Submitted to a Candid World

There is a dangerous trend in the current Supreme Court, one that is already devastating our civil liberties and confounding our jurisprudence, with potentially lasting & dangerous consequences. It has already had a searing effect on womens’ reproductive rights and voter registration, and marches on unchecked.

Some background: the Supreme Court reviews two types of challenges to the constitutionality of laws. First, and most commonly, they see “facial” challenges, in which the plaintiff claims that the law is so unconstitutional, that it can never be applied in a constitutional manner. Second, they hear from individual plaintiffs taking exception only to the application of an act to them. The latter is called an “as-applied” challenge.

In the right hands, the as-applied/facial distinction allows a justice to grant a plaintiff just enough relief - i.e., they get their own exception - without going too far and invalidating an entire law. However, a justice can rule the other way, too, finding that the law could conceivably be applied constitutionally, and that an aggrieved individual would have to bring an as-applied challenge. Since an as-applied challenge is often useless (i.e., by the time you litigate your as-applied issue, the damage is already done), the distinction can result in the creation for plaintiffs of a worthless right, as a meaningless consolation prize to losing their case against the law’s constitutionality. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is engaging in this tricky practice with increasing frequency under Chief Justice Roberts. (more…)

I’ve had it up to here with this crap. I try to restrict my use of profanity on this site, but this argument is batshit insane, and it’s time for it to die. I want to save you from viewing the idiocy expressed therein, so I’ll gist the arguments of the link for you: it’s the typical creationist canard, that evolution, by iterating the idea of the “survival of the fittest,” gave Hitler the intellectual armaments he needed to perpetrate the Holocaust. As the author (Benjamin Wikier, “PhD”) says,

All this doesn’t mean that Darwinism was the sole cause of Hitler’s barbarism. But it does make clear that Darwinism must shoulder its share of the moral burden, because the connection is undeniable.

Lunacy. First, be suspicious of anyone who puts “PhD” in their public names. It’s a shameless plug that does nothing more than display the author’s own intellectual insecurity. But then again, what do we expect from the Discovery Institute?

More importantly, though, science does not imply a moral conclusion. While evolution posits that, in a state of nature, natural forces will weed out animals which are incapable of survival, it is a long jump from this statement of fact to the ethical (and extremely immoral) conclusion that mankind ought to attribute different subjective values to different races and social castes, and assume the duties of “selection” itself by weeding out those races. Let’s continue below the line. (more…)