SCOTUS Catch-all |

[superrific]

So you are saying that if you don’t finish in the top 15% of a top 3 law school (which in itself probably has the top 1% IQ in the country) then you are stupid?

Basically you are saying that 99.9% of people in America are stupid.

Stupid relative to what we should expect from a Supreme Court Justice. Stupid relative to Supreme Court justices like Kagan or Breyer or Jackson or even Scalia.

I mean, don't people say that NBA players "suck"? They don't mean suck relative to the entire world. I'd guess that the average NBA benchwarmer is at a higher percentile in terms of basketball ability than Gorsuch is in terms of intelligence.

Or Hubert. Is he a terrible coach? He's better than 99% of people in America.

 

[wmheel1287]

Someone should ask this duplicitous motherfucker what Christmas Day means and if the entire Christmas holiday must be condensed into that one day. Based on his logic, that would seem to be the case and we are all doing it wrong.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

“… The justices, in a 8-1 ruling, reversed a lower court's decision that had upheld the law in a case brought by Kaley Chiles, who argued that it violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech.

… The dispute pitted Colorado's authority to forbid a healthcare practice that it calls unsafe and ineffective against First Amendment ⁠speech protections.…”

 

[superrific]

The First Amendment has been hijacked. It was never meant to allow medical care to evade regulation just because the therapy is conducted via speech. It's nuts, to be honest.

I have way more respect for Kagan/Soto to be harsh just because I disagree with their conclusion in a case I haven't closely followed. But I do wonder if they voted with the majority so they could write a concurrence, and then in the concurrence point out that the determinative factor was that the law is viewpoint-based, not just content-based. Thus, in their view, this one falls when an ordinary content-based regulation does not.

But I fundamentally reject the idea that the government has to be neutral with respect to all viewpoints. We should not let high school teachers teach that the earth is flat. We should not let doctors tell patients that vaccines are harmful and they are better off without them.

I suppose generally speaking, I reject the idea that the First Amendment requires us to ease medical standards to accommodate "physicians" who can't seem to follow existing medical standards for reasons (usually they are religious). Many doctors are religious and they manage to reconcile their religion to their responsibilities as physicians. This is true for therapists too. Indeed, it can be argued that in some fields, religiosity makes physicians more effective at communicating with patients and their families.

But if you can't do that, if you can't figure out how to be a doctor who is also religious, then you shouldn't be a doctor. Find another calling. We shouldn't have to bend over backwards to accommodate people based on their inability to keep their dicks in their pants, epistemically speaking.

 

[Icky Mettle]

“… The justices, in a 8-1 ruling, reversed a lower court's decision that had upheld the law in a case brought by Kaley Chiles, who argued that it violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech.

… The dispute pitted Colorado's authority to forbid a healthcare practice that it calls unsafe and ineffective against First Amendment ⁠speech protections.…”

This is the worst decision by SCOTUS since the last one.

 

[superrific]

This is the worst decision by SCOTUS since the last one.

The fact that it was 8-1 gives me pause. I read the concurrence and it makes sense but doesn't convince me.

The big problem is that government should be neutral re: religion but it doesn't follow that it has to be neutral with respect to any and all religious practices. The government should not have to remain neutral on whether the earth is flat, whether homosexuality is evil, whether black people are inherently inferior in God's eyes (yes, this was a religious belief for a long time -- and still probably is in some quarters -- so it's not exactly an outlier).

Conservatives always claimed that gay marriage would open up the door to polygamy or bestiality. In reality, those outcomes are way more likely to come from the religious camp. Why exactly can't Mormons have multiple wives? It's a part of their religion. Is it because the Supreme Court disagrees with that religious view? There's no stopping point, no limiting principle.

 

[farce©]

The fact that it was 8-1 gives me pause. I read the concurrence and it makes sense but doesn't convince me.

The big problem is that government should be neutral re: religion but it doesn't follow that it has to be neutral with respect to any and all religious practices. The government should not have to remain neutral on whether the earth is flat, whether homosexuality is evil, whether black people are inherently inferior in God's eyes (yes, this was a religious belief for a long time -- and still probably is in some quarters -- so it's not exactly an outlier).

Conservatives always claimed that gay marriage would open up the door to polygamy or bestiality. In reality, those outcomes are way more likely to come from the religious camp. Why exactly can't Mormons have multiple wives? It's a part of their religion. Is it because the Supreme Court disagrees with that religious view? There's no stopping point, no limiting principle.

I immediately thought about Mormon polygamy when I read about this ruling. But then I recalled that the LDS church was coerced into banning polygamy before the US would consider statehood for Utah. Maybe given how this suit was determined, the Mormons can reinstate polygamy by saying their religious beliefs were infringed upon by the government leveraging their beliefs against them, and now the precedent is set that the government must be neutral in religious matters, so bring on the sister wives!