Comment

GOP Attacks Thurgood Marshall In Kagan Hearing

722
Aceofwhat?6/29/2010 10:29:40 am PDT

re: #675 Obdicut

There are plenty, such as the odious ones preventing gay marriage.

Riiight. The question about gay marriage is NOTHING as odious as societal discrimination based on race. It’s not even in the same ballpark.


And you keep forming this in terms of ‘conscience’, rather than, as Marshall did in the one quote you keep referring to as the entirety of what to judge his philosophy by, his intellectual faculties.

Philosophy is only partially an exercise in intellect. The intellect alone will not guide a person to what is “right”. Chomsky is a smart guy. His intellect doesn’t drive him to correct conclusions on Israel. You keep forming this in terms of a philosophy grounded in intellect. That is incorrect on its face. We are a nation founded on certain beliefs.

We believe that all people are created equal. We believe that we are entitled to certain inalienable rights. Our justification for these beliefs is, at its heart, both moral and intellectual. The intellect does not tell us to feed the poor and care for the orphans.



Can you give an argument for why that one phrase is a better explanation of his philosophy than his many, many written decisions, and previous to that, the large numbers of arguments he made before the Supreme Court on the Constitution?

Yes. They’re his damn words! I am not so presumptuous as to say that Thurgood Marshall is not erudite enough to accurately paraphrase his judicial philosophy!

To me that’s a hair split so fine you could use it to string the world’s smallest violin. Correct and right are synonyms, and I think if he’d said “correct” instead of “right” in his sentence the GOP would still be attacking him in exactly the same manner.

Then let’s explore this a bit. Take Citizens’ United, for example. Some here at LGF, and many elsewhere, complained ad nauseum that it wasn’t right, because the outcome would result in too much influence for “corporations” (nevermind the unions, they’re ignored when inconvenient to most of the left).

So what? Whether the outcome is “right” is unimportant. Did the law correctly toe the line of the 1st amendment? No.

The ruling on Separate but Equal was decided on exactly those grounds. Do you feel that ruling was a bad one? The ruling held that in the real world, Separate But Equal was an impossibility, that the results, the outcomes of such legislation would never work.

No. I believe that separate but equal was so odious, so heinous, that I am glad it was struck down.

I do not believe that any such item or law exists today, one so odious that the judiciary must risk a significant overreach to keep the country on track.