AdamSmith

When Titian was mixing some madder For a nude he had posed on a ladder, Her position to Titian Suggested coition, So he stopped mixing madder and had her.

Scalia's Originalism Opposed by Madison/Jefferson dailykos.com Scalia's cramped view of the US Constitution, which he describes as being rooted in the original intent of the Constitution's authors, was explicitly opposed by the primary architect of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Madison, as well as by Jefferson. Scalia's version of original intent fails even on its own terms: the original intent of the Constitution evidently was to create a living document in which definitions of liberty would continually be expanded. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the majority held that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment protects same sex couples from discrimination, because discrimination based on sexual orientation clearly violates the principles of equal protection. The 14th Amendment says: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Scalia claims that "equal protection of the laws," within the context of its time, was intended only to apply to issues of discrimination against African-Americans. So, Scalia fulminated, in his Obergefell dissent: When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, every state limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so. That resolves these cases. Scalia claims that his original intent doctrine requires him (and he believes, all right thinking Supreme Court Justices) to apply the standards of 1868 to what equal protection means, and to stop there. This would also mean women and people with disabilities, for example, are, according to Scalia's reasoning, outside the protection of the 14th Amendment (and such interpretations are another reason why the Equal Rights Amendment is important), but that's a different argument for a different day. Even applying his own standard, Scalia fails to explain why the authors of the 14th amendment wrote the general principle of "equal protection of the laws" into the constitution if they only meant "equal protection of the laws on the basis of race." But what did two of the most important "founders" think of this form of constitutional interpretation? Madison is best known today as the "father" of the Bill of Rights, since he drafted the provisions and introduced them into Congress. Madison was actually the primary architect of the US Constitution as a whole. Originally, however, he opposed a bill of rights. What was his main objection? He presciently feared that some future politicians or jurists (e.g. Scalia and his co-dissenters) might calcify the enumeration of rights they specified into a finite list that excluded the recognition of all other liberties. Madison was convinced by the vociferous debates in the states over ratifying the Constitution, which included denunciations of the lack of a bill of rights, and by arguments by Jefferson among others, to change his mind and propose a bill of rights himself. Even so, in Madison's speech introducing the Bill of Rights to Congress, on June 8, 1789, he discussed his own fears: It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow, by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution. In a sadly futile attempt to prevent future Scalias (and Robertses, Alitos, and Thomases) from arguing that the rights as enumerated in 1789 were the be all and end all of liberty, Madison wrote the "last clause of the fourth resolution." That clause is now the (unjustly neglected) 9th Amendment to the US Constitution: The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Madison was most concerned about violations of the rights of the minority by the majority. In a 1788 letter to Jefferson discussing the idea of a bill of rights, Madison wrote: In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. Scalia ignores, or has so far refused to understand, that just because the rights of same sex couples have been violated by the majority for hundreds of years (including in 1868), that this is not a valid argument for continuing to violate these rights. The repudiation of the idea that a tradition of violating rights is a legitimate constitutional justification for continuing to violate rights has been a central argument of Kennedy's string of sexual orientation cases since Lawrence and Garner v. Texas. Scalia and the three other dissenters in Obergefell haven't seemed to get this yet. Ending the violations of a minority's (same sex couples') rights by a homophobic (mostly straight) majority are exactly the kinds of violations that Madison told Jefferson he hoped a bill of rights, at its best, would eventually help end. According to Michiko Kakutani's NYT review of historian Joseph Ellis's new book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, Ellis ends the book with a telling quotation from Jefferson that directly warns against freezing the interpretation of the Constitution into Original Intent oblivion: Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I know that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country.... But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. Roberts echoed Scalia's supposed "original intent" doctrine when he claimed in his Obergefell dissent (which was joined by the other three dissenters) that the majority opinion "had nothing to do with" the Constitution. Apparently, Roberts is ignorant of, or chose to ignore, Madison and Jefferson's views as enumerated above, but also of the 9th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. The dissenters refuse to follow Madison and Jefferson's original intent and apply the "progress of the human mind" to interpreting the meaning of the US Constitution. In this refusal, their "original intent" doctrine fails to apply the principles of equal protection and liberty to our own time. Even worse, at least at the level of logic, their decisions fail even their own putative original intent test. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/02/1398441/-Scalia-s-Originalism-Opposed-by-Madison-Jefferson#

Marshall Islands This dome in the Pacific houses tons of radioactive waste -- and it's leaking http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific-radioactive-waste

In NYC there must be a fetish bar for people who love people in your condition?? Sympathies -- get well!

Things that make you go hmm... Go Set a Watchman: mystery of Harper Lee manuscript discovery deepens Lees lawyer claims she found the To Kill a Mockingbird prequel last August, but new report reveals a Sothebys books expert unearthed it three years ago http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/02/harper-lee-go-set-a-watchman-manuscript-discovery

Agree the knife would seem to hang over Rentboy and rentmen now as well. Too bad for all 3 sites. Wonder what would be the revenue potential for a PayPal-like service set up specifically to facilitate any and all transaction types, to include this kind of thing, which PayPal frowns on?

The leetle one on the right!

Somewhere I saw a "Desiderata for Astronomers" that read in part: ...and no doubt the cloud deck is unfolding as it should... /

Thank you for this post! Of course just as I was reading it, clouds rolled in here. But the Sky & Telescope web site will no doubt have gorgeous pics of it tomorrow and subsequently from both pro astronomers and amateurs. (Coincidentally a former editor of fhat magazine, which is published out of Cambridge, MA, was a proudly out gay man somewhat before it was commonplace.) History of the mag: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/about/

From Doubles Tennis to Internet Porn: My Year as a Supreme Court Clerk By TED CRUZ June 29, 2015 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/ted-cruz-memoir-supreme-court-119529.html#ixzz3eUWjJV4m

Between the sheets?!

I have heard that in the U.S.! An old-fashioned thing from more closeted times here though.

"I never thought of marriage as something only for men and women. But I'd never marry a guy I didn't like." - Willie Nelson http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/exclusive-willie-nelson-same-sex-marriage

I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe; by the Which I mean, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. H.P. Lovecraft

...gay divorce!

"It's hard to believe that gay Americans achieved full constitutional personhood just five years after corporations did." Stephen Colbert

Well... One could argue there was quite a difference indeed between the cost-effectiveness of Gulf I under George H.W. and Powell, and that of Gulf II.

Also to know when simply to hold them in readiness.

Nice discussions today on SCOTUSblog.com. From one of them: ...The other fundamental disagreement [between the majority and the dissenters] is over whether constitutional protections for liberty are entirely static or whether, instead, they evolve as human understanding and social conditions evolve. In Obergefell, as in Lawrence and Windsor, Justice Kennedy strongly reaffirmed the latter position. As he put it, “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to further generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.” In one sense you can read this as a flat rejection of constitutional “originalism.” That is what has the dissenters so exercised. They want to continue to operate under the Washington v. Glucksberg principle that the Due Process Clause does not protect any form of liberty that was not already protected at the time the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment were ratified. They see the alternative of an evolving Constitution as anathema because it allows recognition of new forms of liberty like the right of a gay couple to live together and be treated equally. But Justice Kennedy in fact makes the claim that his view is more consistent with the actual original intent of the Framers – that they drafted our basic constitutional protections broadly so that they would be interpreted differently over time as the world, and our understanding of it, evolve. In his view, the war between originalists and advocates of the “living Constitution” misses the point: evolving protections for basic rights were the original intent. http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/06/symposium-a-fair-and-proper-application-of-the-fourteenth-amendment/#more-229703

Know your car warning lights.

Only in Japan! Women flock to Japan zoo to see 'hunky' gorilla https://www.yahoo.com/news/women-flock-japan-zoo-see-hunky-gorilla-044739619.html

A 30,000-pound bunker buster. Largest non-nuclear weapon ever: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/30-000-pound-bomb-could-204800527.html If somebody is going to have one, suppose I'm glad it's us. For now.

OMFG ...and best name since Chord Overstreet.