Worth noting that those suits rely on the citizen having the funds to start the suit, and the court accepting it. In other words "the KKK are talking about lynchings on facebook" isn't going anywhere, but "someone was mean to a christian" is.
We're seeing similar stuff in Australia with the various "freedom of religion" bills that exempt the things evangelical christians do from laws that would otherwise constrain them. But also making it clear that the dope-smokers and polygamists have to stay in the box. There is definitely no freedom from religion. Politically, a right wing moderate is someone who is very definitely christian just not evangelical christian (or more accurately, mammonite christian).
]]>Eyeroll seconded! (Says the cat guy)
]]>If all the servers etc for InstaTwitBook are in, say, California, don't they have to be sued there?
]]>And in some cases, making it clear quite forcefully. An unsympathetic judge not only dismissed the Noosa Temple of Satan's case against the Queensland Department of Education (to be permitted to teach religious instruction classes), but is threatening to have one of the plaintiffs charged with swearing a false affidavit: on the basis that his affirmation of religious beliefs is not genuine. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster does have a presence in Queensland as I understand it, but this is a good hint about the direction similar actions from that quarter are likely to go here... although I suspect FSM legal activities in the USA have been a bit better thought through than what NTS tried to do.
]]>https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-07/qld-court-noosa-temple-of-satan-education-challenge/101044878
Justice Burns found the Temple had no genuine connection to anything pertaining to religion and, "certainly no evidence of a shared belief in a supernatural being, thing or principle, let alone canons of conduct to give effect to such belief''.
I await with great interest his opinion of everything from Buddhism to Hillsong Church (although money may meet his criteria of a "supernatural principle")
As a bit of brain relief I give you Te Kupu with Teremoana Rapley "Stormy Weather" (CW: intro to video is brutality)
]]>Ha! Well as an aside we're in for it again here in sunny SEQ. It's flooding now and still raining, and it looks like at least another couple of days of heavy rain are rolling over. We're safe, but it's annoying that it's happening again so soon. It's nearly winter after all.
I actually saw a couple of young people canoeing down a local creek this morning. They had PFDs that looked like type 3 or worse, and no helmets. I hope that they caught some seriousness before the seriousness caught them, but anyhow there's no way they could paddle back upstream. Creek is usually a couple of metres wide and mostly around 150mm deep (not counting holes I guess). Currently it's about 30m wide, 2-3m or so deep (in the spot I saw the canoe) and moving fast. Sadly the media seem to encourage this stuff... and of course some people have already died since the water started rising yesterday.
]]>It's not raining here right now, but the weather has relaxed back to a normal wet summer rather than anything that could be mistaken for "fine and sunny". I've been running the PC off the grid because 750W of solar isn't enough to keep a 200W computer going. OTOH I got a walk to the shops in without feeling the need to take my umbrella!
]]>"my father was a prominent anti abortion activist. clarence thomas was a close family friend growing up. i literally cannot tell you how many times i EXPLICITLY heard from these people, EXPLICITLY, smug glee over the idea of women dying from unsafe abortions."
]]>(1) (mentioned by JBS @ 123) The first amendment of the US Constitution seems pretty clear about forbidding laws that favor one religious doctrine over others or over non-theistic ethical systems. (The Establishment Clause "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...") The partisan majority on the US Supreme Court can dance around with bizarre interpretations of the Establishment Clause, but they are full of shit (IMO/IANAL). They would be allowing states to turn religious doctrine, theologically dubious religious doctrine held by a subset (perhaps a minority) of the population, into law.
I do not understand why the Establishment Clause is not a larger part of the arguments against those forced birth laws that define a pre-viability start of human life. And even post-viability/pre birth, there is no religious consensus.
(2) Another line of argument; the US has a standard and quite secular definition of death that involves brain death (either indirectly or directly)[1]:
What is the Uniform Declaration of Death Act (UDDA)? (Last updated June 12, 2018)
The UDDA offers two definitions for when an individual may legally be declared dead:
- Irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions; or
- Irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.
If the same standard were applied to fetuses, fetus central nervous systems start to have significant structural isomorphisms with post-birth human nervous systems in the second trimester (though a few basic gross structures start to appear around week 7, and see (3) below).
An arguably-functional heart forms by week 9 - the very early "fetal heartbeat" talked about by forced birthers is nonsense; there is no heart at that point.
So if Roe v Wade is overturned, and various laws criminalizing failure to implant or later miscarriage come into force, there will be a legal standard in many states for ensoulment/beginning of human life based on the (somewhat incoherent: e.g. twins/chimeras) religious doctrine of a subset of Christians, but for desoulment, a national secular standard will hold.
If a standard for death similar to the ensoulment-begins-at-fertilization standards into some state's laws applied, it would essentially be a ban on organ transplants except for live-donor transplants like blood transfusions/bone marrow transplants. If the body had greater than zero cells left alive, then the person would not be dead, so vital organs could not be removed. (We could get argumentative about blood samples in cold storage, etc.)
(3) A similar argument works with the ‘when does human brain life begin” lines of research over the last several decades (human life ending with brain death). It’s pretty complicated and quite without total consensus, but at e.g. 16 weeks there is no neural infrastructure for human consciousness, and (weakly) arguably not until birth or after. So these early-human-life laws are theocratic laws, asserting a human nature(/ensoulment) to a blob that cannot possibly support it except as a metaphysical thing that is assigned at conception (disregarding twinning/chimeras) but that waits around patiently until the brain is sufficiently formed to support consciousness; it’s a theological concept, and FWIW there is no agreement among even Christian theologians.
The Emergence of Human Consciousness: From Fetal to Neonatal Life (Nature, March 2009, Hugo Lagercrantz & Jean-Pierre Changeux, worth a skim.)
Newborn infants display features characteristic of what may be referred to as basic consciousness and they still have to undergo considerable maturation to reach the level of adult consciousness. The preterm infant, ex utero, may open its eyes and establish minimal eye contact with its mother. It also shows avoidance reactions to harmful stimuli. However, the thalamocortical connections are not yet fully established, which is why it can only reach a minimal level of consciousness.
[1] There are Catholics (and probably others) who argue that brain death is not real death/desoulment. They are wrong (brains host souls/minds! :-), but here's a tediously argued sample argument: https://www.hprweb.com/2021/03/brain-death-what-catholics-should-know/
[2] My usual USA-political [hangout] was downed in a suspicious massive datacenter outage over a week ago. That is making me cranky. Saw a full-arc double rainbow this evening, though, which was nice.