You are intermingling political ideology with law (the Constitution), and you never fail to do so.
Let me get this straight: political ideology has nothing to do with law.
I see. Interesting assertion.
And I am quite sure that your ideas about what "the gospel of Jesus Christ" entails is 100% irrelevant to the powers of Congress enumerated in Article I of of the Constitution.
And I'm quite sure that you don't have anything near the knowledge of the doctrines of the church relative to this to state with any degree of clarity what the relationship is, from a church standpoint.
If it something is within the purview of Article I, it is, by definition, constitutional. Your disagreeing with any given program because you don't like it is not a constitutional issue, but a political one.
Good. You have just obviated the entire New Deal, Great Society, universal health care, and probably 80% of the modern administrative state. I welcome you among the few and proud standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"
By the way, I am not interested in hearing your hilariously uninformed opinions about how "the Socratic method is the courtroom," or how torts are implicitly bad (when you have no demonstrated understanding of what a tort is), as a rejoinder to your failure to be able to tell the difference between a legal question and a political one.
I've never said there are not differences between legal and political questions. It is also the case that many, if not most, political questions eventually devolve into legal ones. What I have pointed out, for a long time, is that the method of argumentation you bring to the marketplace of ideas is grounded heavily in the kind of highly truncated, process oriented argument you are used to in the courtroom, a form of argument that serves the courtroom well on some occasions, and not so well in others, but, on its own, is well out of its element and over its own head in the non-courtroom philosophical realm.
It is not particularly impressive to see your verbosity about the what you think the Framers intended when, true to your Skousenite talking points, you think that
case law is a perversion of the Constitution, despite the fact that the Constitution presupposes that the United States is a common law country.
1. I've never read a word of Skousen on political issues, and have no idea what he thinks about them.
2. Where do I claim that case law is a "perversion of the constitution"? Here's what I actually said:
Darth is interested only, as I've always suspected, only in case law; only in what "the courts" have said and the precedents that have been set, not in the original intent of the Constitution, and not with philosophical rigor. Legal, Socratic reasoning is not the same thing as philosophical reasoning or a philosophical temperament.
What I have clearly said, and what a number of the best minds in political philosophy of the late 20th century have said, is not that "case law" is a perversion of the constitution, but that people like Darth, who use the edifice of case law built up over time to incrementally alter the meaning of the constitution and circumvent its actual text and original intent, are
perverters of the constitution (we could well take Cass Sunstien as a textbook example of the type). The problem is not the constitution or the concept of case law per se, but legal Morlocks like Darth, whether they be leftists or extreme libertarian secularists.
I went to the page, but I don't see the claim that you ascribed to me. However, it is true as a matter of constitutional history that the first amendment has, as its fundamental purpose, the protection of political ideas, and most especially, ideas to which the majority is hostile. Nowhere have I claimed that art is only protected speech unless it is political. In fact, I doubt I would have ever made such a claim, especially within the context of child pornography, which was the subject of the post to which you linked, as I've long been clear that pornography qua pornography is not speech. It is not protected free speech because it is not speech, but pure vicarious ideation.
Speech, for or against pornography, whether political or philosophical in nature, certainly is protected.
And that's why Harry Reid cannot possibly be a good Mormon.
Interesting that you defend the very person who said publicly that "I am a Democrat because I am a Mormon," implying explicitly that Republicans and, perhaps, other non-Democrats (such as Austrian libertarians etc.) cannot be good Mormons (or Christians).
Reid's problem is that the party he supports and its core ideology are thoroughly hostile and inconsistent with the teachings of the Church. But brother Reid is in no sense incapable of the kind of double think and delusional hypocrisy typical of the rank and file of his party within institutional politics. Witness the following remark by Boyd Peterson:
Finally, I am a Democrat because I believe LDS scripture and prophets have urged us to live within our means, to be fiscally responsible.
Do not have your mouth full of food when reading that quote.