Discussion for article #223710
The justices will decide 5 important cases this month or in other words five news ways to screw us all.
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Strangely, I think I agree with the conservative justices on the fifth case re abortion protesters. I donât know how you can prohibit protesting, as long as itâs done peacefully (i.e., just signs and words). yeah, anti-choice idiots are annoying and hateful, but with free speech you have to put up with that. It will be interesting to see how all nine vote on that one.
Itâs astonishing how the Reagan and Bush (senior and dumber) appointments have transformed the Court from a respected American institution into a politically motivated instrument in the long term plots of the 1%.
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Measure off 35 feet and take a look at it. Massachusetts isnât prohibiting protesting - itâs prohibiting protesters from getting in your face. If you canât register your opinion from 36 feet away, youâre doing something wrong.
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Scalia, an important vote in many Fourth Amendment cases, expressed sympathy with letting cops search someone's iPhone in certain situations, like when they have reason to believe doing so may stop a bomb from detonating.How much evil crap has been justified by appealing to fantasies about ticking bombs? Has such a scenario ever actually happened in human history (i.e. not on an episode of 24)? Yet these imaginary scenes push us to ever more destruction of the Bill of Rights.
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Am I the only person who wonders why Scalia and his mini-me, Thomas seem to have no health issues? They both look like stroke candidates to me, and the country would be better off if they did succumb. I know this sounds terrible, but they are harming so many people with their hateful activism that I donât feel bad about it.
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Some people survive on their hate. Take away Nino and Thomasâ ability to malign the rest of us, and theyâd keel over immediately.
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I have seen protesters get up in the face s of women going in to Planned Parenthood; some of them just going for a Pap Smear or birth control. They bring huge signs with pictures of fetuses â some grotesque, and push them into their faces. It discourages people from going to get routine care, and for those (already upset if they are going in for an abortion) it adds enormously to their stress.
If protesters got that close to Supreme Court justices going in to work, they would have a different view of âfreedom of speech.â
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Thatâs a good point, but arenât there laws against harassment? Canât they just enforce those and you get the same outcome? Phrasing the law to limit protesting seems like the wrong approach. I guess Iâd have to see the law itself, but it sounds like they could have just restructured it to be an anti-harassment law.
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Excellent points. I hope they show videos of this sort of thing during oral arguments or at least submit them for the justicesâ viewing. And you make a great point about how justices are sheltered from protesters. I hadnât thought about that. Now that would be a fascinating debate. Seems like there are probably already limitations on where you can protest.
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If peaceful protest is what was going on, there wouldnât be a need for the law. I do feel a bit conflicted because at the same time I support environmentalists rights to chain themselves to doors and such.
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Very, very subjective, and therefore difficult to enforce. My free speech might be your harassment. Thatâs why these kinds of restrictions are usually enacted with simple distance measurements.
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Not really the same situation. The hallmark of that kind of civil disobedience is the willingness to be arrested for your conduct. The womenâs clinic screamers, by contrast, demand the right to pursue their tactics without any legal consequences.
(And once again, Iâve reached my three-comment limit. When does this commenting system decide that my âtrust levelâ is no longer ânew user?â Iâve been posting for a month, and havenât gotten into any poo-flinging with anyone.)
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Easy way to forecast these is to ignore the legal matters and assume the voting will be poltiicized. So a free speech case with a conservative claimant = victory. Free speech case with a liberal claimant = loss.
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There has to be some distance that the protesters have to keep. Certainly if I were going in to or out of one of those clinics, there would be a zone the length of my extended arm that a protester would definitely not want to cross into.
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Is there an analog in the prohibition against campaigning within a certain distance of a polling place?
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While the are indeed laws against harassment, the women who seek abortion services are much less likely to press charges against the protestors (charges which would be on-the-record for all to see). Permitting these protestors to get in the faces of women seeking a personal medical service give the protestors exactly what they want - either license to harass the patient or force her to publicly accuse the protestors and âoutâ herself - and either way the clinic patient loses.
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So much for that âStrict Constructionistâ BS the wingnuts always fling around.
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In the Aereo case, the argument is that the law is antiquated which sounds like a perfect set-up for the the second amendment argument. Just like the, I think, unintended consequences of the Supremes Gay marriage ruling that opened the floodgates for Gay marriage, maybe this antiquated thing will work against the gun nuts?
The Supreme conservatives will likely find a way to twist that into some form of idiotic Citizenâs United thinking, but we have to get beyond this gun mania somehow.
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