|
tazzygirl -> RE: Justice Scalia is at it again. (9/23/2010 9:41:55 AM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Sserpentia
Point being, it was on party within a state which banned women from voting from the state constitution. It's not the Constitution of the United States which denies rights of women.
The Constitution would be a poor set of rights if it were locked in the 1780s. The Eighth Amendment would protect us against only the sort of punishment that was deemed cruel and unusual back then. As Justice Breyer has said, "Flogging as a punishment might have been fine in the 18th century. That doesn't mean that it would be OK ... today." And how could we say that the Fourth Amendment limits government wiretapping - when the founders could not have conceived of a telephone, much less a tap?
Justice Scalia doesn't even have consistency on his side. After all, he has been happy to interpret the equal-protection clause broadly when it fits his purposes. In Bush v. Gore, he joined the majority that stopped the vote recount in Florida in 2000 - because they said equal protection required it. Is there really any reason to believe that the drafters - who, after all, were trying to help black people achieve equality - intended to protect President Bush's right to have the same procedures for a vote recount in Broward County as he had in Miami-Dade? (If Justice Scalia had been an equal-protection originalist in that case, he would have focused on the many black Floridians whose votes were not counted - not on the white President who wanted to stop counting votes.)
Even worse, while Justice Scalia argues for writing women out of the Constitution, there is another group he has been working hard to write in: corporations. The word "corporation" does not appear in the Constitution, and there is considerable evidence that the founders were worried about corporate influence. But in a landmark ruling earlier this year, Justice Scalia joined a narrow majority in striking down longstanding limits on corporate spending in federal elections, insisting that they violated the First Amendment.
It is a strange view of the Constitution to say that when it says every "person" must have "equal protection," it does not protect women, but that freedom of "speech" - something only humans were capable of in 1787 and today - guarantees corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.
source
It becomes more interesting if you read the whole article.
|
|
|
|
