explicit right to freedom from religion. While the Federal government is barred from establishing a national religion, states can and have (Massachusetts and Virginia) had their own government-supported churches. 

 

About 30 years ago, it occurred to me that if abortion takes a human life and is therefore murder, then a miscarriage must be manslaughter. I am pretty sure that I offered it as an argument to libertarians and progressives at social gatherings and was met with blank stares. It seems to have sunk in. (NPR here: Losing a pregnancy could land you in jail in post-Roe America.) You would have to prove that you were not negligent, that you obtained pre-natal care and followed the regimen prescribed for you. Absent that, you are negligent. 


I do not understand why "a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification" except, perhaps, because men are also prohibited from terminating their pregnancies, just as the rich and poor alike are forbidden to sleep under bridges. 


PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The GOP as Pushy Beggars 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

Ayn Rand versus Conservatives 

The Science of Liberty

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments 

 

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