Can't wait to hear the screams about the ACLU on this one...

[Theben]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


That's not a problem with the source, but the scholars.

Scholars once believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, so why should we believe them?

Because scholars, unlike religious types, are willing to change their tune once shown enough evidence.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Scholars once believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, so why should we believe them?

That was because they relied on the Bible. Once they got away from that, things were fine.

[Ben Kenobi]

Fine. I still await the evidence demonstrating the unreliability of the bible as a historical source.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by MrFun
I'm more concerned with the fvcking bitter cold temperatures now, than any fantastical flood.

Cold? Yeah, a tad its only 55 or so.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Fine. I still await the evidence demonstrating the unreliability of the bible as a historical source.

Here's just three off the top of my head:

1) No worldwide flood that wiped out all of humanity except 8 people ever occured, and the dimensions given for the Ark are scientifically impossible for a ship of such material.

2) As we went over a while ago and you seem to have conveniently forgot, Daniel is concretely in error in its namings of the Neo-Babylonic and Persian kings, and it gives contradictory dates for Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem.

3) Tower of Babel, anyone?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Tower of Babel, anyone?

CivIII said that was real, dammit

[Ned]

Just to set the record straight, the "right to privacy" is an aspect of "liberty" that is expressly protected under the 5th and 14th Amendments under the doctrine of substantive due process to invalidate statutes or procedural due process to protect the likes of Limbaugh. Read Stewart's concurring opinion from Roe v. Wade:

"MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring.

In 1963, this Court, in Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U. S. 726, purported to sound the death knell for the doctrine of substantive due process, a doctrine under which many state laws had in the past been held to violate the Fourteenth Amendment. As Mr. Justice Black's opinion for the Court in Skrupa put it: "We have returned to the original constitutional proposition that courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies, who are elected to pass laws." Id., at 730.(1)

Barely two years later, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, the Court held a Connecticut birth control law unconstitutional. In view of what had been so recently said in Skrupa, the Court's opinion in Griswold understandably did its best to avoid reliance on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the ground for decision. Yet, the Connecticut law did not violate any provision of the Bill of Rights, nor any other specific provision of the Constitution.(2) So it was clear [p168] to me then, and it is equally clear to me now, that the Griswold decision can be rationally understood only as a holding that the Connecticut statute substantively invaded the "liberty" that is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.(3) As so understood, Griswold stands as one in a long line of pre-Skrupa cases decided under the doctrine of substantive due process, and I now accept it as such.

"In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of `liberty' must be broad indeed." Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U. S. 564, 572. The Constitution nowhere mentions a specific right of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life, but the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment covers more than those freedoms explicitly named in the Bill of Rights. See Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners, 353 U. S. 232, 238-239; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534-535; Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390, 399-400. Cf. Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U. S. 618, 629- 630; United States v. Guest, 383 U. S. 745, 757-758; Carrington v. Rash, 380 U. S. 89, 96; Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U. S. 500, 505; Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116, 127; Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U. S. 497, 499-500; Truax v. Raich, 239 U. S. 33, 41. [p169]

As Mr. Justice Harlan once wrote: "[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment." Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 543 (opinion dissenting from dismissal of appeal) (citations omitted). In the words of Mr. Justice Frankfurter, "Great concepts like . . . `liberty' . . . were purposely left to gather meaning from experience. For they relate to the whole domain of social and economic fact, and the statesmen who founded this Nation knew too well that only a stagnant society remains unchanged." National Mutual Ins. Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co., 337 U. S. 582, 646 (dissenting opinion).

Several decisions of this Court make clear that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12; Griswold v. Connecticut, supra; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, supra; Meyer v. Nebraska, supra. See also Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158, 166; Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U. S. 535, 541. As recently as last Term, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438, 453, we recognized "the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." That right [p170] necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. "Certainly the interests of a woman in giving of her physical and emotional self during pregnancy and the interests that will be affected throughout her life by the birth and raising of a child are of a far greater degree of significance and personal intimacy than the right to send a child to private school protected in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925), or the right to teach a foreign language protected in Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923)." Abele v. Markle, 351 F. Supp. 224, 227 (Conn. 1972).

Clearly, therefore, the Court today is correct in holding that the right asserted by Jane Roe is embraced within the personal liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/410s1.htm

[Imran Siddiqui]

Just to set the record straight, the "right to privacy" is an aspect of "liberty" that is expressly protected under the 5th and 14th Amendments under the doctrine of substantive due process to invalidate statutes or procedural due process to protect the likes of Limbaugh.

Yes, yes, we know that argument and have debated it many, many, many, many times (right Berz?). No need to treat us like children .

However, the 'right to privacy' also relied on other amendments. 'Substantive Due Process' (another debate) was bolstered by other amendments to create the Constitutional 'right to privacy' in Griswold v. Connecticut (the majority used a penumbra of rights emanating from the Bill of Rights argument).

[Ned]

Imran, the problem with a vague definition of a right to privacy independent of liberty is that there exists no provision in the constitution for the Supremes to adjucticate the constitutionality of state action that violates such an undefined right.

[Imran Siddiqui]

the problem with a vague definition of a right to privacy independent of liberty is that there exists no provision in the constitution for the Supremes to adjucticate the constitutionality of state action that violates such an undefined right.

Well duh . That's what happens when you say the Constitution includes rights that aren't written into it. You wonder exactly how those 'rights' should be phrased.

[Ned]

Imran, what do they teach you today in school about the status of "substantive due process?"

[Imran Siddiqui]

Law School or College or High School? Be more specific will you?

In Law School, a bunch, including the debates about it. In College, certain classes deal with it (some pretty decently).

[Ned]

Law school.

[Ben Kenobi]

1) No worldwide flood that wiped out all of humanity except 8 people ever occured, and the dimensions given for the Ark are scientifically impossible for a ship of such material.

2) As we went over a while ago and you seem to have conveniently forgot, Daniel is concretely in error in its namings of the Neo-Babylonic and Persian kings, and it gives contradictory dates for Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem.

3) Tower of Babel, anyone?

Looks like we ought to take this to another thread, or else we will completely jack this one.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Law school.

Well, we get both sides. We, of course, get the history of substantive due process... at least the explosion of those cases in the Lochner Era and then in the post Griswold Era. We also read a lot of Scalia dissents and other stuff which casts down on the whole concept of substantive due process.