Consider as a analagous situation one where there are two people, person A and person B. Person A has a liver which no longer functions, and can only live if he recieves a liver transplant. Person B is, for whatever reason, the only person on the planet who can donate part of his liver to person A. This procedure will have some risks, but person B is likely to survive (similar to childbirth, which is much more likely to result in the death of the mother than having an abortion). However, person B will be permanently damaged by this procedure (much like carrying a child for 9 months permanently changes a woman’s body – nothing life-threatening, but it won’t be good for him).

Clearly, both of these individuals have a right to live, just as both the mother and the fetus have a right to live. However, the question which must be decided is if the fetus’s right to live outweighs the mother’s right to decide what happens to her body. Personally, I believe that an individual should be able to choose what happens to his/her body, and should not be forced to put his/her life in danger or suffer permanent physical damage just so that another can live.

First, “I can’t find a privacy right in the Constitution, though I will say I wish it was there, and would support a well-worded amendment in that area. However, if the Court in its greater wisdom feels like there is a privacy right buried in there somewhere that restricts government intervention into what we do of our own free will with our own bodies, then there are a HELL of a lot of laws out there that need to be declared unconstitutional beyond just anti-abortion law, including: narcotics laws, prostitution laws, the FDA, the tobacco settlement, alcohol prohibitions, helmet laws, seat belt laws, etc.”

Privacy is a subcontext of the protections against illegal search. That’s in your top 10 amendments. There are still laws prohibiting activities on the Sabbath just because it is the Sabbath. We should probably kill some of the first amendment violators before going after prostitution laws (which, like marriage, probably shouldn’t have any governmental oversight beyond health).

I do enjoy the term “activist judges” because it means nothing but the fact that someone interpreted the law differently than you would have liked. Let’s put things in perspective, I don’t know any laws prohibiting women from leaving the house during their menstual cycle. Nor do I know any Christians who follow this clearly defined rule in their Bible. So the fact is that Christians in this country do pick and choose what parts of the Bible they will and will not follow. We talk about the 10 commandments being ingrained in our legal system, but only half of them appear in any fashion in our legal codes.

Here is the problem, you can not have freedom to practice one relgion without freedom from practicing others. Members of public office are, like teachers, in a unique position to influence beyond the simple status given to most strangers. We consider it inappropriate for a teacher, because of their position, to romantically engage with a student even at the college level. It is inappropriate for a representative of the State to embrace one religion, because almost all relgions have as a basic tenet that every other belief is wrong. Stating that one is right equates to stating that others are wrong. And if you are a believer, it is not possible to divorce yourself from that understanding of God’s will. This is why it is imperative that a judge interpret the law and the Constitution without embracing God’s will at all. And this is why the seperation of church and State is so key in the argument regarding judges.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing some of this campaign reform rolled back and instead have efforts put forth to stop ‘news’ agencies from pushing agendas. It is absurd that the media falls into this ‘liberal/conservative’ classification. It is also absurd that reporting the truth about casualties gets defined as ‘liberal’. The constitution is over 2 centuries old and if you believe in it, you are ‘liberal’? does this mean the only real conservative is Torquemada? Actually, it might….

Finally, let’s talk about the real danger of saying that a simple majority should be allowed to stop discussion or debate. If you went out in 1950 and asked the public, over 70 percent would have told you there should be a law prohibiting inter-racial marriages. It might be over 50 percent even now. Should we have passed an amendment to the Constitution? There was even biblical reference used to promote this viewpoint. Freeing slaves, allowing women to vote… the greatest accomplishments toward freedom and democracy have been driven by the minority viewpoint and by keeping argument alive. And when injustice uses the same tools, that gentleman Senator, injured by a recent stroke, will raise the 60th hand and say ‘aye’. True progress, genuine democracy, is not the victory of the bigger team, it is the realisation of the rules or justice and equity that are so universal as to garner the votes of all faiths and all parties.

humbly submitted….

You have put on part of the armor and are fighting with part of your
strength, and it is a battle you will loose for us all!

Would you encourage your Christian flock to pick and choose the parts of
the Bible they are comfortable with and only honor those parts? How
can you defend freedom of religion and not freedom of speech, press and
assembly as well?

Your broadcasts rightly warn of the dangers of activist judges and their
anti-Christian judgments, but the answer is not raising money for a PR
campaign to influence the selection of conservative judges. Law means
fixed, and the role of judges, as you said on your TV show, is to
interpret the law and not write it. Your folly is to mount a Trojan
horse campaign in full view of the enemy! Oh please, evil sirs, do not
ignore the law and oppress me anymore.

Existing Congressmen and Senators are enablers of the federal court’s
government by tyranny. By making a circus of advise and consent and
insisting on nominating candidates who share their conservative or
liberal agendas, our lawful representatives divest themselves of their
responsibility for making laws that conform to the Constitution and are
approved by the represented. We need Congress and the Senate to reign
in the “Activist” courts and reassert their authority to write laws. To
force our elected representatives to be accountable to their oaths of
office, ‘We the People’ must be able to hire and fire.

To make this happen, we must eliminate so called Campaign reforms that
practically guarantee incumbents will be re-elected and that no “new”
political party can supplant the Democrats or Republicans, despite the
fact that over 1/3rd of voters are now registered independent. When the
legislative branch passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, many among
them thought it would fail to pass constitutional muster and that the
Supreme Court would overturn at least parts of it. George Bush
questioned BCRA’s Constitutionality but still signed it into law.

If you study the history of Federal Campaign Laws, you will find they
are a recent oppression of the Bill of Rights. There were not federal
campaign regulations until 1907 and no enforcement mechanism until 1975.
This is because there are no federal elections, only elections for
federal office held in the individual states. The tenth Amendment
grants authority to regulate elections to the states and the people.

We the People currently have a friend on the six member board of the
Federal Election Commission in the person of Professor Bradley Smith. I
believe it was Senator Ted Kennedy who objected to Mr. Smith’s
appointment, as Bradley Smith is strident in his objection to the FEC
and believes it is unconstitutional. Senator Kennedy questioned whether
Mr. Smith could be relied on to perform his duties given his belief.
Mr. Smith assured him he would abide with the law, even though he
objects to it.

Mr. Bradley Smith’s situation is a metaphor for Coral Ridge’s approach
to fixing our broken Republic. When Mr. Smith’s tenure is up or his
voice is not the in the majority, the Constitution no longer applies!
We need to restore the broken system, not apply a band-aid.

While there is still a chance, put on the full armor, defend the whole
1st Amendment and let’s leave it all out on the field!

I don’t see anything in that text that implies that the press can legally get away with obstructing justice while other citizens not in the press, like Martha Stewart, go to jail for obstructing justice. Now, you might think that the press should have such a privilege. Heck, I might in fact support some type of privilege. But the fact is that right now, it does not exist under the law and judge Sweet should have given judge Floyd’s answer, which I can’t resist paraphrasing:

==
I agree with the above post. However, would like to add that the ‘press’ mentioned in the 1st Amendment referred to the right of every citizen to use same without the freedom being abridged by any law written by Congress.

Corporations attempted to get Congress to write legislation granting them ‘rights’ from 1781 until 1886 when:

“the Supreme Court ruled no such thing in 1886. The ‘corporations are persons’ ruling was a fiction created by the court’s reporter. He simply wrote the words into the headnote of the decision. The words contradict what the court actually said. There is, in fact, in the US National Archives a note by the Supreme Court Chief Justice of the time explicitly informing the reporter that the court had not ruled on corporate personhood in the Santa Clara case.” — Thom Hartmann, Dinosaur War, The Ecologist, December/January 2002 Issue

“[A U.S.] Supreme Court ruling in 1886 … arguably set the stage for the full-scale development of the culture of capitalism, by handing to corporations the right to use their economic power in a way they never had before. Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Court ruled that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution, and consequently has the same rights and protection extended to persons by the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. Thus corporations were given the same “rights” to influence the government in their own interests as were extended to individual citizens, paving the way for corporations to use their wealth to dominate public thought and discourse. The debates in the United States in the 1990s over campaign finance reform, in which corporate bodies can “donate” millions of dollars to political candidates stem from this ruling although rarely if ever is that mentioned. Thus, corporations, as “persons,” were free to lobby legislatures, use the mass media, establish educational institutions such as many business schools founded by corporate leaders in the early twentieth century, found charitable organizations to convince the public of their lofty intent, and in general construct an image that they believed would be in their best interests. All of this in the interest of “free speech.” — (Bold Emphasis Added) Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.100

Furthermore, there are still no licenses or boards to pass to become a member of the press.

Rights:

Kentucky Constitution, Section 8
Freedom of speech and of the press.

——————————————————————————–

Printing presses shall be free to every person who undertakes to examine the proceedings of the General Assembly or any branch of government, and no law shall ever be made to restrain the right thereof. Every person may freely and fully speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty.
Text as Ratified on: August 3, 1891, and revised September 28, 1891.
History: Not yet amended.

Note it is state constitutions that define citizen’s freedom of the press and the 1st Amendment only instructs the federal government to keep their hands off. This is consistent with the concerns of the individual states in creating a ‘federal’ government and
one of the guarantees they demanded before giving up part of their authority to the union.

Side note, the King of England wanted every America press (the device) to have a unique number carved on the platen so every page could be traced to its source. This why anonymous speech, another victim of campaign law, was highly prized in early America.
==
The idea of professional newsmen with special rights protected by the 1st Amendment is part of the dumbing down of America.

In fact the idea of editorials being separate from the rest of what is published by the press is a marketing ploy devised sometime around 1920 to add legitimacy to the claim of impartiality.

Welcome, welcome, welcome, to the 129th edition of Bigwig’s Carnival of the Vanities, where bloggers from all around the blogosphere submit their own under-appreciated postings, rather than waiting for others to notice them. As your host, I hope you st…

Welcome, welcome, welcome, to the 129th edition of Bigwig’s Carnival of the Vanities, where bloggers from all around the blogosphere submit their own under-appreciated postings, rather than waiting for others to notice them. As your host, I hope you st…

Welcome, welcome, welcome, to the 129th edition of Bigwig’s Carnival of the Vanities, where bloggers from all around the blogosphere submit their own under-appreciated postings, rather than waiting for others to notice them. As your host, I hope you st…

I’ve learned that typically a fetus’ heart starts beating between 18-22 days. Could that possibly be it? It makes sense to me, but there might be a chance a woman doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant until after that, but I don’t know.