Trickle Down?Follow

You have.



You will not be able to prove/show this for several reasons. I guarantee it. But feel free to try and I'll get back to you tommorow on why you cannot do so. It'll be fun.



You have not shown that your position is more beneficial to human development and society, though there is no reason this is not possible.



Not exactly. It can be a consequence.

The parent/children argument he's making isn't absurd at all. Most people agree with it already, to some degree and for certain issues. Religious schools still have to meet the same standards of accredidation, and the students take the same standardized tests. Vaccinations are required (although exemptions are easy to get). And social services and can remove a child from custody for amorphous reasons evolving beyond simple physical abuse. It's perfectly valid to intellectually explore the position of societal guardianship of the child as far as you want to take it, and is widely endorsed by the public to then enact policies deemed necessary and feasible.




Edited, Feb 11th 2009 12:36am by trickybeck

Very funny. No.

Warning! Wall of text!

All of these cases are on point -- the point I was making -- broad parental rights in a child's education among which is the right to send your child to a school that doesn't violate your religious beliefs. They are all part of a long line of cases that says parents have the right to make choices about their children's education. You can try to spin it differently, you can even call it dicta, that's what lawyering is. But you would be spinning it in oppposition to the Supreme Court's holdings.

If I wanted to cite a case that established the 1st Amendment protection that makes it illegal for a state to require attendance at public schools, I would have cited Pierce v. Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510) and dicta by Kennedy in a 2000 case.

In Pierce, the Court said an Oregon law was unconstitutional which made it mandatory for parents to send their children to public school. As in Meyer v. Nebraska (262 U.S. 390), this law was unrelated to the legitimate state goal of educating children because it interfered with the fundamental right of parents to exercise control over how their children were to be taught. Forcing parents to have the educational options for their children limited to public schools infringed upon the above right and was an abuse of the state's police power to insure the health, safety, and morality of all localities in that jurisdiction. This standardization went against the sentiment of the Court often quoted in the part of their opinion that declares a child is not the creature of the state and that the responsibility for educating children should rest with the parents.

This decision is also important because it made clear that state governments had to permit private schools to operate. No challenge has since been made on this point.

Now if you go and read Pierce, you will see that the opinion based its holding on the 14th Amendment, not the 1st, and you will then come back and rant and rave about how I was wrong. However, to understand the case and it's underlying meaning, you have to understand that the reasoning that the Court reached its holding based on the Society of Sisters' argument was primarily that the law violated the 1st Amendment. At the time the case was heard, the Court had not yet heard those cases that led to the application of the 1st Amendment to the States. At the time, the Bill of Rights was only viewed as limiting the Federal Government, and not as limiting state governments. fast forward to the year 2000, in Troxel v. Granville (530 U.S. 57), established that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause has a substantive component that “provides heightened protection against government interference with certain fundamental rights and liberty interests,” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720, including parents’ fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children, see, e.g., Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651. Pp. 5—8. Justice kennedy's dissent says about this right, "Pierce and Meyer, had they been decided in recent times, may well have been grounded upon First Amendment principles protecting freedom of speech, belief, and religion." But because the parties in Granville didn't raise the 1st Amendment claim, he wasn't deciding the merits of that argument.

What Justice Kennedy is saying is, in effect, is that the 1st Amendment is now a better source of these rights but we're stuck calling this a 14th Amendment Right because the pedigree of these decisions started at a time when the 1st Amendment didn't apply to the states, and parties in an appeal naturally couch the arguments in terms of the 14th Amendment language used by the Court in Meyer and Pierce. The majority opinion didn't dispute Justice Kennedy's position on this matter, which they would have if the majority had disagreed with him. The majority was made up of Justices O'Connor, Rehnquist, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Thomas.

The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to extend specific protections of the Bill of Rights to the States. That process has taken a long time, and has not yet reached every right embodied in the Bill of Rights. Each right so applied has been the result of a specific case that raised the argument after the first time the Court used the 14th Amendment that way. So a lot of 14th Amendment jurisprudence is actually Bill of Rights jurisprudence forced into an outdated 14th Amendment mindset. This kind of tortured reasoning is nothing more than job security for lawyers. When it comes down to it, the rights they're protecting in these cases -- parental rights -- are based on the association of the family unit (not just biology). Freedom of Association has been implied in the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, which includes the right to exclude people (a.k.a. the Boy Scouts case).

It takes more to read Supreme Court cases than just reading the words. Raw intelligence is not enough. In addition to understanding the historical development of Constitutional Law, you also need a thorough grounding in other areas of law, and you need practice studying and arguing the meaning behind the Court's words. I've been grilled on case law by highly capable legal scholars. And, in law school, in a course called "Parent, Child, and State," -- I studied these and other school cases. I prefer to trust in the education that earned me a high class ranking at a prestigious law school. So basically, I'm not bothered by the judgement of someone who doesn't know any better.

Arguing is never aggravating or pointless. It's a huge relief from the boredom of the last months of my time on the taxpayer's payroll. But I appreciate the sentiment :-)

Word-count without intellect is annoying as fUck.

It's like gbaji impregnated a mongoloid.

Very funny. No.


Not funny at all. Troubling that you could possibly really be this stupid.


Warning! Wall of text!

All of these cases are on point -- the point I was making -- broad parental rights in a child's education among which is the right to send your child to a school that doesn't violate your religious beliefs. They are all part of a long line of cases that says parents have the right to make choices about their children's education. You can try to spin it differently, you can even call it dicta, that's what lawyering is. But you would be spinning it in oppposition to the Supreme Court's holdings.


Wrong. You're clearly NOT a lawyer, clearly have ZERO education in law, and clearly WILDLY overestimate your ability to understand case law.



If I wanted to cite a case that established the 1st Amendment protection that makes it illegal for a state to require attendance at public schools, I would have cited Pierce v. Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510) and dicta by Kennedy in a 2000 case.

No. Wrong amendment, fuckstick, and unrelated to your original argument.


In Pierce, the Court said an Oregon law was unconstitutional which made it mandatory for parents to send their children to public school. As in Meyer v. Nebraska (262 U.S. 390), this law was unrelated to the legitimate state goal of educating children because it interfered with the fundamental right of parents to exercise control over how their children were to be taught. Forcing parents to have the educational options for their children limited to public schools infringed upon the above right and was an abuse of the state's police power to insure the health, safety, and morality of all localities in that jurisdiction. This standardization went against the sentiment of the Court often quoted in the part of their opinion that declares a child is not the creature of the state and that the responsibility for educating children should rest with the parents.

This decision is also important because it made clear that state governments had to permit private schools to operate. No challenge has since been made on this point.

Now if you go and read Pierce, you will see that the opinion based its holding on the 14th Amendment, not the 1st, and you will then come back and rant and rave about how I was wrong.

It's like you're psychic or something. Hey, also if you claim the sky is made of soup, then link a picture of you throwing a bowl of soup in the air, I'll ALSO tell you that you're wrong.


However, to understand the case and it's underlying meaning, you have to understand that the reasoning that the Court reached its holding based on the Society of Sisters' argument was primarily that the law violated the 1st Amendment. At the time the case was heard, the Court had not yet heard those cases that led to the application of the 1st Amendment to the States. At the time, the Bill of Rights was only viewed as limiting the Federal Government, and not as limiting state governments. fast forward to the year 2000, in Troxel v. Granville (530 U.S. 57), established that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause has a substantive component that “provides heightened protection against government interference with certain fundamental rights and liberty interests,” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720, including parents’ fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children, see, e.g., Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645, 651. Pp. 5—8. Justice kennedy's dissent says about this right, "Pierce and Meyer, had they been decided in recent times, may well have been grounded upon First Amendment principles protecting freedom of speech, belief, and religion." But because the parties in Granville didn't raise the 1st Amendment claim, he wasn't deciding the merits of that argument.

What Justice Kennedy is saying is, in effect, is that the 1st Amendment is now a better source of these rights but we're stuck calling this a 14th Amendment Right because the pedigree of these decisions started at a time when the 1st Amendment didn't apply to the states, and parties in an appeal naturally couch the arguments in terms of the 14th Amendment language used by the Court in Meyer and Pierce. The majority opinion didn't dispute Justice Kennedy's position on this matter, which they would have if the majority had disagreed with him. The majority was made up of Justices O'Connor, Rehnquist, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Thomas.

The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to extend specific protections of the Bill of Rights to the States. That process has taken a long time, and has not yet reached every right embodied in the Bill of Rights. Each right so applied has been the result of a specific case that raised the argument after the first time the Court used the 14th Amendment that way. So a lot of 14th Amendment jurisprudence is actually Bill of Rights jurisprudence forced into an outdated 14th Amendment mindset. This kind of tortured reasoning is nothing more than job security for lawyers. When it comes down to it, the rights they're protecting in these cases -- parental rights -- are based on the association of the family unit (not just biology). Freedom of Association has been implied in the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, which includes the right to exclude people (a.k.a. the Boy Scouts case).

It takes more to read Supreme Court cases than just reading the words. Raw intelligence is not enough. In addition to understanding the historical development of Constitutional Law, you also need a thorough grounding in other areas of law, and you need practice studying and arguing the meaning behind the Court's words. I've been grilled on case law by highly capable legal scholars. And, in law school, in a course called "Parent, Child, and State," -- I studied these and other school cases. I prefer to trust in the education that earned me a high class ranking at a prestigious law school. So basically, I'm not bothered by the judgement of someone who doesn't know any better.

So to sum up, there is no 1st Amendment protection, nor is there a SINGLE SCOTUS case refreencing this imaginary protection, and you were completely, abjectly, unarguably, and in every possible context JUST FUCKING WRONG

Was it that I didn't understand your point? Nope, it's just that you were:

JUST FUCKING WRONG

Was it that I didn't understand the intracacies of SCOTUS decisions and the importance of reading them entire, including dissents and notes? Nope. It's simply that you were:

JUST FUCKING WRONG

Understand, moron? You're "studying" of case law around schooling was significantly LESS valuable than me ************ to climax onto a Happy Days DVD, because...guess what? Not only did you get it completely wrong, you got it MORE wrong than complete fucking ignorance! Congratulations, quite an accomplishment. I guess a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and an idiot doing research is funny as hell.


Edited, Feb 11th 2009 6:41pm by Smasharoo

But not just because the parent has no more right to make decisions for his/her child than anyone else though, right? They have to be doing something to the child that society as a whole has decided is "wrong" or "harmful". That's not the same as saying that the parent has no greater rights.

In fact, it is. Do you see why? Just kidding, let me explain:

If one party has the ability to unilaterally remove a child from the custody of another party based on an arbitrary decision that something "harmful" is occurring, then that party has the greater rights. Parents and babysitters, lets say: If a parent finds a babysitter to be engaging in an activity with their child they think is arbitrarily harmful, they can remove the child from the babysitter's care. The state has the same relationship re parents: If the parents engage in an activity the state arbitrarily decides is harmful, they can remove the child from the parent's care.

QED, game over. You lost, sorry, happens.

Several flaws in your argument Smash:

1. A specific part of the state empowered to make that determination is not equivalent to "any one". The statement said that parents had no more rights than "any one else".

2. "The state" doesn't have rights. It has powers. I this case, it has the power to infringe the default condition of a parent having the right to make decisions regarding how his/her child will be raised.

3. The concept that an individuals rights can be infringed via due process is *not* the same as saying that said person does not possess those rights.


The state can pass laws limiting the amount of noise you can make between certain hours of the day. This does not mean that individuals don't have a right to free speech, nor does it mean that the state has "greater rights" in the area of speech. The people have rights which may be infringed by the state as a result of due process. That's an accepted cost individuals allow in order to gain the protection that society's rules presumably bring. It is *not* a license for the state, much less "any one" to declare that someone does not possess a given right.

Only if the statement was phrased in the form of an opinion (or even an objective to explore) rather than a fact. You didn't say "I believe that parents should have no greater rights than anyone else when it comes to decisions about their children", and then attempt to defend that position. You attempted to defend an earlier position by stating that as a fact.

In this particular case, you avoided the question of whether a specific infringement of parental rights is legitimate by essentially declaring that parental rights don't exist in the first place. Now, that's a legitimate argument to make on it's own, but you can't just declare it to be true and use it as a supporting fact without any sort of support for the statement itself. Doubly so when that clearly flies in the face of established legal precedent.

"any one else" is not the same as "everyone else". The statement as made said that "any one else" had as much rights as the parent. That means that each and every other individual has as much right to make decisions regarding a child as the child's parents. So if Joe, the sleazy guy down the street says that it's ok for Hannah to wear makeup and a short skirt while doing a lap dance for him, Nexa has no more say in the matter than he does.

Is that ok with you? Or do you think that's maybe... Absurd.



False Dilemma. Parents have both rights and powers with regard to their children. They have the power to impose their rules on their children while they are minors, and they have the right to do so without others interfering (without due process of course as all rights are limited).

Powers and rights flow in opposite directions Smash. Powers are things you can do with regard to someone else. Rights are things that someone with power promises not to do. States cannot have rights because there's nothing with power over them. People have rights because the state has power over them, but promises not to use it except in specific areas and under specific rules. Parents have rights with regard to the state, and power with regard to their children. And guess what? Children *also* have rights with regard to their parents (and the states) powers over them. They usually don't have power over anything else, except maybe the family pet...


The fact that you so consistently fail to grasp this most fundamental concept is frankly always amazing to me.


The rest of your post is gibberish. You clearly don't understand what rights are, and your entire post fails due to that.

Edited, Feb 11th 2009 6:19pm by gbaji

Centuries of court rulings disagree with you.

How does eliminating the concept of parental rights constitute something that is "consistent with liberty and respect for the rights of people"? If you respected people's rights, you'd respect their right to raise their own children as they wish, wouldn't you? So yeah. I do expect you to support this new and out-from-far-left-field statement...

It was just a poke at Smash. He has a habit of treating two words or phrases that have different actual meanings as the same, even within the same sentence sometimes. He loves to play the semantic game, so I figured I'd toss it right back at him. Deal with it... ;)

It was just another funny reason why your original statement was absurd as written. One I honestly hadn't even noticed until Smash played flip flow with "everyone" and "anyone" in his post. I obviously "got" that you meant "the state", given that I responded as such twice on this page already. Don't get your panties in a twist. That's why the rest of my post was about the difference between rights and powers in this context.