Friday, May 20, 2016

where is that in the constitution?

WAPO law article notes that in NYC you can be fined a quarter million dollars if you use the wrong pronoun. And notes:

Feel uncomfortable about being forced to use terms that express social status views (“Milord”) or religious views (“Your Holiness”) that you may not endorse? Well, you should feel uncomfortable about people being forced to use “ze,” which expresses a view about gender that they might not endorse. And, more broadly, I think we should all feel uncomfortable about government regulators forcing people to say things that convey and support the government’s ideology about gender.
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thhere are so many absurd items about the bathroom laws that I moved the rant to my rant blog.

However, the MSM seems to be ignoring that the US Catholic bishops oppose it,  not just on modesty issues, but on constitutional ones:

Children, youth, and parents in these difficult situations deserve compassion, sensitivity, and respect. All of these can be expressed without infringing on legitimate concerns about privacy and security on the part of the other young students and parents. The federal regulatory guidance issued on May 13 does not even attempt to achieve this balance. It unfortunately does not respect the ongoing political discussion at the state and local levels and in Congress, or the broader cultural discussion, about how best to address these sensitive issues. Rather, the guidance short-circuits those discussions entirely.

this is ignored by the press, as are Muslim opinions that mandate modesty in bathrooms.

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Related item:

Obama has just lost a big Supreme court case unanimously against the Little Sisters of the Poor because the SC noted the government went out of their way to prosecute instead of finding a compromise. From the WSJ:

the aim in religious-liberty cases is not accommodation but submission.
In this case for example, when the justices asked the Obama administration if there were any ways to provide women contraceptives other than hijacking the Little Sisters’ health plan against their will, the administration hemmed and hawed, first answering “no” until it conceded that maybe it could be done.
In short, the Obama administration’s goal was not just getting contraceptives to women. It was also to do so in a way designed to force religious groups such as the Little Sisters to cry “uncle.”
(italics mine).

this last part is important, because without you being told, Obama's officials have decided that hospitals will have to allow sex change operations and abortions if they receive "federal funding". Again, this was not in the law: It is a bureaucratic interpretation of a regulation in the huge Obamacare law that no body read.

This is aimed a coercing hospitals associated tihe Catholics and SeventhDay Adventists, of course.

and in the future, if this is allowed to stand, will force all hospitals and doctors to euthanize patients.

No I am not being extreme The law in Canada is trying to do this right now.

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all of this sounds like culture war redux: But even if you agree with Obama's opinions, from a constitutional viewpoint, you should worry.

It is bad enough when the Supreme court over and over agains discards legal history and the common law tradition to impose the viewpoint of a small elite. But at least most Americans will obey, because they respect the constitution and see the court as part of the constitution.

But unelected bureaucratic lawmaking is not constitutional. And deciding to interpret obscure regulations to include things that were never imagined by the Congress who passed the law is now being done at many levels.

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