Left2Right Comments

I had the exact same reaction. This phrase has become code for "will advance the fundamentalist Christian agenda."

Deborah Frisch

www.debfrisch.com
 

Well, Prof. Herzog, I, for one, would criticize the legal reasoning behind Dale, though the argument advanced in the dissent is even more risible. In any case, your posts on Constitutional issues are themselves becoming "a ritual stupidity" with all of this "bozo" talk about "good" versus "bad" interpretations.
 

Don Herzog, after months of slackin' off and writing nothing at all on his blog, finally wrote the following excerpt: "Where oh where "in the Constitution" does it say anything about freedom of association?"

Hmmmm. Not being a constitutional lawyer or law professor, I guess I would have to defer to Don, but I thought that "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" clearly meant that people had the right to "associate" with others as they saw fit.

If the right of assembly didn't include the choice of who you would assemble or associate with, the government could then decide for you who you associate with. For example, I can hear the government say, "So Don, you want to assemble? Well, right over there are 42 republican soldiers. Go ahead and assemble with them and discuss whatever you like. What? You want to assemble with other Leftists? Nope. Freedom of association doesn't exist - we'll tell you who you can associate with."
 

Prof. Herzog would also appear less transparently partisan if he would be consistent on this matter. On the one hand, he thinks that originalists should criticize Dale, yet on the other hand he ignored, then marginalized the originalist objections to "settled caselaw" regarding the government's right of contract ( http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/05/solomon_and_fai.html).

I guess originalists will have to learn to read the penumbras formed by the emanations from Prof. Herzog's mind to figure out precisely which cases they ought to criticize.
 

I'm not sure what Herzog's point is. That Rehnquist's interpretation of the First Amendment is no more disrespectful of the original intent of its authors than right to privacy interpretations mandating abortion on demand?

Am I the only one who finds that hard to swallow?
 

P-BS-Watcher,

Yup. As far as I can tell, you can either post zero trackbacks or multiple trackbacks to Left2Right with one trackback being impossible. I've pointed this out to the Left2Right administrators, but I suspect that they can't fix it. I have the same problem for the trackback links to this site. In the past, eventually, the Left2Right folk will delete the duplicate trackbacks by hand.
 

Glad to see Don is back and carrying his usual bitterness with him. Curious it is that after the Priest/boys scandal in the Catholic Church the homosexuals in the Boy Scouts thing is still popping up,raises questions as to motivation. Just to add to what has been already pointed out; do Boy Scouts assemble,if not how do they meet and associate? What are the ramifications to other groups/associations that liberals don't like? What is the difference between overturning a case and overturning a state law [10th amend ?] Article 1 sect 8; I daresay that the left would be more put out if that article were taken seriously than many others,nothing there about welfare that I can see. In any case we had an air force for about 40 yrs before a seperate branch was created. It was called the Army Air Corps'you might recall it's role in WW II. Given the first papragraph of sect 8 and sentence 11 of that article I think it's fair to say there's less stretch than Griswold & Roe. Putting all that aside,would A Gay Boy Scouts of America be a viable solution, if not why not?
 

I'd like to add to yesterdays post. Please note Renquists phrase,"expressive association". To get away for a moment from Don H's obsession with sex,specifically gay sex, [please note his repeated posts on the subject on Left2right if you think me harsh] imagine someone attempting to break into a private golf club on the grounds they don't have tennis courts or horseback riding. Better yet,and reminiscent of homosexual attempts to bust into the St Patricks Day parade some years ago, imagine avowedly hetrosexual attempts to likewise strut their stuff in and during a gay pride parade. Also,Don H said something about "interpretation is the only game in town". Hardly. You see there's also the game of Construction,which is exactly what Griswold and Roe were. The use of the word interpretation allows for the kind of subjective,range of the moment,catch as catch can,all opinions weigh the same [well,almost all] legal chaos that some seem to prefer,except when a Republican is in the WH. I'm waiting for someone to suggest Richard Rorty for the Court. The proof of the constructinist pudding in Griswold is Douglas's desire to hang his decision on more hooks than the Smith Brothers have cough drops. Goldberg made the blunder of emphasizing the 9th Amendment,which emphasis probably earned him a dressing down in thw Court's chambers. The founders repeatedly referred to natural rights too numerous to be mentioned concerning the 9th and that indeed could be a liberals Pandora's Box. I may add to the above comment on juggler,excuse me,Justice Douglas; with all those hooks he still needed emanations from the edge of shadows to justify his construction. Oh yeah,interpretation!
 

Heterosexuals *do* march in pride parades. If you've never heard of PFLAG, you're not equiped to comment on any gay rights issues due to severe ignorance.

Or were you using heterosexyal as a code word for anti-gay? Yes, anti-gay groups can't march in pride parades, any more than anti-Irish groups can't march in Irish parades.

But gay does not equal anti-Irish. Nor does it equal anti-Catholic, even thought St. Paddy's day aprades don't restrict themselves to only Catholic groups.

Not that I think this explanation will change your mind, which is probably full of "Ew, evil icky gays!"
 

I think, and this may be a first, that I'm on Don's side of this. PBS's input helped my decision.
Strict versus liberal construction of text is, seems to be, a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind. The phrase is probably and usually code for abortion, although it comes up in other contexts too.
A few other thoughts: When i was in scouts, 68-77, nobody ever asked or cared that I was an agnostic bisexual. The organization seemed to have been hijacked by fundies around when Reagan too office.
The term 'freedom of association' for the right of assembly may first have been used in NAACP v Alabama ex rel Patterson, 1958, which was a right to privacy case, the right of the NAACP not to be forced to disclose its membership list. The right of privacy was further developed in Talley v California (1960) which held the government cannot require disclaimers on political literature (e.g. stand by your ad.)
Aaron, your remarks were acute, but your website link may have had a typo.
 

I made a number of points in two different posts and it all comes down to PFLAG? I don't think so. One is severely ignorant because one hasn't heard of PFLAG,nope! A person loses the right to comment on a number of points related to an issue because of PFLAG ignorance,hardly. One's general knowledge base is compromised due to not knowing PFLAG,not. I may or may not spend the weekend boning up on PLAG but I'll have to think about it. Speaking of ignorance; I didn't see anything in my posts {2} that says homosexuals HAVE to be anti Catholic,so we'll flush that one right now. Maybe there's a severe reading disability out there. One thing is for sure,there is a severe hostility problem, a severe need to be accepted, and a severe tendency to overeaaction. Whoops,that's three things. Having experienced this type of post,as well as the particular poster,on the original Left2Right I feel the need to point out a problem that exists not only on the net but in the world at large, a problem serious but not yet fully understood or classified by medical science. That problem, or more aptly, condition is Last Wordism. Last Wordism afflicts those unhappy souls who, among other afflictions, have to believe that by getting the Last Word they have won,for at least five minutes they find peace and stop stalking around the house smashing furniture and aiming kicks at the cat. So as an act of both charity and self assurance I will cede the field to those who don't understand what they read, who see and respond to things that aren't there, and judge ignorance by the trivia they know that others don't know or care about.
 

Don't forget that in drawing on Griswold and other precedents, the Roe court never endorsed the "emanations from penumbras" theory of constitutional privacy. Instead, Justice Blackmun and friends located the privacy right in Roe in the due process clause the 14th Amendment:

"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

That clarification aside, I don't think liberals should run and hide from the penumbral rights theory in Griswold. Yes, the language is a little highfalutin, but the logic is compelling. The liberties protected in the Bill of Rights do seem to presume a more general right to be let alone, as Justice Brandeis liked to put it.

S. Mazie
 

by Sebastian Holsclaw

"Next time you hear someone pounding the table about Griswold and Roe as instances of legislation from the bench, ask him about Dale."

This is the problem. You claim that there are distinctions that can be made between the cases, but since you refuse to actually make the distinctions you get to gloss over the fact that the distinctions make make the question look silly. In this instance you seem to be annoyed that Scalia uses "association" instead of "assembly" and pretend that this distinction is as much of a problem as using a super-broad definition of "privacy" instead of, umm that clear phrase in the Constitution that Courts are obviously refering to when they use the word.
 

I was an Eagle Scout. I don't remember anytime taking an outh to be heterosexual.
 

The answer is: there are interpretations and there are interpretations. “penumbras and emanations” are stretching it too far – away from the things themselves (I know Husserl has bad press). The conservative INTERPRETATION is correct, because it is driven by low-level belief, motivation, instinct of sticking to practice, to facts, to people. A leftie is driven by Platonic progressivist whims that he calls “ideals”. So he's dragging interpretation towards those whims. A true conservative, and especially a proper liberal, i.e. libertarian, doesn't.

An interpreting person “likes” the outcome in what way??? That is the critical question! Our leftie philosopher missed this crux of the problem: you like the outcome because it justifiable on grounds of facts and “sticking with things” or you like the interpretation on basis of leftie moral sentiment!

Example: “time is money, money is power, ergo time is power”. A leftie has no remorse against practicing such an abuse, if it only serves some progressive goal. A conservative and especially libertarian does, even if it gets in way of his preferred ideology.

As an anarchist, I don't like the idea of Congress having right to levy taxes according to the Constitution – but I am not going to lie that it's not there. A leftie would interpret the text out of such reasonable, but disliked conclusion, step by step, and distortion by distortion.

Ergo, any leftie interpretation of constitution is simply incorrect.

Granted, there is quite a number of paleoconservatives that have the propensity of dragging the interpretation towards towards their inner sentiment – say, religious sentiment - as opposed to progressive sentiment.

But that doesn't excuse the left from not doing the same! It's like a little sister arguing that she does not have dirty hands, because it's her brother who does. There is no mutual exclusion here.

Modernist rightwingers or secular rightwingers or libertarians or intellectual conservatives interpret constitution correctly. The leftie interpreters merely take the meaning of Constitution for a progressive ride.

Re air force: it's a red herring and easy challenge. Constitution essentially happens in the “human noosphere”, i.e. our minds, not in physical reality. The progress of technology in no way changes that. That would be akin to saying that the profit motive of an ancient swordmaker is somehow fundamentally different from that of modern gunsmith, because technology progressed, you see. Same as economics isn't physics, so the Constitution isn't physics. So statements of Constitution towards interpretation of humanist reality can be taken literally. Statements of Constitution re physical reality can't be taken literally.

It's not the fault of the conservatives that the Constitution is essentially conservative. It's their great political luck. And again, I'm not conservative!

The truth is, progressive goals are NOT SUPPORTED, and they are outright banned, by reasonable interpretations of the Constitution. The politics of Constitution, the worldview behind it - is conservative. This is a bullet that no leftist has ever bitten on!

If conservatives en masse had the intellectual dishonesty of the left, they would reinterpret Communist Manifesto into conservative document. By heaping interpretations upon interpretations you could do that easily. That's what the left is doing with Constitution.

Another line of attacking this leftie crock of an argument: the “it all boils down to interpretation” line is el cheapo postmodernism. I.e. that one can interpret the document to mean just about anything that one wants it to mean. That is making Constitution meaningless, simply empty of meanings, and taking absurd conclusion that any action of government is viable.

The leftie “philosopher” has merely given us the preposterous reductio ad absurdum: me sez lotsa interpretations are there.

Well, yeah, sure they are there – and some are reasonable and some are not!

HOW is it that interpretation A is reasonable and B is not – well that depends on particular case.

But this kind of analysis is beyond the horizon of the problem hacked by reductio of ad absurdum by a leftie! It's sort of philosophical asking “have you stopped beating your wife?”. A leftie philosopher STOPPED SHORT of asking such question and then beheads all the interpretations into silly “t'is all a matter of interpretation”.

There's more: a leftie CAN NOT ask such question, about methodology of separating wheat from chaff in interpretations of Constitution, if he ever wants the

Why don't you ask honest and make progressive version of the Constitution? But you pretend as if Constitution could be interpreted into progressive outline. Well, no, it can't reasonably and honestly be interpreted into such shape.

Let's apply this sort of thinking to Clintonian defense: “have you smoked pot?” - “define smoking. Well you see the emanation, the penumbra of marijuana was there in my throat, but it was not there in my lungs, so technically I was not smoking marijuana”.
 

Can we declare this blog dead yet?
 

Josh Jasper said: "Can we declare this blog dead yet?"

Are you referring to Left2Right Comments? Then no. I have no intention of deleting it just in the extremely unlikely case that someone wants to refer to some old comment or conversation here.

So not dead. Just dormant (perhaps permanently).

I hope the Left2Right archive isn't deleted either.
 

If the main left2right blog is dead, the comments blog is pretty much dead as well.

It looks pretty dead to me.
 

It lives!
I argued exactly the opposite. -p-bs-watcher.
Yes, that was what conviced me.