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US Supreme Court gives back power to the people
The facts
In March 2018, the state of Mississippi passed the Gestational Age Act, which banned any abortion operation after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for a medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality but none for cases of rape or incest.
Republican Governor Phil Bryant said that he was:
He added:
“We’ll probably be sued here in about a half hour, and that’ll be fine with me. It is worth fighting over.”
An abortion clinic named the Jackson Women’s Health Organization and one of its doctors filed a suit in Federal District Court the day the Gestational Age Act was enacted against various Mississippi officials, alleging that the Act violated Supreme Court precedents establishing a constitutional right to abortion. The District Court granted summary judgment in their favour and permanently enjoined enforcement of the Act, reasoning that “viability marks the earliest point at which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions” and that 15 weeks’ gestational age is “prior to viability.”
Mississippi appealed against the Fifth Circuit to the Supreme Court in June 2020, challenging the viability standard set by previous Supreme Court decisions and asking the Court to allow the prohibition of “inhumane procedures”.
Relevant law
The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that:
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Roe v. Wade (1973)
In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the US Supreme Court majority opinion in striking down Texas’s abortion ban as unconstitutional held that women in the United States had a fundamental right to choose whether to have abortions without excessive government restriction:
“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 … in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy.”
“A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Roe v. Wade decided that a state’s right to regulate abortion was limited according to which trimester of pregnancy:
“With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in the health of the mother, the ‘compelling’ point, in the light of present medical knowledge, is at approximately the end of the first trimester. This is so because of the now-established medical fact, referred to above at 149, that until the end of the first trimester mortality in abortion may be less than mortality in normal childbirth. It follows that, from and after this point, a State may regulate the abortion procedure to the extent that the regulation reasonably relates to the preservation and protection of maternal health.”
“To summarize and to repeat:
100
1. A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
101
(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.
102
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.
103
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”
Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)
The subsequent case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) resulted in a particularly divided Court.
The plurality’s opinion overturned the Roe trimester framework in favor of a viability analysis allowing states to implement abortion restrictions that apply during the first trimester of pregnancy, and the Court also replaced the strict scrutiny standard of review required by Roe with the undue burden standard.
However, the plurality emphasised that stare decisis had to apply because the Roe rule had not been proven intolerable:
“The sum of the precedential enquiry to this point shows Roe’s underpinnings unweakened in any way affecting its central holding. While it has engendered disapproval, it has not been unworkable. An entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe’s concept of liberty in defining the capacity of women to act in society, and to make reproductive decisions; no erosion of principle going to liberty or personal autonomy has left Roe’s central holding a doctrinal remnant.”
“Where, in the performance of its judicial duties, the Court decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe and those rare, comparable cases, its decision has a dimension that the resolution of the normal case does not carry. It is the dimension present whenever the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution calls the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.”
Justices Blackmun and Stevens approved of the plurality’s preservation of Roe. Justice Blackmun, the author of Roe, argued for a woman’s right to privacy and again insisted that all non-de-minimis abortion regulations were subject to strict scrutiny.
Justices Rehnquist and Scalia dissented from the plurality’s decision to uphold Roe v. Wade and strike down the spousal notification law, contending that Roe was incorrectly decided.
The Gestational Age Act
Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, see Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191 (2018) provides that:
“Except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform . . . or induce an abortion of an unborn human being if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks.” §4(b).
US Supreme Court decision
Justice Alito held that the divisive issue of abortion properly belongs and should be given back to the people:
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997)”
“The right to abortion does not fall within this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty.””
“Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 979 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.”
Full story: https://sterlinglawqld.com/us-supreme-court-gives-back-power-to-the-people/
Race hate hoaxer Jussie Smollett gets appeal bail
In December, American actor Jussie Smollett was found guilty by a jury of falsely reporting a hate crime against himself.
He claimed two racist Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats beat him up. It turned out he had paid two Nigerian brothers to stage the whole thing so that he could pretend to be a victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime.
Earlier this month, Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in Cook County jail, and 30 months of felony probation, as well as restitution of $120,106 and a $25,000 fine.
Since then, Smollett was ordered to be released from jail after posting a personal recognizance bond of $150,000 by an appeals court pending the appeal against his convictions.
In Australia, a convicted person must ordinarily demonstrate exceptional circumstances in order to get appeal bail. The position appears to be different in America.
Jussie Smollett sentenced to 150 days in jail for fake hate crime hoax
Last year, American actor Jussie Smollett was found guilty by a jury of faking a hate crime against himself.
But many in the media had believed him. His tale was simply too good to be false.
Brainless Brooke Baldwin of CNN lamented that “And this is America in 2019“.
She was correct, but not quite in the way she meant it.
America in 2019 was a country whose ruling class was obsessed with race and identity politics, and desperate to find instances of racism in order to justify their obsessions.
That remained the case the following year, when a white kid who shot some violent rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin in self-defence was immediately characterized as a white supremist, even though all three rioters he shot were white.
Jussie Smollett understood this and figured that being the victim of a violent racist attack would spectacularly boost his profile.
He was proven right. Soon after, America’s ruling class unconditionally accepted his tale, and used it to condemn the entire country.
Full story:
Ring around a Rosey, or a look at how the Black Death of the middle ages is reflected in the current outbreak of a Ebola
In the middle of the 14th century, however, there seemed to be no rational explanation for it. No one knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one patient to another–according to one doctor, for example, “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick”–and no one knew how to prevent or treat it. Physicians relied on crude and unsophisticated techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious practices such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar.
In many ways we can see distinct similarities between the Black Death and the current outbreak of the Ebola virus in western Africa, Like the medieval plague then there is no known cure for Ebola now and despite all of the wishful thinking, despite all of the advances in medicine in the last 600 years we are just as powerless to stem the spread of this disease. And I am sorry to be the bringer of bad news but I think that this disease is going to have a similar effect on the population of Africa as the Plague had on 14th century Europe. We can certainly expect that the death toll will soar into the millions as efforts to contain it continue to fail.
Why do I expect such a large death toll?
This is a virus that not only spread through the exchange of bodily fluids but also remains active in the items that those fluids fall upon, thus bedding and clothing that the infected have touched becomes vectors for the disease to reach new victims. Add to that cultural practices pertaining to the care of the sick that funds family looking after their own, a low level of education, the effects of other diseases poverty and crowded living conditions and it’s not had to see just how optimistic any suggestion that the disease can be contained are. Just look to the example of the response to one man with the disease who is now gravely ill in the United States to get some idea of just how much effort is needed if you are too truly contain the infection: This level of response is just not possible in third world west Africa and so it seems inevitable to me that the infection is going to spread exponentially just as the black death spread exponentially in 14th century Europe.
So what can the modern west do to help stem the spread of the disease in Africa?
Well not much at all really, we risk losing a large number of our very skilled people if we send them into the disease hot spots firstly because the treatment that is available essentially boils down to trying to keep patients hydrated and waiting to see who has the natural ability to fight the infection. Those brave souls who are trying to treat the currently infected are trying to do so while wearing Hazmat suits that are essentially a fancy yellow plastic bag which I’m sure you will realize is nothing short of tortuous in the tropical climate of the region. So not only do the health workers run the very real risk of contracting the infection but also they risk dying from heatstroke in the suits they try to prevent infection with. Several health workers who have caught the Ebola virus have been evacuated so that they can be treated in Western hospitals but if the numbers of infected western heath workers were to increase I can foresee the practice of repatriating them being wound back or even abandoned in the effort to contain the disease. Aid in the form of medical supplies, certainly can and should be provided but the major imperative now has to be containment, and quarantine of all parts of Africa where the disease has been found.
The Environmental bigger picture, or accepting the will of Gaia
In the natural world there are clear limits to the population of any species. Be it the amount of substance that a particular species can find or something in the environment that find them tasty and therefore limits their numbers through predation. Human beings are very clever in their ability to eat almost anything that is nourishing and in many ways we have become the apex predator in every part of the eco-system. That in conjunction with our ability to mitigate that other limit to population, disease. Has seen our numbers soar beyond 7billion souls on this small planet. I would seem to me that pandemics are one of the ways that Gaia addresses the problem of too many people on the surface of the planet. Oh humanity certainly has dodged a bullet from pandemics in the recent past. But this disease is not going to be so easily dodged. I think that it has already reached a critical mass that makes it virtually unstoppable. Heck thanks to modern air travel I will be very surprised if is even just contained on the African continent.
Things are going to get a great deal worse before they get better
During the Black Death whole towns succumbed to the disease they were left with only the dead in residence sometimes the dead were not even buried and it’s not hard to imagine that happening again in Western Africa if Ebola really starts to take off as I am expecting it to do.
What we need to realize is that modern medicine is good, its clever and its largely been the bringer of better lives for all of those it has touched, from the poor children spared the mortal diseases of childhood that used to take so many children well before they reached maturity to the wonders of surgery that can see the imperfections and damages to our bodies repaired and replaced in a way that would seem magical to a medieval man contemplating the plague yet here we stand in the same place as that medieval man facing a disease pandemic that we cannot stop and a death toll that we dread will be larger than anything humanity has not seen in the last six centuries.
If this danse macabre does play up a storm it will change every aspect of global human society we could well go from a place where the people desperately compete for places in the economy to one where skilled workers will be in very short supply in many parts of the planet. The mechanized west where we already have machines that enable a very small number of people to grow the crops to feed the many or to operate the machines will probably get through this upcoming disaster well enough but any society still that practices subsistence agriculture can expect the same hard times that befell Europe after the plague because there was simply not enough people to plant and harvest the crops. Those who have been worried about climate change May well find all of their concerns are moot because a world with less people on it will not be producing anywhere near the emissions growth they are so certain is the problem. On the other hand the worlds mercantile economy is likely to be severely affected by both the loss of potential customers and the cost of trying to address the disease.
One other thing that we should recognize is that many people see the world through the lens of their religion and those religions that have a millenarian tendency may well see Ebola as some sort of divine retribution for our “sins”. A faith like Islam on the other hand which places such value in the observance of a mass gathering like their Haj could well be both a vector for the spread of the disease and suffer a huge number of casualties among its faithful.
The innocent childhood game of ring around a rosey actually has its origins in the time of the black death.
If clothes maketh the man ……
(by Ray Dixon ~ fashion blogger to the manosphere)
Then Barack ‘Beige’ Obama just lost the war against the Islamic State before it even started.
The ABC reports on Obama’s lack of a cunning plan:
US president Barack Obama says he has asked officials to prepare a range of military options for confronting Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and foreshadowed recruiting international partners for potential military action.
“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse.”
” We don’t have a strategy yet.“
But I think that report could have also read:
US president Barack Obama says he has asked his wife Michelle to prepare a range of suit options before he confronts Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and has foreshadowed recruiting international clothing designers for potential (and suitable) apparel.
“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse.”
“I don’t have a decent suit yet.“
I suggest he tries khaki.
Some thoughts about mooted changes to Media ownership law in Australia
People are creatures of habit and it is only that so many people are habituated to buying the news papers that any are still being sold at all. Just take any kind of commute on public transport and consider how many people are reading a paper and how many are staring at a screen instead. Some certainly may be playing games or even watching video but I expect that they will be out numbering those who are still reading dead tree editions of the MSM.
Then there is the things in the paper that people buy them for, most papers are not exclusively about politics and current affairs anyway, so some readers will be buying the paper for its coverage of sport, lifestyle or even just for the crossword puzzles. My point is that the political classes (in particular those from the left ) just look at the raw sales figured and they think that every reader of the Herald Sun is in the thrall of Rupert Murdoch and that the owners dictate to their readers directing their opinions. The reality is that all media entities write to their audience. If they don’t their audience wither away quite quickly. With the coming of the internet this is even more how things work Online entities are even more in an endless quest for readers so you have to play to what your readers want rather than thinking that you can manipulate their thinking. I have been writing a blog for nearly a decade now and I have noticed just how quickly particular readers flit in and out its the same now with the way that people read things online from the likes of Murdoch, Fairfax or even the Guardian People don’t just get their news from one source any more no matter what the subject is they will read what several sources say about it and then make up their mind. This behaviour is the same when it comes to broadcast TV people flit form one channel to another seeking different perspectives. My argument is simple, if the media consumers have changed their habits then perhaps there is something in the notion that media diversity laws from the last century should perhaps reflect those changes as well.
Cheers Comrades
Who are the real bigots in the St Pat’s spat? or the proper way to nurture social acceptance
As its a fine Saturday morning and I think that such days are perfect for a change of pace I offer a new topic that I have come across from my subscription to “Spiked”. It concerns the refusal of the St Patrick’s day marches in New York and Boston to allow Gay activists to march under Gay themed banners in their parades. Of course our friends of the pink persuasion are screaming “discrimination” with a great deal of vim and vigour so loudly that you would think that the march organisers were planning to burn a few homosexuals at the stake as part of the celebrations. What I find most worrying about the whole thing is the same “if you don’t support the Gay agenda 110% then you are a bigot” mindset from those homosexual activists who want to hijack the ostensibly Catholic festival to promote their own cause .
There have also been reports of people losing employment after it was discovered that they do not agree with gay marriage. A common theme in these reports is that the individuals involved do not appear to dislike gay people, but they have nonetheless been labelled bigots due to their objections to same-sex marriage. Rather than encouraging a live-and-let-live attitude, it appears that some supporters of same-sex marriage seek to find and root out anyone who won’t publicly accept this relatively new institution.
When lawmakers in Arizona introduced a bill last month that sought to clarify whether small business owners like wedding photographers can refuse work on religious freedom grounds, there was little consideration in the media of the legal pros and cons. Few highlighted that the existing law allows private vendors to refuse work on the grounds of sexual orientation, and thus continues after the governor vetoed the bill. Instead, the proposed law was greeted with a hysterical campaign to label it ‘anti-gay’ and ‘Jim Crow’ (an historically illiterate comparison, beginning with the fact that Jim Crow was enforced by state law and businesses that refused to obey it could be prosecuted).
These tendencies to demonise dissent are visible in the campaign against the St Patrick Day parades. There is a rush to label any disagreement with gay marriage or gay culture as out-and-out ‘bigotry’. There is a desire to not simply state that certain views of gays are wrong, but to have those views silenced. And there is an operation to target and scare corporations that are associated with such views. Gay activists threatened a campaign against corporations in Arizona, including the National Football League for holding the Super Bowl in the state, if the recent bill passed. Similarly, they pressured St Patrick’s Day sponsors like Samuel Adams and Heineken to withdraw support. This is the top-down, elite-led politics of name and shame, rather than a properly liberal campaign that draw upon popular support.
What we are witnessing is an attack on those who don’t share today’s pro-gay outlook. Some may want to opt out of this Culture War, but the war increasingly won’t allow there to be any bystanders. Instead, there is pressure to conform. Even if it does not spill over into the political or legal world, such conformism is problematic for the free flow of ideas.
The sky will not fall if gays and lesbians are allowed to march in the Boston and New York St Patrick’s Day parades. But we will create a conformist, intolerant and unfree society if we do not allow space for the expression of different views, including traditional religious teachings about homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
The title of the article asks Who are the real bigots in the St Pat’s spat? and I can’t avoid concluding that its the very noisy Gay activists who are using every possible way to bully people into “endorsing” to their position. I can’t help thinking that this may well back fire on them and lead to a backlash that seriously damages the hard earned public good will towards homosexuality that has been steadily been accruing over the last few years. Social acceptance can be most fragile flower that needs nurture and careful cultivation and it can be oh so easily lost if you start tearing up the field with loud and noisy tractors instead of well directed hand tools.
Cheers Comrades
The Fate of Traitors
I suspect that after a substantial part of his bid has been served that Bradley Manning may just wish that he had been convicted of the most serious charge so that he could have had the “green dream” or an appointment with a firing squad rather than spending the rest of his life within the walls of a military prison .
click for source
As the US military justice system is not so inclined to make sentences for multiple crimes run concurrently, choosing instead to make them cumulative its very likely that Manning will spend the rest of his life behind bars this is of course going to be a most timely reminder of the fate that awaits all traitors and oath breakers…
Now if only they could send in a Seal teem to liberate Julian Assange from tat embassy room in London they could have a nice show trial and then…
Cheers Comrades
if you aid the enemy, then you are the enemy
Cue:- Richard Ryan
Iain Hall's SANDPIT 