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May. 16th, 2008 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cormacA couple of years ago, I wrote a letter to Diane Feinstein, expressing my concerns over her support for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting the desecration of the American flag. I cited Supreme Court decisions that had deemed laws banning such desecration to be unconstitutional, as they prohibited freedom of speech. Instead of accepting that such a ban is incompatable with the highest law in the land, Senator Feinstein sought to put such unconstitutional ideas into the Constitution itself.
This seemed odd to me, as it not only prohibited actions of the American people (the last time that was tried with an amendment, it was repealed), but would make the document internally inconsistent. It would be akin to amending the Constitution to say that Christianity was the offical religion of the land, and that all employees of the government had to prove that they were true believers of the faith. It just doesn't work with the First Amendment.
Now I see that reactionaries are trying to do the same thing to the California Constitution. Now that the California Supreme Court has ruled that laws prohibiting homosexual marriages are unconstitutional, these idiots are trying to amend the Constitution.
Why, oh why, do these people hate freedom?
This seemed odd to me, as it not only prohibited actions of the American people (the last time that was tried with an amendment, it was repealed), but would make the document internally inconsistent. It would be akin to amending the Constitution to say that Christianity was the offical religion of the land, and that all employees of the government had to prove that they were true believers of the faith. It just doesn't work with the First Amendment.
Now I see that reactionaries are trying to do the same thing to the California Constitution. Now that the California Supreme Court has ruled that laws prohibiting homosexual marriages are unconstitutional, these idiots are trying to amend the Constitution.
Why, oh why, do these people hate freedom?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 10:56 pm (UTC)Which is not to say that these people aren't blazing idiots, and should be shouted down. Trouble is, they have a pseudo-point in that the measure in question passed by a scary margin. Pseudo-point, of course, because if the majority got to decide civil liberties, we'd be lacking the 13th, 14th... etc. But they don't get that. Or they get it all too well and are determined not to have it happen again, depending on which demographic of 'they' you're talking about.