Canada has WMDs

[kandrathe]

I suspected that. He just had that strange institutional feel about him.

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

Care to take a guess at how many Canucks are posting in this forum, Hoss? You might be surprised... or panicked. :lol: What a lovely attitude to display in an overtly international forum board.

In case you missed the initial point, this thread was garnering opinion on exactly how much Canadian Law and its changes were going to affect and exert pressure on legislators south of the border. The fact that it was posted on a "gamers" board really has little to do with the issue; I posted it here because I respect the thoughts and opinions (not to mention the debating skills) of several of the minds that lurk on this site.

Does that address your concerned query?

[Roland]

It only makes them follow you home. :P

[Guest]

"What a lovely attitude to display in an overtly international forum board."

I dont see what my "attitude" was. The only group I subtlely bashed was "gamers" of which I am one myself.


In fact if you had really understood my post, the implication was that being a gamer removes ones ideas from the realm of serious consideration(not fair to gamers really) and is a greater tag than nationality(which is fair actually sice its a choice to be a gamer).

And as for telling me how many Canadians are here - duh. Next youll probably explain to me that we also have many gamers posting here.

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

yay another bash by Nico

Now THAT was a troll. ;)

[pakman]

But gamers should know that fire and acid is bad to trolls :P Anyone who has played D&D at least ;)

[ShadowHM]

Hi Ghostiger,

Pierre Trudeau was one of the most notable and quotable Prime Ministers of this century. Like all good Prime Ministers, he indeed paid close attention to what went on next door. Example:

We're a different people from you, and we're a different people partly because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant.

Now you may be just a gamer but most of the participants in this thread are only secondarily gamers. And I think P.E.T. would have had great fun following the comments in this thread. He loved controversy and he loved a good argument. And he never backed down from what he thought was right.

And, since he has a GREAT deal of time on his hands now ;) I suspect he would have no trouble finding the time to enjoy this thread.

[Guest]

Perhaps your right.

But I never said I was "JUST a gamer".

[Occhidiangela]

I realize that I am on your turf here, your being professionally expert.

However, in order to change a law, someone has to make the case that the law needs to be changed, or taken off the books. This case can be made either on the floor of a legislature, or oftern in courts and appellate courts. Funnily enough, it falls to lawyers to do just that, make the case regarding laws.

Many legislators, not all, evolve from the legal profession, so my question is, to my view, very valid in that I wonder why those of the legal profession do not 'police up the debris' of their profession. The EPA makes other lines of work clean up their mess.

I do appreciate, due to politics as usual, the lack of luster that cleaning out laws that make no sense attracts, but that is a public service necessary to a profession. Professions being more than jobs, but higher callings.

The AMA, for example, and the medical profession typically cleanse crappy procedures fro their arsenal as new techniques or knowledge grows.

Why not the profession of law?

[goldfish]

I wish it were so easy. However, it is not, because of the legal requirement of "standing."

As a lawyer, I can advocate for changes in laws in public forums to try to influence the legislature. I can argue that law X is bad by writing a law review article, or by making a presentation at the American Bar Association, for example. That kind of advocacy -- which non-lawyers can do as well -- is intended to make legislators want to clean up a law. If it's compelling enough, and if the legislators have time, they might do so.

However, I can NOT go into a court and suggest that the judge invalidate or modify a law unless I have a client who has been injured by that law (at least, not in Federal court, it varies state to state, but most states have similar standing requirements).

For example, suppose that a state has a law saying that it is illegal to chew bubble gum. Suppose that all parties agree that this law is silly and outdated. However, the legislature, for whatever reason (it's too busy balancing the budget, for example) has not repealed the bubble gum law.

I cannot go to court and ask a judge to strike down that law -- unless I represent someone who has been prosecuted under that law. I can't just walk into court and say "Your Honor, this law should be invalidated." I must be able to say "Your Honor, I represent Occhidiangela, who has been prosecuted under this law, and our defense is that the law should be invalidated." (The defense obviously wouldn't be that short and undetailed, but that would be the argument).

This applies even to clearly unconstitutional laws. For example, if the law in question prohibited blacks from chewing bubble gum, it would pretty clearly violate the Fourteenth Amendment (unless there was a compelling state interest, which we will assume there was not). I still can't ask a court to strike it down unless I am representing a black person who is being prosecuted under that law.

I'm using a criminal law example here. There are also civil law provisions which courts can strike down. Again, they must be raised by a party harmed by the law. For example, another clearly unconstitutional law would be a statute of limitations on breach-of-contract claims which was 2 years for whites but 3 years for blacks. Clearly unconstitutional? Yes. But I can only ask a court to strike it down if I am representing a white who wants to bring a breach-of-contract claim after 2 years (but before 3).

(Again -- just to repeat -- standing is a federal doctrine and a state doctrine. The discussion above is about the federal standing standard, but many states have similar standards).

Standing is created by the grant of power to courts under Article III which gives them power over "cases and controversies." The Supreme Court has ruled that this requires an actual harmed party.

(There are exceptions to standing doctrine, and lots of little rules, but that would be really getting into a first-year civil procedure course, which I don't have time to lay out, and which you probably didn't want to read anyway :P If you are interested in standing doctrine, there are a lot of resources out there).

(Note that standing is also one of the more controversial doctrines in application -- judges are often (sometimes accurately, I would say) accused of ducking bigger issues by dismissing a case on standing grounds).

[Occhidiangela]

Let's set aside the appelate issues, and focus on getting to the legislature.

In influencing a legislature, the language of the debate and any presentation to the legislature that a citizen, or a large group of citizens, make(s) must be presented in legaleeze. Absent that, it won't come to pass as law, or will easily get corrupted as it is translated into that language.

Plenty of folks besides lawyers can be pointed to for the necessary civic action needed to get the petitions signed and get items presented at the legislature, and for that matter to get as much media coverage as possible to influence the deal. Politicians respond to Newspaper stories.

But, you see, the language of law being such an arcane subject, beyond everything else, the action needs the attention of a lawyer, one who is expert in the language of law, which is the subject at hand.

[Occhidiangela]

I guess it was most likely Tabloid Fodder and a lot of loose talk.

Then again, Mick was certainly infamous for his lechery and his range of choices. :D

[LavCat]

Hi,

on the other side you have same-sex marriages which are not criminal by law (they are just not recognised by law).

I suspect that the laws against "sodomy" which are still on the books in many places in the USA would make same-sex marriages criminal under the law...

America seems not to have sodomy laws. Bowers vs. Hardwick is overruled. (One prerequisite to marriage is having a partner, however -- some people play Diablo.)

I have been reading the decision and it seems broad, but I am not a lawyer.

[pakman]

Here you go Occhi...a Supreme Court ruling :)

[Occhidiangela]

Would you please cut and paste the article? I am not a Chigago Tribune member, nor do I have any interest to get pop ups from them.

[pakman]

By GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer
Published June 27, 2003, 5:47 AM CDT

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's ruling striking down bans on gay sex also strengthens the constitutional underpinnings for legal abortion and other socially divisive issues, some legal experts say.

The court said Thursday that what gay men and women do in the privacy of their bedrooms is their business and not the government's, a historic civil rights ruling that will likely be used to challenge other bans involving private conduct.




The decision in many respects deals with the same issues as the court's 30-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling that provided for legal abortions. Emory University law professor David Garrow said the ruling "strengthens and enshrines" the court's thinking in the abortion case.

The case involving gay sex was in the final batch of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court this term. The justices take a three-month summer break each year. Justices in the past have chosen the last day to announce if they plan to retire, but no one did so Thursday.

Also this week the court upheld the use of affirmative action in cases involving college admissions policies at the University of Michigan.

The court, in striking down a Texas law that made homosexual sex a crime, overturned an earlier ruling that had upheld sodomy laws on moral grounds. The law allowed police to arrest gays for oral or anal sex, conduct that would be legal for heterosexuals.

"The scale and footprint of this far swamps the Michigan duo (affirmative action rulings) in long-term historical stature," Garrow said.

Justices used strikingly broad and contrite language in the 6-3 decision.

The Constitution's framers "knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

Two gay men arrested in Texas after police walked in on them having sex "are entitled to respect for their private lives," Kennedy wrote. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."

In a lengthy, strongly worded dissent, the three most conservative justices said the ruling was a huge mistake that showed the court had been co-opted by the "so-called homosexual agenda."

"The court has taken sides in the culture war," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for himself and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, suggesting the ruling would invite laws allowing same-sex marriages.

Matt Coles, director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court's decision was broader than expected and will affect other social issues involving gay rights.

The ruling also, he said, "should go a long way to make us feel a lot more comfortable about the continuing vitality of a woman's right to choose."

Houston District Attorney Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., who argued in favor of the law before the high court, called the ruling a major departure from earlier court statements.

"I am disappointed that the Supreme Court (majority) did not allow the people of the state of Texas, through their elected legislators, to determine moral standards of governance for this state."

Of the 13 states with sodomy laws, four -- Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri -- prohibit oral and anal sex between same-sex couples. The other nine ban consensual sodomy for everyone: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.

Thursday's ruling invalidates all of those laws, lawyers said.

Garrow said it also weakens the reasoning used by the Supreme Court in ruling in 1997 that terminally ill people do not have a constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with Kennedy in full.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with the outcome of the case but would have decided it on different constitutional grounds. She also did not join in reversing the court's 1986 ruling on the same subject.

The court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," Scalia wrote for the dissenters.

Although the majority opinion said the case did not "involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter," Scalia said the ruling could open the way to laws allowing gay marriage.

"This reasoning leaves on pretty shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples," Scalia wrote.

The ruling also threatens laws banning bestiality, bigamy and incest, he wrote.

The two men at the heart of the case, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, were each fined $200 and spent a night in jail for the misdemeanor sex charge in 1998.

The case began when a neighbor with a grudge faked a distress call to police, telling them that a man was "going crazy" in Lawrence's apartment. Police went to the apartment, pushed open the door and found the two men.

"This ruling lets us get on with our lives and it opens the door for gay people all over the country," Lawrence said Thursday.

The case is Lawrence v. Texas, 02-102.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

[Occhidiangela]

That premise has been a pretty valid argument, some say, ever since the 1960's. I'd say that the law won't hold water anywhere else now, which makes it legal for man-woman couples to now do all manner of interesting things to one another without it being illegal.

Assuming they are consenting adults.

Funnily enough, that has been going on for quite some time now.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Didn't get a chance to read the ruling until this morning and I was pleasantly surprised. That the conservative Supreme Court rendered a PC liberal verdict surprised me some. That it went so far beyond a grudging admission of the political realities and actually actively supported freedom surprised me more.

Good for them. Better still for our liberties.

And, of course, now the states individually and the federal government need to recognized and address many of the issues that were brought forth in this thread. Once again, the LL is at the forefront of modern opinion :)

--Pete

[whyBish]

The ruling also threatens laws banning bestiality, bigamy and incest, he wrote.

???

Wouldn't bestiality would be considered rape since animals can't give consent, or do they count as property, therefore can't be raped?

Wouldn't incest still be banned under principles of no harm to others and an application of basic genetics?

What's wrong with bigamy? I would've thought that it would currently be in the same category as same-sex marriages, i.e. not illegal, just not recognised.

[gekko]

"The court said Thursday that what gay men and women do in the privacy of their bedrooms is their business and not the government's..."

The laws on such things as bestiality, etc, are "threatened" by this law because of the above quote. This is, in fact, the crux of the problem with laws prohibiting freedoms for our own good. Where exactly do you draw the line? Simply put, what business is it of the government if Joe down the street likes to do things with my dog in the privacy of his own home? Obviously, it's more complicated that that: there are animal rights laws and such as well. However, that's just an example of how the above quote can (and most likely will) be used.

By the way, don't take this post to support one side or the other. I've discussed this so much in real life that I've purposely stayed out of this thread :P. Though I thouroughly enjoyed reading it.

gekko