Are homophobes born that way?

[_Moniker]

Hobbes viewed men in a state of constant warfare and when man compacted to form together to create government they gave up natural rights in exchange for this social order. He viewed the Leviathan as having ultimate sovereignty and rebellion was not usually acceptable when power was abused -- this is why our founding fathers preferred LOCKE AND PAINE. :)
Quote:

Duuuuuh....Which way did he go George???

Yes Moniker, I know...

Really? Then why do you mention natural rights so damn much and can't seem to separate them from constitutional rights? You do understand that positive rights can be created by the social contract? Do you see the distinction between the negative and positive rights? You seem to think that only negative rights are constitutional and this is just not so.

Kirk says that Burke was more of an influence than Locke, but that's for another discussion. Suffice it to say that the idea of Natural Rights has significant bearing, but perhaps more in the Declaration than in the Constitution.

Paine had more immediate influence on the revolution, declaration, and was calling for a republican constitution. Locke actually stated the natural rights were "life, liberty, and property" <--- wee bit familiar?

by the way -- why don't you tell me what Burke thought of natural rights? :)

Yes, that's what they are doing, and the Judiciary was created with no such powers (and was, among the Founders, particularly Jefferson, the most feared of the branches of government were it to become corrupt).

No! They are not creating legislation. They interpret the constitution and deem legislation constitutional or unconstitutional. The Justices can NOT create legislation. As I explained numerous times to you before it is not a stagnant process. There can be amendments to state or the federal constitution. New Justices can be appointed. Legislation can be rewritten to pass constitutional muster.

You clearly do not understand the concept of "tyranny of the majority" or how the constitution deals with both the tyranny of the majority and the equally problematic tyranny of the minority. Care for a political science 101 lesson Moniker?

haha! YOU wrote this about the elites, by the way:

The very idea that a tiny group of judges educated at Ivy League law schools are someone morally superior to the typical American citizen is an indication of raw hubris, not proper judicial temperament. As Robert Bork has long pointed out, we like many of the results of such decisions, but later we may be snared in the precedents their legal reasoning created.

I understand precisely that the founding fathers were terrified of the masses and created the constitution in such a way so that only certain segments of our society could participate in the political process. Why? Because they feared the masses.

Oh, by the way, you're still missing the mark -- constitutional rights go beyond the scope of natural rights.

Do they? Constitutional rights are legal instruments, but instruments based in the concept of natural rights, and natural rights were understood to preexist both the state and organized political society; they are inherent in the individual human being. All the actual "rights" in the Constitution are unalienable; we cannot be alienated from them as they come to us from "nature and nature's God" and are intrinsic. Any other "rights" that could conceivable be created by human beings - such as judges or legislators - are by definition contingent -upon the good graces of those who have created them or, even more importantly, the winds of cultural change.

So, the right to a free and public education is an inalienable right? You're telling me what I already know -- yet, YOU are not reading what you're writing. There ARE certain natural rights that we do not forfeit in society, yet, we move beyond that and there are certain positive rights that come into play in our society and some of them are constitutionally protected.

These, such as homosexual marriage and abortion, are not "rights" at all, in the constitutional sense, but simply judicial perquisites; a cultural gratuity extended to politically influential or culturally de rigeur groups at a specific cultural moment.

If the justices rule that they are "rights" then of course they are "rights". Just because they're not natural rights does not make them unconstitutional!

When, where?

Gag

You're asking me here what the difference is between the natural right of freedom of speech and the legal/constitutional right of freedom of speech (or religion, or assembly, or association)?

Or the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the legal/constitution version of the same?

Oh, you're aggravating me.

Here's some more posts of yours:

They are constitutional if and only if they are actually constitutional and can be shown to be so through an analysis of the original intent of the writers. What you really believe in Moniker, is rule by lawmakers, not rule of law, and the lawmakers you are defending here, the California Supremes, have no constitutional authority to make law at all.

Bzzzt

This is my FAVORITE!

My statement:

You again forget that the Judiciary is again checked by the popular vote in the way of amendments.

Droopy reply:

Only before the fact. After the fact, the change in law is, for all intents and purposes, permanent and beyond democratic control.

Until you figure out that the process is not stagnant and what precisely the different branches do then you shouldn't lecture anyone about PoliSci 101, eh?

I can vote. I also can drink a beer. That's amazing, huh?

[_Droopy]

This may help you understand what I'm getting at when you talk about "rights" and seem to keep referring back to inalienable and natural rights and not recognizing the difference between them and LEGAL rights.

So our unalienable rights can be legally indeterminate? Which ones and under what conditions?

You've said before there is no such thing as a "right" to a free and appropriate education

Correct.

-- bzzzt - wrong! There is because the Justices have ruled there is! You've said there's no right to penumbras -- bzzt --- wrong! There is because the Justices have ruled there is. Etc...

Ahhh, I see where you're coming from now. You have just made the point that the entire conservative intellectual movement has been making for upwards of thirty years now: The Constitution means what the judiciary says it means. There is no substantive meaning to the Constitution at all grounded in the original intent of the Founders and the core philosophical set of principles upon which the Constitution was constructed.

Problems:

1. The United States Constitution is grounded in two fundamental principles: the concept of the rule of law and the concept of equality under the law.

What you have done here is substitute the rule of lawmakers for the rule of law; in essence, substituting the endless procession of case law and precedent (legalism) for Constitutional principle. This is, at its base, inherently lawless because human social, psychological, and ideological preferences drift, ebb, and flow like the sands of the Sahara, and that means the interpretation of the Constitution will drift and flow with it. But this, of course, is tantamount to simply having no core constitution at all, and simply allowing the courts to make law and interpret it de novo as we go along.

You have turned over the governance of the country to human judges and their judgment bereft of a supreme law of the land to which all, including the judges themselves, must defer. A nation which is ruled by those who make and interpret law, as over against a nation under the rule of law, is inevitably a lawless nation governed both by popular passions and the intellectual/ideological fads that pass through elite institutions and culture. It is a nation with no substantial legal or political ground, and hence, no central governing principles upon which to understand the limits or extent of the law or its proper sphere.

It is also an autocratic government under thrall to unaccountable judges who have arrogated to themselves the powers of legislators but without political accountability and slight chance of their decisions ever being altered or recalled, despite their effects upon society.

Rule by judges is hence both lawless (though the nation may be bathed in law) and undemocratic.

Judicial imperialism also closes debate on contentious and complex philosophical issues by placing them beyond the will or participation of the people (we may still argue about them, but it really doesn't matter as a group of human beings in black robes have already settled the matter legally).

Is there a "right" to education? If so, then there is also an attendant duty, or reciprocal responsibility attached to it. And, if it is a right, then it must be provided for by someone as a matter of the very fact of existence under that political order. Who is to provide your education? Health care is a right? Then someone must provide it for you on pain of violating that right.

Sol here we see a society in which everyone exists at the expense of everyone else, as Bastiat foresaw. A lawless society in which the law has the potential to change every day and every person, bristling with judicially created rights, lays claim to the resources, labor, means, and time of every other member of that society pursuant to those "rights".

(education cannot be a "right" in any case, as education is an individual pursuit and occurs only if and when an individual chooses to become educated. It cannot be provided by law any more than can intelligence, happiness, or cultural sophistication and taste).

Abortion is a "right"? Then it must be provided to those who desire it by some agency. How? Who is to do the providing? By what means? Are those who abhor convenience abortion on demand to provide it to those who, because it is a right, lay claim to the labor and resources of others to make it available?

I find it baleful that the sheer intellectual vacuousness of Roe and the imaginary structures tortured from the text of the Constitution to arrive at the fictive "right" in question do not bother you; that the imaginative creation from thin air of constitutional principles that, in all actuality, have no basis in the document, does not cause you concern.

In essense Moniker, you've sown a lot of seed on Animal Farm, but you're not going to like the crop when it matures.

[Guest]

Really? Then why do you mention natural rights so damn much and can't seem to separate them from constitutional rights?

We can cut with the smoke and mirrors now Moniker, as you have made it quite clear that by "constitutional rights" you do not mean rights contained within the constitution, given a strict construction, but only legal perquisites extended to cultural subgroups or interests logically and legally independent of the actual text as interpreted by the judiciary according to their own criteria.

It is what they say it is.

Interesting how willingly you would turn over every iota of liberty guaranteed to you in the Constitution to a small oligarchy of philosopher kings who will now decide for you what your rights are and what they are not.

You've given over your own right of participation in the political life of your society to a small, unaccountable group of commissars.

Now, if you don't like the outcome, to what standard will you turn?

[_Moniker]

Hey, Coggins -- let's see what a founding father said about the Constitution, shall we?

Jefferson:

Time and changes in the condition and constitution of society may require occasional and corresponding modifications.

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements, nor bigoted to the practices of our forefathers. It is that bigotry which keeps the Indians in a state of barbarism in the midst of the arts [and] would have kept us in the same state even now.

I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident: 'That the earth belongs in usufruct to the living;' that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it... We seem not to have perceived that by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.

Can one generation bind another and all others in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter unendowed with will.

I can keep going!

I don't think Jefferson is too keen on original intent... ... .... :)

[_Moniker]

Really? Then why do you mention natural rights so damn much and can't seem to separate them from constitutional rights?

We can cut with the smoke and mirrors now Moniker, as you have made it quite clear that by "constitutional rights" you do not mean rights contained within the constitution, given a strict construction, but only legal perquisites extended to cultural subgroups or interests logically and legally independent of the actual text as interpreted by the judiciary according to their own criteria.

It is what they say it is.

Please google "penumbras". Okay? Try findlaw.... might want to look at "right to education", as well.... okey dokey?

Or even better why not take some Constitutional Law courses and then come back and discuss this in a few years?

I haven't looked yet, (*giddy with anticipation*) to see if you told me what Burke thought of natural rights. :)

Gonna look now and then I'm gonna rub it in. :P

[_Moniker]

Coggins, you composed that rant before I even posted didn't you?

Answer my post and stop screwing around. You don't know where I actually stand on any of these issues -- I'm merely explaining how it works. :)

[_Moniker]

Now, if you don't like the outcome, to what standard will you turn?

If I don't like the outcome I can use the amendment process or elect representatives that will appoint Justices that mirror my own political temperment -- the same exact thing you can do!

I've given away nothing! I just understand the process!

by the way, were you all for the Marriage Amendment Act? :)

~edited to add~

I'm not even certain why you brought in Burke when talking about natural rights -- Burke influenced certain portions of the Constitution yet actually thought men had no inalienable rights. Rights came from government.

[_Droopy]

Hey, Coggins -- let's see what a founding father said about the Constitution, shall we?

Jefferson:

Time and changes in the condition and constitution of society may require occasional and corresponding modifications.

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements, nor bigoted to the practices of our forefathers. It is that bigotry which keeps the Indians in a state of barbarism in the midst of the arts [and] would have kept us in the same state even now.

I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self-evident: 'That the earth belongs in usufruct to the living;' that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it... We seem not to have perceived that by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.

Can one generation bind another and all others in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter unendowed with will.

I can keep going!

I don't think Jefferson is too keen on original intent... ... .... :)

You can keep going with your postmodernish ahistory and decontextualizing of history until your fingers bleed from tapping your keys, but none of the above has any bearing upon homosexual marriage, liberalized abortion, education, health care, or any of the other whole cloth political constructions of the modern judiciary.

To make your case here, your going to have to show that the founders actually had in mind concepts like Gay marriage or abortion when they wrote the Constitution, and that the kinds of changes and amendments they had in mind had any conceivable relevance to the kinds you and the Left desire.

This is the same old threadbare, hobby horse historical revisionism the Left has been using for forty years to tear up the Constitution to make way for their "better world", and its anti-intellectualism and historical immaturity are still as ripe as they were then.

The second amendment and the "general welfare" clause have been tortured and put in stocks in the same manner to justify the same political agendas according to the same principles believed to exist in the imaginary constitution that exists within the actual one.

You're not a libertarian Moniker, your a statist and a serf, willing to give away both your liberty and mine in the name of moral self congratulation.

Pathetic.

[_Droopy]

I

f I don't like the outcome I can use the amendment process or elect representatives that will appoint Justices that mirror my own political temperment -- the same exact thing you can do!

I've given away nothing! I just understand the process!

You're so politically naïve it positively astounds.

But you dodge the primary point yet again.

[Guest]

<snipped out too much stuff>

I am not telling you where I stand on most of these issues. I actually think that it's best if there is broad support for certain things, yet, I am not against the process.

Stop labeling me and stick to the point!