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Most of our written principles serve only as a mocking illustration that the white people running this place know the right thing to do but simply refuse, out of spite, to do it.
My goal is to expose what the Constitution looks like from the vantage of a person it was designed to ignore.
What conservatives do and try to do through the Constitution and the law is disgusting. They use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people, and tell you they’re just “following orders” from the Constitution. They frustrate legislation meant to help people, free people, or cure people, and they tell you it’s because of “doctrinal interpretative framework.” They use the very same legal arguments that have been used to justify slavery, segregation, and oppression for four hundred years on this continent and tell you it’s the only “objective” way of interpreting the law.
I refuse to act as if second-class status within my own country is one option among many.
Democracies tend to elevate any person with enough wealth and charisma to stand out in a crowd. Democracies neither necessarily nor naturally reward merit. Nor do they punish incompetence. Democracies tend to go along with the popular will, and Socrates knew that the popular will could be easily manipulated into believing any odd thing.
The real cancel culture is the one practiced by conservatives. They are the ones leading the assault on the First Amendment and freedom of speech. It’s rich people and conservative politicians using frivolous lawsuits to chill journalism and clean up their mentions. It’s law enforcement using tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the streets of peaceful protesters. It’s the police committing police brutality against people protesting police brutality. It’s the attorney general trying to prosecute people who laugh at him. These are the First Amendment threats of our time.
Phillips’s claim that his religious freedom would be
compromised by being forced to engage in his own business is ludicrous on its face. Refusing to do your job because the person paying you to do it has different beliefs than you is not a religious objection, it’s plain and simple bigotry.
Free speech, not free exercise, is why Phillips cannot be compelled to say something he does not believe.
A reasonable person can argue that Phillips has free speech protections for his artistry.
plan. Free speech protects people with theocratic views, but it doesn’t give them the right to impose those views on things like the market economy and the health care system.
These people are not trying to claim protection under the law; they’re trying to change the laws so that they can discriminate against the LGBTQ community, not just in the wedding cake business but in all businesses across all levels of society.
These people are willing to suffer the ongoing national tragedies of mass shootings, they’re willing to ignore the epidemics of suicides and violence against women, they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of schoolchildren, all so that they might feel a little less afraid when something goes bump in the night. We live in the most violent industrialized nation on earth because too many dudes can’t admit they still need a night-light.
It’s worth pointing out here that Prohibition was repealed at the end of 1933. So, for those playing along at home, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s entirely rational response to gang violence was to liberalize drug laws and restrict gun access. And it worked! The inability of modern Republicans to figure out how to stop street violence is truly beyond me.)
There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery. The Second Amendment is in the Constitution because Patrick Henry (Virginia’s governor at the time that the Constitution was being debated) and George Mason (the intellectual leader of the movement against the Constitution, the “anti-federalists”) won a debate against James Madison (the guy who wrote most of the Constitution and its original ten amendments). Henry and Mason wanted the Second Amendment in there to guard against slave revolts.
The Second Amendment could be rewritten to say: “White Supremacy, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of white people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed,” without any appreciable difference to the laws and rights of gun ownership as currently experienced.
Instead of reasonable suspicion, cops act on their unreasonable implicit (and often explicit) biases. That’s why arguably constitutional stop and frisks became nothing more than a Trojan horse for the unconstitutional scheme of racial profiling.
Police officers are agents of the state. They are authorized to have a monopoly of force: they can hit you but you can’t hit them back. They can execute on the street—I mean they can literally impose the death penalty upon you without a fair trial or a right to appeal—if they feel you’re a danger to others. Holding them to a standard somewhat beyond what they themselves think is reasonable is not too much to ask.
The Fifth Amendment is a litmus test of whether you have enough education (from the books or from the streets) to know it exists. And that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Your constitutional rights aren’t supposed to change depending on whether you know they exist.
To be eligible to vote in New York State in the 1850s, Black men needed to be a male landowners in possession of $250 worth of property and have state residency for three years. Neither the property nor residency requirements applied to white men.
That’s not “impartial” justice; it’s white justice imposed on Black bodies by a system that treats white people and their experiences as the default.
white jurors cannot sit in impartial judgment of Black people. Nobody really wants to say that, so we run ourselves through a bunch of equal protection analysis about the fairness of the objections to Black jurors, to make the conversation more palatable. But the real argument is that a Black person cannot get an impartial jury if that jury is all white.
“must draw its meaning from the evolving standard of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
From the perspective of the framers, what distinguished a cruel and unusual punishment from an allowable and normal punishment was not the method of execution, but the victim who was executed.
The state-sponsored arbitrary murder of its own citizens who may or may not have committed a crime cannot be made legitimate through an invented definition of the word cruel that wasn’t even used by the savage slaveholders who wrote the word down 250 years ago.
It’s monstrous for the state to kill people when the state regularly convicts the wrong people of crime. And it’s unethical to kill people based more on the effectiveness of their legal counsel than the severity of their offenses.
It’s pretty easy to dress up “whites win always” with legalese and sell it back to an audience of white people, especially when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have already done most of the work.
Strict scrutiny in the speech context could apply to damn near anybody. But in the equal protection context, strict scrutiny kicks in only for laws targeting members of a suspect class. Hence the legal importance of that classification.
they just think the Fourteenth Amendment is hiding rights for businesses they think are people, instead of minorities they wish were not.
Protecting children was just not something the framers thought the federal government had the power to do (put a pin in that thought).
I don’t understand these people who look at two consenting adults fucking and think, “Oh no, something must be done about this!”
What good is a protection from unreasonable searches if there is no protection from being unreasonably monitored?
It’s almost like the protected class here is the fetus, and not the born, human, woman-person whose body is attached to it.
I could give some Thirteenth Amendment arguments. Because the same amendment that prohibited slavery surely prohibits the state from renting out women’s bodies, for free, for nine months, to further its interests. Forced labor is already unconstitutional.
If you don’t agree with me—if you don’t think that the Fourteenth Amendment provided for the full political, civil, and social equality of women—then how in hell are you against the ERA? How can you possibly think that women don’t already have equal rights because of your limited, originalist interpretation of the Constitution, but also don’t think the Constitution should be changed to right this clear wrong that your interpretation has created?
Conservatives love arguing that the people they oppress are well taken care of by the oppressors.
Putting aside the issue that an actual draft which fairly called upon all citizens and didn’t exempt rich white boys with bone spurs might be the only thing that could arrest this country’s habitual global warmongering,
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Fetal personhood laws cannot overcome the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude, if we accept that a woman is a person who cannot be forced to labor.
From a certain point of view, rich people never have a problem with monarchy; they have a problem with hereditary monarchy.
It mainly empowers city voters lucky enough to live in low-population rural states.
And so, conservatives do not put it up for a vote. They do not allow a free and fair election on their actual platform. They use the judiciary, the least transparent and least responsive branch of government, to push through their antebellum values, and rely on ignorance to mask their true agenda.
Our system of justice should not be like this. Whether some people have rights or not should not depend on when the random wheel of death strikes down an octogenarian justice. Nor should it depend on the kind of strategic retirement gamesmanship employed by Republican-appointed justices.
