Precedent: All it takes is an idiot.

Photo: Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo

This Monday past in NY Manhattan Supreme Court, Justice Barbara Jaffe granted a writ of Habeas Corpus to two chimpanzees.

This is after a NY Appellate Court rejected a similar attempt with the following ruling:

“[We] conclude that a chimpanzee is not a ‘person’ entitled to the rights and protections afforded by the writ of habeas corpus. Only people can have rights, because only people can be held legally accountable for their actions.  In our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights … that have been afforded to human beings.”

Animals are not people, that doesn't mean we are free to abuse them, but it does mean that they are chattel, can be bought, sold, and otherwise dealt with by their owners within the confines of the law.

What do you think? 

MSN 

Science Magazine 

 

Should Everyone Have the Right to Vote?

Photo: Martin Olsson

Yesterday's post raised some interesting questions regarding secret ballots and mandatory voting, here's another:

We all know the circumstances under which conditional voting was imposed in the context of post civil war reconstruction, but it wasn't until the passage of the 24th amendment in 1964 that poll taxes in federal primaries and elections became unconstitutional.  It wasn't until 1966 that the Supreme Court reversed it's previous decision that poll taxes were constitutional in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) with it's decision in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections that they weren't (under the 14th Amendment).  Currently other conditions placed upon voting would technically be constitutional, although most would be illegal under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, e.g literacy tests deemed constitutional in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959).

So the question is, should everyone be allowed to vote?

The Constitutional requirement is that all persons be treated the same under the law yet 15 states and DC bar persons under guardianship or or adjudged mentally incompetent or incapacitated from voting.  20 states have laws that bar people from voting only if they have been adjudged specifically to lack the capacity to vote, three states bar those who have been deemed non compos mentis, nine states bar "idiots" and "the insane" from voting yet the laws are seldom enforced due to the ambiguity of the terminology, 11 states have no requirements at all.

Yes, in Colorado if you have the mental acuity of a house plant you still have the right to vote. If you're incompetent to stand trial in North Carolina... you still have the right to vote.

Legally, only a court can take away your right to vote yet a study of Philadelphia nursing homes determined that staff was deciding who was competent to vote and who was not... in Pennsylvania, which is one of the eleven states that do not have voting competency requirements.

In 2008 it was estimated that 2.5% of potential voters (5.3 million) could not vote due to felony disenfranchisement, in 2012 that number had climbed to 5.8 million.  The Supreme Court held felony disenfranchisement constitutional in Richardson v. Ramirez (1974) under the 14th amendment "shall not be denied... "except for participation in rebellion, or other crime".  It is left up to the individual states to decide.  Maine and Vermont have no felony restrictions on voting, 13 states allow voting after release, four states allow voting after parole, 20 states allow voting after probation, eight states have circumstantial rules, and three states require the convict to petition for restoration.

I'll start the conversation with this Robert Heinlein quote:

“Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.” 

You Don't Have a Right to Other People's Stuff

It was a red banner week for the flaming red left. First, a principle object of liberal rage and hatred died, and then Saturday brought a rare Rush Limbaugh apology. Let's bring the focus back where it belongs: Personal Rights

Progressives have trashed the concept of natural rights, ironically exchanging it for a modern-day Divine Right of Kings

Our nation was founded upon negative rights; essentially, the right to be left alone to do what you wish with your life, liberty and property as you pursue your own personal happiness. The left now crashes in demanding positive rights; the right to shake down others for  free stuff. This is a direct violation of our natural negative rights, eventuating the noisy culture clash.  

They've used the state to confiscate our inherent rights to life, liberty and property, and they put to a vote which "rights" will be granted back to us. We get whatever our Emperor and his Supreme Council bestows upon us.

The various liberal outrage syndicates ensure they get their fair share, while denying political enemies the same.  At the first sign of a threat to the confiscation schemes, they send in an aggrieved tribe screaming choleric indignation to scare off the predatory politicians.  In this brave new world of collectivized rights that are doled back out, whoever screams the loudest wins.

This is upside-down, as Mark Steyn explains:

When it comes to human rights, I go back to 1215 and Magna Carta [...] Back then, “human rights” were rights of humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They’re the rights that matter: limitations upon kingly power.

Eight centuries later, we have entirely inverted the principle: “Rights” are now gifts that a benign king graciously showers upon his subjects — the right to “free” health care, to affordable housing... 

Obama’s bureaucratic edict is upgraded into the “right to contraception coverage at no additional cost.” And, up against a “human right” as basic as that, how can such peripheral rights as freedom of conscience possibly compete? (Mark Steyn)

Nobody is proposing to deny women access to contraception. You wouldn't know it by the hysterical left, screaming like they had Torquemada's hot poker up their rear ends.

Here's some needed clarity on this inflamed issue:

But the right to choose contraception does not entail a right to have it paid for by someone else, any more than the right to own a firearm under the Second Amendment entails the right to a free Smith & Wesson. (Culture Warriors)

The Left Wing:  DC's Newest Reality Show!

The apotheosis of the left's shameless claim on the property of others comes in the form of a 30-year old woman, on national tv, brazenly demanding others pay for her to get her freak on.  "Her parents should be proud," intoned the president.  Uh huh...  Progressives should be proud, the indoctrination is taking hold.

The left has taken Hollywood's West Wing to the next delusional level, with life imitating art as their latest iconic icon provided mock testimony in a phony Hollywood-like set, complete with liberal politicians and their handmaidens in the press starring as themselves!

As Sandra "Get Yo Freak On for Free" Fluke is finding out (Is it true Bill Clinton called Obama asking for her phone number?), when you drag your dirty undies out into the public square and force other people to bow down to your morality and you demand that they pay for you to knock off a piece, it is no longer private morality. It’s public, and your behavior becomes a legitimate debate topic.

Just look at how Obamacare made everyone's health a public topic, giving the first lady a state-sponsored podium to scold all those fat kids.

Battling Rights Claims

What we have in this debate is a clash not between two liberty interests, but rather between two rights-claims – one negative (genuine), the other positive (counterfeit). All that is required for the exercise of a negative right (to self-ownership and, redundantly, liberty and one’s legitimately acquired belongings) is other people’s noninterference.

[...] But the fulfillment of positive rights requires that other people act affirmatively even if they don’t want to — say, by providing products or paying the bills. If one person’s freedom depends on the infringement of someone else’s freedom, the first claim is illegitimate. To hold otherwise is to reject the principle of equality.  (Reason)

The progressive idea of positive rights is a thinly-disguised coercion by mob rule. This direct democracy, granting positive rights to whoever screams the loudest, flies in the face of American values. The American way is to respect the natural rights of all; not cheering when government goes jihad on the rights of your enemies and then gives you the spoils.

Freeman - Liberty: The Other Equality
Mark Steyn - The Perversion of Rights

Sandra Fluke does not Speak for Us

Sandra Fluke Transcript
Rush Limbaugh Apologizes

Watcha Gonna Do When They Come For You?

"If liberals want to keep the Rick Santorums of the world out of their bedrooms, all they need to do is renounce the idea that even people they agree with have the right to sniff around in private quarters." (Nick Gillespie)

I keep hearing from big government leftists that the constitution is outdated, it was written by old white men way back in the 18th century, how can you look to them to solve our 21st century problems? The answer is, I don’t. The constitution is not a solution, it is a framework in which we work to solve those problems. It was meant to restrain government when it gets the urge for a final solution.

Two Side of the Same Statist Coin

Progressives have created a clanking soulless monster, piddling down their little legs with giddly glee as it tramples conservative and libertarian projects. But oh, how they scream like schoolgirls when those most sinister of figures, "old white men," grab control of it! The horror!

State-Sponsored Rape and other Abominations...

Ducky mewls about Virginia mandating sonograms for all women wanting an abortion, with the left elevating it to a civil rights issue, practically comparing Governor McDonnell to a modern-day Orville Faubus barring the abortion-house door. As if that were not enough, in a cute play on our emotions, the left equates the mandatory sonogram to state-sponsored rape. I wonder if language policewoman Shaw Kenaw has ordered her fellow libs to stop it, since it trivializes real rapes?

When you cry that everything should be collectivized and run by the state, and you acknowledge no overarching philosophy and no constitutional controls to bind it, you can't then complain when "old white men" seize the levers of power and do what they see fit.  In a world where there's no such thing as natural rights, might makes right, right?

So, my progressive friends, when your Frankenstein's Monster turns on you, please excuse the rest of us a schadefreude-induced chortle.

There is a way out of this.  It's called personal responsibility and personal liberty. Do what you want, when you want, on your own dime. Take these decisions away from the purview of the state. Government has no business in our private lives.

You Don't Have a Right to Not be Offended

An obscurantist Muslim immigrant we graciously allowed through the gates of civilization attacked a Pennsylvania man who was dressed like a zombie Muhammad on Halloween. An idiot judge, citing Sharia law and extraordinary Muslim sensitivities, let the assailant off.

So does that mean I can punch Larry Flynt out of his wheelchair for his anti-Catholic comments and cite Canon Law as my defense?  No, it doesn't.  But what it does do is set the legal precedent that Islam is in a special protected class because it's practitioners are too violent to control themselves.  America takes another step closer to the turd world.

The assailant, Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim immigrant, physically attacked Perce, attempted to pull his sign off, and, according to police, admitted what he had done right after the incident. The defense argued that Elbayomy believed it was a crime to insult the prophet Mohammed (it is, under sharia law), and that because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam.

Judge Martin did not lecture the defendant about free speech or how disputes are resolved in a civilized country. He instead dressed the victim down for failing to appreciate how sensitive Muslims  [...] are about Islam. (Sharia Court of Pennsylvania)

I blame the State Department

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that our government should not be letting in people who think it is OK to attack others who offend their beliefs. I shudder to think what would have happened had this creep been walking down South Beach with his family and spied two men holding hands and kissing.  And how in the hell can we be letting people in and not explaining our laws to them?  All hopeful immigrants must be briefed that not only is blasphemy not against the law, it is one of the chief ways many of us exercise our first amendment rights.

Letting such people come here is like letting wild beasts into your home.  It is doubly dangerous when we have judges who more resemble ayatollahs, trampling the constitution while lecturing victims on how to avoid further attacks by not offending Islam.  The people of Pennsylvania should impeach that judge for trampling the constitution he has sworn to uphold.

There Ain't No Bridge Big Enough...

In an article about the flaming outrage in Afghanistan, I stumbled upon some words that say it much better than I ever could.  Upon concluding that we should quit Afghanistan sooner rather than later, Andrew McCarthy further observes...

That, however, cannot be the end of it. If, according to the president, we need to apologize to Muslims because we must accept that they have such an innate, extraordinary ardor for their religion that barbaric reactions to trivial slights are inevitable, then they should not be invited to enter a civilized country.

At the very least, our immigration laws should exclude entry from Muslim-majority countries unless and until those countries expressly repeal repressive sharia laws (e.g., the death penalty for apostates) and adopt American standards of non-discrimination against, tolerance of, and protection for religious minorities.

If you really want to promote freedom in Islamic countries, an immigration policy based on civil-rights reciprocity would be a lot more effective, and a lot less expensive, than dispatching tens of thousands of troops to build sharia “democracies.” It would also protect Americans from people whose countries and cultures have not prepared them for the obligations of citizenship in a free society. (Why Apologize?)

Indeed.  Imagine (God forbid) if all of us were as violently hypersensitive about our beliefs as that immigrant.  The country would be in constant turmoil.  If we value our freedoms, our culture and our way of life, we can't be letting in those who do not.