Again, you can find different court rulings that on their own are separate but all relate to something else (XYZ). If a lawyer looks through the law and finds the connections to XYZ (that no one previously put together), they can then have a legal argument for the legality/illegality of XYZ. Same thing in DnD where you look might have to look over 5 different parts of the player's handbook to figure out you can actually do something or jump this far or whatever it is.
Oh good lord. Let me recap here: Your argument was that the law not clearly covering an issue (the gist of which you characterize as "
you don't know until you ask") was functionally the same as "a DM saying you can't do XYZ. One of the players has to find where
in the rulebook it says you can do XYZ". Once again, that is clearly the
complete opposite of the circumstance you are comparing it to. In the first scenario, there is explicitly no rule on the books and the Judge/DM is making a judgement call based on their own understanding of what the law/rules
should be. It's explicitly a novel circumstance that explicitly and by definition has no direct precedent in the books to reference. In the second scenario, you presume that the law/rule is explicitly in the books - that it not only has precedent, but is explicitly covered by a rule that you can directly cite - and the Judge/DM simply did not consider it and that resolving it is as simple as showing them the applicable rule/precedent and them conceding the point specifically because the rule is in the plain text of the books.
Not only are those situations not comparable, they're antithetical to each other.
Yes, if parts of a law are against the constitutional, the Supreme Court can negate the law and/or said parts. You literally quoted me saying "As long as the law isn't unconstitutional..." Per your slavery example, why wasn't the 13th amendment deemed unconstitutional then? The legislature makes constitutional amendments, not the Supreme Court.
And the part you once again failed to read is that the whether or not the court declares something to conflict with the Constitution
can very well be down to spin and the personal politics of the Court. See again how the court did a 180 on whether or not anti-miscegenation laws violated the Equal Protection clause.
As to your inane "then why didn't they deem the 13th amendment unconstitutional" rhetorical: In theory,
they could have tried,
if they had the will to try and force the issue, but it's a principle that has yet to be employed stateside. It's also worth remembering that the Taney court - which ruled on the Dred Scott case in 1857 - only lasted until 1864, before the Civil War ended. From 1864-1873, it was the Chase court. By the time the war ended (1865), the composition had changed significantly. Taney, Curtis, Campbell, Daniel, McLean and Catron were dead, resigned, or retired. That's 6 of the Court's then-10 justices right there, and in 1866 Congress reduced the court's size from 10 to 7. So functionally it was an almost completely new court composition.
Never mind that the whole late unpleasantness of the Civil War - which the aforementioned Dred Scott case was pretty well recognized as a spark in a powderkeg for - meant that there the court had very little will to pick that fight again even had its new composition been as favorably disposed towards slavery as the Taney majority that preceded it (which it decidedly was not).
You're saying RBG is wrong?
[RBG] believed that the Roe v Wade case had based the right to abortion on the wrong argument, a violation of a woman's privacy rather than on gender equality.
Are you thinking I'm saying people shouldn't have a right to privacy for medical treatments? That's not what I said. I said that the reason privacy is a horrible argument is because that means any medical procedure/treatment is protected as long as both the doctor and patient agree to it. That would mean euthanasia or cloning or whatever can't be banned.
Ok, let me start by saying that you keep on trying to invoke
appeal to authority fallacies, but also consistently fail to understand the substance, scope, and context of what you cite, usually - as in the case here - invoking what are contextually minor quibbles or concerns that you then ignorantly exaggerate both the severity and scope of in order to mistakenly claim that they in fact support a completely unrelated point.
Setting aside that what you're referring to isn't even at the level of obiter dicta, RBG wasn't arguing that the case or its arguments were wrong, and certainly wasn't making your argument that it should have been rejected because it meant "any medical procedure/treatment is protected". Quite the opposite in fact. She was arguing that its end result
didn't go far enough, but had given reproductive rights activists enough of a victory to make them grow complacent and not further crystalize the issue by framing it as an equal protection issue
in subsequent rulings to reinforce it. That the smart
realpolitik solution would have been to limit the scope of Roe to Texas's Penal Code specifically, and then use the precedence established by that ruling as a basis for subsequent rulings and
then - after years of using similar cases to establish precedence - characterize abortion as constitutionally protected under Equal Protection grounds.
In this respect it's not unlike the argument that Brown v. Board of Education was a mistake because it integrated schools immediately at all levels rather than gradually (ie, have integration start with that generation at the Kindergarten level, with those students being the pilot program, and school integration progressing as the pilot program rose in grade level, resulting in colleges not being fully integrated until about 17 years after Brown) under the belief that doing so would ease racial tensions and that failing to do so ended up exacerbating them. It doesn't argue that Brown was wrong or poorly argued, but that it should have had a different scope and consequences
for realpolitik reasons. What you're referring to from RBG was much the same with regards to Roe.
What I'm saying is that you are yet again citing something that you never actually familiarized yourself with and egregiously misrepresenting it as consequence. What you're doing is no different than a creationist saying that "even Darwin admitted that the eye couldn't have evolved", and quoting a line from Origin of the Species that they have meticulously stripped of the context that establishes it as a
rhetorical lead-in rather than the concession they misrepresent it as. And much like that creationist, you've consistently shown that you have not read the source material, cannot be bothered to do so even after having been called out on your inaccuracies, and have no interest in doing so much less take the time to actually understand it. You just want to use it as a rhetorical tool to claim validation for your preconceptions.
So let me be direct here: Stop trying to bluff your way through conversations. It's clear as day that you haven't done your homework and your continued doubling down after being called out on it purely out of stubborn pride just makes it even more obvious.
All you have to argue is that marriage yields objective X, Y, Z benefits and these other people are losing out of those benefits and that essentially isn't fair, equal protections and all. Just marriage as a concept means nothing, a piece of paper (saying 2 people are married) doesn't make a relationship any stronger or weaker or better or worse. it's when the government acknowledges marriage and gives people benefits that are married. If the government didn't acknowledge marriage and marriage was just a religious thing people did, there'd be no issue with say the Catholic church (or any church) not marrying gay people as gay people could just make their own religion and get married if they wanted to.
They did argue that. It just wasn't part of the quote mined snippet fed to you by the ideologues who wanted to convince you that the case was necessarily ridiculous.
"For that reason, just as a couple vows to support each other, so does society pledge to support the couple, offering symbolic recognition and material benefits to protect and nourish the union. Indeed, while the States are in general free to vary the benefits they confer on all married couples,
they have throughout our history made marriage the basis for an expanding list of governmental rights, benefits, and responsibilities. These aspects of marital status include: taxation; inheritance and property rights; rules of intestate succession; spousal privilege in the law of evidence; hospital access; medical decisionmaking authority; adoption rights; the rights and benefits of survivors; birth and death certificates; professional ethics rules; campaign finance restrictions; workers' compensation benefits; health insurance; and child custody, support, and visitation rules. See Brief for United States as
Amicus Curiae 6 9; Brief for American Bar Association as
Amicus Curiae 8 29.
Valid marriage under state law is also a significant status for over a thousand provisions of federal law. See
Windsor, 570 U. S., at ___ ___ (slip op., at 15 16). The States have contributed to the fundamental character of the marriage right by placing that institution at the center of so many facets of the legal and social order.
There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle.
Yet by virtue of their exclusion from that institution, same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage. This harm results in more than just material burdens. Same-sex couples are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would deem intolerable in their own lives.
As the State itself makes marriage all the more precious by the significance it attaches to it, exclusion from that status has the effect of teaching that gays and lesbians are unequal in important respects. It demeans gays and lesbians for the State to lock them out of a central institution of the Nation's society. Same-sex couples, too, may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage and seek fulfillment in its highest meaning."
Once again: you clearly have not done your homework.
I know in reality that animal abuse laws existed before cat declawing was perceived as a bad thing (it was normal when I was a kid and there was animal abuse laws already). I'm talking about the hypothetical. You can't list literally everything that is animal abuse in an animal abuse law, but you can give criteria for what would be considered animal abuse. And then if you can prove cat declawing fits inside that criteria, then it would be considered animal abuse and illegal.
And yet again you prove to be such a reflexive contrarian that you end up losing track of your own argument and provide evidence of exactly the thing that you are arguing against. To wit: You have just acknowledged that declawing a cat was not previously considered animal abuse and therefore not covered by animal abuse laws,
exactly the circumstance that I brought that up to exemplify. You have just clearly shown that you understand this,
but you're so invested in contesting the point as a matter of principle that you just conjured up the idea that we were speaking in hypotheticals that are entirely divorced from reality (rather than me using an example - as I have been doing repeatedly throughout this entire conversation - to explain a concept to you), purely to pretend that
the facts under discussion don't have any bearing on that same discussion. Frankly, it's both transparent and juvenile.