The 2nd Amendment To The US Constitution: Conservatives Are Lying

Click on the link below for a 10-minute video debunking everything conservatives believe about the 2nd Amendment:

This Maga DUMMY Just Failed The Easiest TEST

Free Speech: IT IS NOT ABSOLUTE

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There has been a consistent interpretation of the concept of the First Amendment to the US Constitution since its inclusion in the Bill of Rights as the FIRST of ten amendments: it is not absolute. A traditional phrase to teach this reality is: "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater.". In other words, if it incites harm, it is not constitutional. 

Given the above, it is objectively evidenced that many (? most) statements from every present-day conservative/MAGA Republican are unconstitutional. So, the question is: WHY ARE THEY ALLOWED TO USE MEDIA UNOPPOSED CONTEMPORANEOUSLY?  It is more than time to not only restore the Fairness Doctrine but make it inclusive of ALL media, with the requirement of instant/immediate fact-checking. With the wide knowledge base easily accessed by media today, this is now possible - - - use it!!!

The US Supreme Court: It's Worse Than You Thought

"The U.S. Supreme Court — that over sixty years ago ruled against state-led prayer in public schools — has swung back the other way with a vengeance. The ultra-conservative majority on the current court has reversed 60 years of progress and put the rights of non-believers in jeopardy.

"In this episode, Jim Underdown speaks to Nick Little, former Director of CFI’s Legal department, and Eddie Tabash, Chair of the CFI Board of Directors. The two lawyers talk about the state of the court, recent decisions, and the problematic future for secular Americans."

Click on the link below for a podcast exposing, not just its destruction of the separation of religion and government, but essentially the foundation of the entire US Constitution:

Supreme Injustice

"Effective Altruism": Is It Against The "Common Good"?

"Effective altruism is an end-run around the common good — a perversion of the civic virtue that the common good requires.

"Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall — and the disconnect between his ends and the means — raises two questions at the heart of our quest to understand what has happened to the common good: What is the role and meaning of civic virtue? And is it possible to be virtuous if our goals are virtuous but the means we choose to achieve them harm others?"

Click on the link below for an essay on how to best "- - -  promote the general welfare:"

Samuel Bankman-Fried and the Perversion of Civic Virtue

Who Should Control Books In Libraries?

Click on the link below for an analysis regarding what organization(s) should be controlling what you can or cannot read in public sources:

Let's talk about the Illinois book ban ban....

The Conservative Position On Firearms SHATTERED!!

THE 2nd AMENDMENT

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I have posted many times on the topic of gun control. However, I have never been exposed to what Jon Stewart recently did to a gun rights ideologue. Get your popcorn and click on the link below (watch through Brian Tyler Cohen's analysis):

Jon Stewart BREAKS THE INTERNET demolishing Republican TO HIS FACE

Two Opinions On The US Constitution

Republicans persist in defending their view of the US Constitution by claiming that THEY hold to the "Original Intent" of such. Click on the link below for a rebuttal to this view:

Let's talk about original intent and the Constitution

Republicans and Democrats disagree regarding the intent of the Amendments to the US Constitution. Click on the link below for the progressive view of them:

Let's talk about the mythology of amendments

"Human Rights" Vs "States' Rights"

Since at least the onset of the US Civil War, groups of people within individual states have used parts of the US Constitution to support nefarious anti-democratic activity under the banner of "States' Rights." Below are some reasons why states' rights do not trump human rights and why the federal government is the final arbiter in protecting both human rights and democracy:

"The protection of fundamental human rights was a foundation stone in the establishment of the United States over 200 years ago." (link)

"Article VI, Paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution is commonly referred to as the Supremacy Clause. It establishes that the federal constitution, and federal law generally, take precedence over state laws, and even state constitutions. It prohibits states from interfering with the federal government's exercise of its constitutional powers, and from assuming any functions that are exclusively entrusted to the federal government. - - - " (link)

Human rights are embedded within the US Constitution and its Amendments. (link)

One has to be willfully ignorant not to see what is happening within both federal and state governments, as well as small and larger groups of organized civilians, to defy human rights by acting outside of laws protecting such. It is not unusual for these folks to cloak their action within the "States' Right" meme. Consistent with this is the phenomenon of the "Constitutional Sheriff." Click on the link below for a podcast delving into the history of sheriffs and this concept of such:

The "Constitutional Sheriff" Myth

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A point to ponder: bodily autonomy is a universal, precedent-supported human right. Why is the US Supreme Court essentially finding that such is a "States' Rights" issue?

THE Major Danger Of Christianity In The USA?

"A federal court ruling allows a Kentucky photography business to openly discriminate against protected classes of citizens under the guise of religious freedom. Constitutional and civil rights attorney, Andrew Seidel, joins us to discuss how this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the victories already proclaimed by a literal cabal of Christian Crusaders pulling the strings at the highest levels of U.S. power."

Click on the link below for a 40-minute video delving into this constitution-breaking movement within the US culture:

How Christian Crusaders Weaponized the Court to Steal a Country

Bastardization Of The 1st Amendment

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution's "religion clauses" have traditionally been in tension. With the Trump era and the hijacking of the Republican Party by conservative Christians, there has been a dangerous movement toward religious interference with the rights of us all under the mantra of "Religious Freedom" by abusing the "free exercise" clause:

• "- - -well-funded, right-wing religious legal advocacy groups have promoted a very different and quite false concept of religious freedom. To distinguish it from the idea it traduces, I will call it “religious liberty” here. It has little to do with the traditional idea that all people should be free to worship or not worship without interference or coercion from law or government. It is instead the idea that (certain) religious groups and perspectives have a right to trump those civil laws of which they disapprove on religious grounds. The idea is invariably accompanied with either implicit or explicit favoring of certain religious groups and perspectives over others, and it involves granting special privileges, and indeed public funds, to such favored groups."

Click on the link below for an analysis of the issue by the American Bar Association:

"Religious Liberty" Used to Uphold Conservative Religious Privileges

Who Owns Our Rights?

The religious claim that a God owns our rights (top-down). Secular opinions on rights essentially hold that they come from the people (bottom-up) in a social contract that fosters maximum human flourishing (link). The US Constitution is a secular document, with a clear separation of government and religion (link). 

Many conservatives claim that there are no rights not explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution, as can be seen in the recent Dobbs abortion ruling: unwritten rights should be recognized only if they were "deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition" and "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty". However, this approach effectively freezes an 18th- or 19th-century understanding of rights in place. The Obergefell case in 2015 not only made marriage equality the law of the land and transformed tradition's role in discerning unwritten rights but that the court rejected the idea that the rights inquiry could be “reduced to any formula.” It instead embraced an approach that “respects our history and learns from it without allowing the past alone to rule the present” (link). Essentially, the Originalistic view of the US Constitution (link) has been debunked.

Click on the link below for a brief video showing clearly that the 9th Amendment to the US Constitution (in the Bill of RIGHTS!) supports the claim that the federal government doesn’t own the rights that are not listed in the Constitution, instead, they belong to the people, thus supporting the precedence leading up to Roe v. Wade:

The Constitution and Marriage

The 2nd Amendment Is Bogus

"What are the origins of the Second Amendment? And what can America’s painful racial history illuminate about our national relationship to guns?

"On this special Live Taping of Now & Then, Heather and Joanne talk to Carol Anderson, professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

"The trio discuss how the recent spate of mass shootings — and Supreme Court decisions striking down gun control measures in liberal-leaning cities and states — echo the longstanding inequalities embedded in American gun ownership."

Click on the link below for the true history of the 2nd Amendment:

Racism and the Second Amendment

The History Of Free Speech In The USA (Episode 2)

"What have been the gravest threats to a free press over the nation’s history? And how can the past tell us how to safeguard our access to information today?

In this second episode in a three-part series on free speech, Heather and Joanne discuss the 1837 murder of abolitionist journalist Elijah P. Lovejoy, the role of Joseph Pulitzer in the creation of the independent press, and the rise and fall of the Fairness Doctrine."

Click on the link below to continue the podcast series. The section (beginning at the 40:45 mark) on the history of the Fairness Doctrine is incredibly enlightening.

Free Speech: The Power of an Independent Press

The History Of Free Speech In The USA (Episode 1)

"How has the federal government limited and protected free speech rights over the course of American history? How have citizens responded when Washington has limited their speech rights? And what can Elon Musk’s commentary on online free speech tell us about the difficult lines between free speech, disinformation, and political power?

"In this first installment of a three-episode series on free speech, censorship, and so-called cancel culture, Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman explore the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the post-WWI rise of the ACLU, and the 1980s debate over burning the American flag."

Click on the link below for an entertaining and enlightening podcast on a subject with no simple answers:

Free Speech: The Government and Us

Abortion And The US Constitution

"The right to abortion is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution because the Constitution does not concern itself with the rights of women. As originally written, the Constitution did not even guarantee women the right to vote—it endowed no one with that right aside from propertied white men. The omission of abortion, then, says less about the issue itself than about who the Founding Fathers considered *people. (* NOTE: it doesn't include non-sentient human tissue)

"Nearly 200 years after the Constitution was drafted, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women across America pushed to liberalize restrictive abortion laws. These advocates were coming into their own as professionals, and they realized that reproductive autonomy was essential for them to live full lives."

Click on the link below for more:

The Constitution Was Not Written For Women

Government And Mandates

" - - - the cases are actually about something even more important: the future power of federal administrative agencies to regulate … anything."

The SCOTUS is about to paralyze any Federal government action during any crisis that affects its constitutional mandate to "promote the general Welfare." The Founding Fathers thought that this mandate was so important that they included it in the first sentence of the US Constitution. In addition, there are solid precedents in US law in support of science-based government action when health and safety are threatened. Click on the link below for a deeper understanding of why these cases are so important to the welfare of us all:

Supreme Court's Covid vaccine mandate cases are more important than you think

Healthcare: Individual Rights Vs The General Welfare

Points to ponder:

• Individual rights are not absolute 
• Libertarianism is a marginal idea and not a universal value
• Humans have evolved as social animals and have thrived from such
• The Preamble to the US Constitution: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
• The First Amendment to the US Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
• Morality comes from biology and socialization, not from an unevidenced God

Given the above:

• Why Catholic hospitals are bad for the US

The Elephant In The Room Last Night

Joe Biden spoke to Congress last night, outlining his plan for the USA. I thought it was very good, emphasizing progressive policies that have been needed for decades. However, as you can see from the image above, the unconstitutional Motto of "In God We Trust" was literally hanging over his head and the nation as a whole. Also, there’s NO reason to mention God in a speech as a government representative. Stop “officially” marginalizing the non-religious. The USA is officially a constitutional secular democratic republic.

In my opinion, there will be no significant change as long as magical thinking continues to be mainstream. Why? Religion, and all other pseudoscience, poisons the mind to accept claims without evidence. I will never see it, but I believe the Motto needs to be changed to:

Originalism's Racist Roots

Conservatives/Republicans like to talk about the need to interpret the US Constitution according to its "original" intent. Click on the link below to see how such a view obfuscates the truth:

The Conservative Movement’s Favorite Legal Theory Is Rooted in Racism

Judge Kavanaugh And Originalism

"There are clear parallels between originalism and conservative Christianity, including purity, textualism, and sanctimony. Perhaps not coincidentally, many originalist judges are highly and conservatively religious. Scalia believed in a literal devil, Thomas is a devout and conservative Catholic, as are Roberts and Alito. Gorsuch is probably a conservative Episcopalian, a close relation to the Catholic Church. The selective reverence for text above common sense, and in some cases common decency, is perhaps the strongest parallel. But so is the element of heresy. Originalist judges tend to treat other judges like jurisprudential heretics."

Hypocrisy, God, and the Originalism of Judge Kavanaugh