And how does a legal precedent exist in the first place?
What you're failing to understand is that
precedence doesn't always exist. Once again, that's literally what defines a landmark decision:
The court's decision creates a new precedent.
The fact that the Supreme Court can, in theory, act like a fail-safe against some ridiculous constitutional amendment passed by the legislature is somehow makes my point invalid?
The point you were trying to make was that the Court not overturning the 13th Amendment evidenced that they lacked the power. What I was invoked there was showing that the Supreme Court does indeed have the power, and that they didn't overturn the 13th Amendment due to a lack of
desire to do so rather than a lack of
ability. And as shown to you repeatedly, how they fall on an a given case often involves a considerable amount of subjective judgement and even spin. See once again the contradictory rulings on whether or not anti-miscegenation legislation was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
RBG said it was based on the wrong argument which is all I quoted and said. I didn't say she agrees with my whole take on Roe. On basic logic, how is right to privacy a legit argument for abortion? The argument doesn't make any logical or legal sense. I am pro-abortion but I'm not just gonna agree with something that doesn't make sense if it aligns with my stance.
And we call that "quote mining", aka a "contextomy": the removal of a quote from the context necessary to understand it, and then claiming that it holds a different meaning than it does within that context. Once again:
The actual argument was that the laws banning abortion as a matter of course without regard for circumstance
violated the Due Process Clause. It concluded that while the State cannot override that right entirely, it has its own interest in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life represented by the fetus, with that interest overriding the woman's right to Due Process later in the pregnancy when abortion procedures (at least at the time of ruling) posed a much greater risk to her own health (ie, the increasing risk hit a point where it outweighed the benefit).
While privacy was an element of this, the case gets bastardized by ideologues as claiming that the case was wholly "based on a right to privacy" which they - and you - pretend was conjured out of the aether (when in fact Griswold v. Connecticut that first explicitly claimed that it was a constitutional right a few years earlier, the case law officially establishing it as precedent dates back to the 1920s for Federal Law and 1900s at the State level, and had been explicitly opined on in the Harvard Law Review in the 1890s), and further bastardize it by pretending that the case declared it to be some unalienable right, which the plain text of the case shows - in no uncertain terms -
was not actually the case. Roe v. Wade was explicitly a compromise position.
Once again, you failing to understand the case because you have gotten its basic facts wrong is not the same thing as it not making sense. Perhaps it would make more sense to you if you actually took the time to read up on it rather than simply parroting editorials whose writers had an axe to grind.
I never said they didn't argue that, I said most of the arguments were baseless because they were. And I said the Supreme Court won't overturn Obergefell because it has far too much constitutional backing.
No, what you do is alternate between saying that it's ridiculous to believe that Obergefell will be overturned, characterizing the arguments on which Obergefell is predicated as ridiculous ("Read the arguments for Roe
and most of Obergefell and tell me those arguments aren't shit with a straight face"), and that it doesn't matter one way or another if Obergefell is overturned. Because at the end of the day you care more about going "nuh-uh!" whenever somebody tells you that you're wrong about something than you do about creating and maintaining an internally consistent position. And you're too proud to ever consider that the many, many people calling you out on your erroneous claims might just be right about you speaking in ignorance, especially considering that you consistently show that you're also too lazy to actually read up on the subjects you're opining on.
I was talking about the hypothetical of cat declawing and animal abuse. You can substitute out cat declawing for something else that would be some newly argued type of animal abuse. My point is in many things like animal abuse, you give criteria for what is animal abuse and then argue that XYZ does indeed meet the criteria because you can't list everything type of abuse in the law. Same thing with child abuse as well.
Again: We were not talking about a hypothetical. That's a fiction that you conjured up purely to pretend that the points explaining why your position didn't hold up to scrutiny didn't matter.
I invoked declawing cats as a contemporary example to illustrate how changing attitudes result in the laws changing to reflect those attitudes. Never mind that you're once again missing the forest for the trees. The point you're ignoring (seemingly deliberately at this point) is that this example reflects a fundamental priciple of the legal system.
Under our legal system, the law has an obligation to be clear and unambiguous. It is a binary. The only answers to whether or not something is protected are "yes" or "no". Not "maybe", not "in theory". If you cannot say - affirmatively and with certainty that the answer is "yes", then it is "no" until such time that the law and/or courts declare otherwise. Because to do otherwise would violate one the central tenets of our legal system:
A law can bind only when it is reasonably possible for those to whom it applies to acquire knowledge of it in order to observe it. If the law is not clear on an issue, then it cannot bind because it allows for reasonable people to come to contradictory conclusions, creating good faith violations of the law even with proper knowledge. If there cannot be a reasonable expectation that you should know better, the law is not binding in that respect. Hence, once again, the
Vagueness Doctrine.
If you successfully argue in court that something that has not historically been recognized as protected should be,
that establishes a new precedent that is used
from that point forward. This is why changes to legal definitions are a big deal, because that directly impacts what the law does and does not cover.
To repeat:
This is not a debatable point nor is it difficult to understand. Bluntly, your failure to understand as much is exactly that:
your failure to understand. These are
extremely basic and uncontested principles. In fact, they're premises that our legal system is built around. You're simply refusing to even try to understand them, and then confusing your willful lack of personal knowledge on the subject (and apparent lack of interest in learning about it) for its content being ambiguous. It's not ambiguous or "up in the air," you're just being obtuse.
Here, let me give you a little fable to try to get this through to you: There once was a man who never got any education to speak of, going into the job market as soon as he had the strength in order to support his family. He grew up to be very hard working, but obviously not the most knowledgeable sort. He eventually had a daughter, and was very determined that she'd get a proper schooling. His hard work paid off, and he was able to fund her education, and she ended up not only graduating high school but getting a scholarship to a decent college.
He was very proud of her, and had a bad habit of trying to get her to show off her 'fancy learning' in front of his friends. So one day, he was talking his friends on the porch and his daughter - home for the weekend - came by. True to form, he shouted, "Hey hun! Speak some geometry to me!" Exasperated, she relented and responded "Alright! The area of a circle is equal to Pi R square."
At first he was speechless. Then he was furious. He shouted back: "What are they teaching you in that cockamamie school? 'Pie are square'? That's ridiculous! Any idiot knows that pies aren't square! They're round!"
What I want you to understand is that that this entire conversation is centered on the functional equivalent of you insisting that "pi r squared" must be wrong because "pies are round". You're making ridiculous objections to basic principles, rooted in nothing but your own preconception and misconceptions about a subject that those same objections make clear that you have no knowledge of. The arguments you're making aren't clever, they're painfully stupid. And the fact that you can't even see that is a testament both to how far out of your depth you are and how determined you are not to learn. You keep demanding that people prove things to you, but you ignore everything cited to you, and even your own sources once it's pointed out that they don't support your conclusions. It's not about knowledge for you, just your ego.
And you know what? I'm done wasting my time on you. It is not worth my time to keep on trying to educate you, including re-checking sources, thinking up applicable examples and analogies to facilitate that education, finding applicable case law, quoting definitions, and both invoking and explaining relevant concepts if all you're ever going to do is go "nuh-uh! That doesn't make sense to me! Therefore it must be wrong!" before turning to "well that doesn't count because I'm not actually talking about reality!" when it finally does make sense to you. Rather than learning from your mistakes you simply dig your heels in and stonewall to the point of literally and explicitly declaring that reality doesn't have any bearing
on an argument about how your presumptions don't match reality. And when you show that you're willing to dig your heels in that far out of sheer stubborn pride, that makes it clear that any attempt at discussion with you is an exercise in futility.
So good day to you.
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