We’ll make a deal: we’ll stop desecrating the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance when they stop desecrating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Star Trek pledge of allegiance gets kid suspended: “Cory Doctorow:
A young Star Trek fan was suspended from school for reciting his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, in which he pledged to the United Federation of Planets. His mom has posted the hilarious story:‘So, anyway. What did he do?’ I picked at the hem of my sweatshirt, looked just to the right of her face. I couldn’t meet her eyes. I felt nervous. I felt underdressed. I wondered where 8 was.
So she told me what he did. And as she told me, I started to laugh. I didn’t laugh a little, either, but I belly-laughed and grabbed my stomach. My son stood with his class this morning, put small right hand over heart, faced the American flag, and recited his own personal pledge of allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.
‘Mrs. Jaworski. This isn’t humorous. The Pledge is an extremely important and patriotic moment each morning in the classroom. I am ashamed of your son’s behavior, and I hope you are, too.’
Link“
(Via Boing Boing.)
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Do you want the government to really have legal input into the appropriateness of your feelings towards another?
Umm, it’s the government that has to make it possible for gays to marry, so I’d say that they’re getting all the input they want already.
My problem is that, as I said, some want ‘marriage’ to be the term for a religious ceremony, and the rest of us get to start calling it ‘civil union’.
I’ve been married for 3.5 years whether your (generalization) religion likes it or not. I’m not going to start calling it a civil union because your (generalization) religion lays claim to the term marriage either.
I know…let’s start calling all marraiges Freedom Unions….
No, we’ll call them “nuclear unions” and when that name no longer tests well, we’ll change it to “constitutional unions” and blame the “liberal media” for using the old term.
You mean Nucular Unions, of course….
Actually, I’m proposing that the government say “we only care about the legal status stuff. You can go talk to whoever about the relationship stuff.” EVERYONE- straight, gay, black, white, vegan, catholic, mormon, dentist, zookeeper – would be legally allowed to enter a civil union. That’s just the legal stuff; if you want to call it a marriage by the authority invested in you by no one but you and your partner, then knock yourself out. What do you care if others don’t recognize it as such because it’s not inline with what they believe or you didn’t go through a certain ceremony or process? If, however, you do feel the need to have your personal relationship recognized by some other authority, like a religion, that’s up to you, too.
Well, I guess this means any and every Supreme Court decision can be considered undemocratic then. Because, by your logic, 9 people (and as few as five, due to simple majority) are imposing their will upon the rest of us
No, because most of the time the courts do their job. They apply laws, resolve ambiguities in the law, and for the most part provide a bulwark between unchecked majoritarianism and the rights of minorities– a job that inherent in their role under our democratically-established system of government. But when they step beyond their appropriate role of deciding cases into the realm of legislating morality for the rest of us– you know, what people accuse Bush of doing– they destroy both the principle of separation of powers and the principle of majoritarianism. When they do that, you bet it’s undemocratic.
David, I’ve not read the SJC opinion…I’ll try to remember to do that over lunch today…but how would you say that action compares to striking down a law intended to maintain white supremacy? The analogy I’ve seen made is that the same thinking behind laws supporting racial superiority can be applied to what you could call heterosexual superiority. Although the SJC may have done a poor job of articulating this link, is this something that could be read into the basis for the decision?
No, not really, because the SJC was internally inconsistent. Their interpretation of the marriage law was based on the intent of the drafters– that it could not possibly be interpreted as an act to legalize marriage between two people of the same sex. Then they looked at the state constitution to see if that intention was consistent with the equal protection provision, and immediately stopped addressing intent. Personally I’ve never been a big fan of “intent” analysis, but I’m in the minority on that issue, and in any event, if a legal principle is valid in part 1 of your opinion, it’s valid in part 2. Under a legislative intent interpretation, gay rights were as far off the radar in the constitutional convention as in the marriage statute, whereas racial equality was a core concern in all of the Reconstruction and equal rights amendments. So by the SJC’s logic, racial supremacy is much easier to strike down than sexual orientation discrimination. Your point about the analogy between racial discrimination and sexual orientation is, in my opinion, one of the better arguments in favor of gay rights, but that doesn’t substitute for a legislative grant of power to the court system. Elegant reasoning and moral justice are not sources of legal authority. It’s also worth noting that the centrality of racial equality to the nation’s various equal protection laws leads to racial discrimination being subjected to a higher level of scrutiny by the courts, what is called “strict scrutiny” as opposed to the regular “rational basis” scrutiny that is applied to sexual orientation issues under existing equal protection law. The upshot of all this is that even if the “logic” behind racial discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination look a lot alike, legally they’re very different things.
Racial supremacy also runs afoul of the Federal Constitution in the Thirteenth Amendment as well as Equal Protection, because the antislavery amendment has always been interpreted to bar the “badges and incidents of slavery” as well as the thing itself; this was, in fact, crucial to the Loving v Virginia opinion which struck down miscegenation laws. Sexual orientation has no such amendment in its corner.
Given the inconsistent logic in the SJC’s opinion, the (probably deliberate) shoddy application of rational basis scrutiny, and the political nature of the dispute, I remain of the opinion that Goodridge v Department of Health is insupportable, whether it’s morally right or not. Ironically, I can think of a good argument for raising the level of scrutiny in sexual orientation cases that might have given them a little bit more of a principled basis for the decision, but that would have required the SJC to actually care about legal principles as much as the outcome of the case.
the way i see it, that kid is a genius. hes acting his rights of civil disobediance already?
thats awesome
i actually go to school and am an atheist, and i get ridiculed about not saying the pledge everyday,
why, last year i got a note in my desk that said “god exists cam” and i told my teacher, what happens to the girl who rites it, nothin. when i write back to her “god doesnt exist alley” I get in trouble. does that really seem that fair?