What do you call a person who opposes Roe v Wade?

[°Leprechaun]

99 day poll.
I oppose the term pro life in this context, for the obvious reason that being pro life would also mean anti gun, anti death penalty, anti war etc and those who are anti abortion are not always pro life on other issues.

[John Dule]

Constitutionally literate.

[Hope For A New Era]

Pro-forced birth.

[West_Midlander]

Pro-life just like I call pro-choice people pro-choice

[Frodo]

The late justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was clearly none of those things, so 'other'. 

[MarkD]

I voted "other" in your poll, but I don't have a clear label that I can give to everyone who is opposed to Roe v. Wade. I wish I could say that everyone who is opposed to that Supreme Court decision is an "interpretivist," but it just would not be true. An "interpretivist" would say that the Constitution does not mean what Roe says that it means, and that judges who interpret the Constitution that way are not truly interpreting the Constitution at all. Those kinds of judges are making law instead of interpreting it. That would be the correct way to explain what was wrong with Roe, but not all people who oppose Roe have that judicial philosophy. Justice Byron White wrote a dissenting opinion in Roe that certainly sounded like an interpretivist, but he was hypocritically inconsistent about how he interpreted the Constitution in a number of other cases.

Don't assume that a political position is equal to a judicial philosophy. I am pro-choice, but I certainly don't agree with how the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution in Roe. I keep my political beliefs separate from my judicial philosophy - my methodology of interpreting the Constitution. I wish everyone would do that, but there will always be some people who don't.

99 day poll.
I oppose the term pro life in this context, for the obvious reason that being pro life would also mean anti gun, anti death penalty, anti war etc and those who are anti abortion are not always pro life on other issues.

This always makes me angry. Do not play disingenuous games with the common sense definition of the term pro-life. Whenever I see people like you doing this, I insist that I am allowed to play the same game and alter the definition of pro-choice. How can you call yourself pro-choice if you support gun control? How can you call yourself pro-choice if you support minimum wage laws, rent control laws, income taxes, environmental regulations, all of the regulations that flow from the Endangered Species Act, and any of the other numerous regulations that federal, state, and local governments create to control the behavior of people? If you call yourself pro-choice, that should mean you have an across-the-board libertarian philosophy, and you ought to be consistently against any government regulation at all.

[Vice President Christian Man]

Anti abortion

[°Leprechaun]

The phrase "pro life" implies that someone who supports safe and legal abortion is somehow pro death, which obviously is insulting.

I don't see anything wrong with the phrase anti abortion.

I also don't mind the phrase anti choice. I am not pro choice on everything. For example 17 year olds don't need military weapons.
Yes, I am anti choice on some things.

Also, I used Roe v Wade to be less ambiguous. Most people aren't 100% on either side of abortion laws. Whether abortion laws are constitutional or not is whole other debate. Congress can codify legal abortion and that would be constitutional.

[Dr. MB]

Constitutionally literate.

[°Leprechaun]

By the way the correct phrase for climate change is global warming and it's the DemocratIC party not the democrat party.
Did it occur to any of you that many people were absent the day they taught grammar in grammar school?

The intention of this discussion is more of a critique of language than anything else. The US Constitution isn't always crystal clear.
A good example is the 2nd amendment.

[John Dule]

By the way the correct phrase for climate change is global warming and it's the DemocratIC party not the democrat party.
Did it occur to any of you that many people were absent the day they taught grammar in grammar school?

The intention of this discussion is more of a critique of language than anything else. The US Constitution isn't always crystal clear.
A good example is the 2nd amendment.

The second amendment is also quite clear. If you want an example of a vague and debatable provision in the Constitution, I’d suggest the Privileges and Immunities Clause.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

anti-Roe.

[°Leprechaun]

By the way the correct phrase for climate change is global warming and it's the DemocratIC party not the democrat party.
Did it occur to any of you that many people were absent the day they taught grammar in grammar school?

The intention of this discussion is more of a critique of language than anything else. The US Constitution isn't always crystal clear.
A good example is the 2nd amendment.

The second amendment is also quite clear. If you want an example of a vague and debatable provision in the Constitution, I’d suggest the Privileges and Immunities Clause.

OK, what does "well regulated militia" mean to you.

[John Dule]

By the way the correct phrase for climate change is global warming and it's the DemocratIC party not the democrat party.
Did it occur to any of you that many people were absent the day they taught grammar in grammar school?

The intention of this discussion is more of a critique of language than anything else. The US Constitution isn't always crystal clear.
A good example is the 2nd amendment.

The second amendment is also quite clear. If you want an example of a vague and debatable provision in the Constitution, I’d suggest the Privileges and Immunities Clause.

OK, what does "well regulated militia" mean to you.

No one actually disputes what that term means. It’s just that it’s included in the prefatory clause of the amendment, and therefore announces a purpose while having no operative effect on the law. Scalia’s majority in DC v. Heller lays it out quite clearly.

[John Dule]

OK, what does "well regulated militia" mean to you.

No one actually disputes what that term means. It’s just that it’s included in the prefatory clause of the amendment, and therefore announces a purpose while having no operative effect on the law. Scalia’s majority in DC v. Heller lays it out quite clearly.

So your theory here is that the Framers, who otherwise labored extensively over the precise wording of our governing document, decided to add some meaningless surplusage to the Second Amendment — and only the Second Amendment? Interesting.

1. You say “your theory” as if I made this up myself. This is the law as it stands under Heller.

2. Announcing the purpose of the law does actually serve a purpose. It’s just that it doesn’t constrain the substantive enumerated right to that purpose, which is what you want it to do.

3. This is the plain meaning of the text, as it would be understood by any honest English-speaker. Those who disagree are either dishonest or not fluent English speakers.

[John Dule]

So your theory here is that the Framers, who otherwise labored extensively over the precise wording of our governing document, decided to add some meaningless surplusage to the Second Amendment — and only the Second Amendment? Interesting.

1. You say “your theory” as if I made this up myself. This is the law as it stands under Heller.

Appeal to authority fallacy. You should first attempt to defend your theory on its merits, not immediately fall back on whether a handful of judges agree with you.

Wow, what an aggressively stupid post. You're the one who referred to it as "my theory," so I decided to explain that this characterization wasn't accurate. That isn't an appeal to authority; that's stating a clarifying fact.

To avoid surplusage, the words must be given binding legal effect — like every other provision. What binding legal effect do you think this clause has? And why do no other provisions of the Bill of Rights announce their purposes?

The purpose of including the prefatory language is to prohibit Congress from unilaterally disbanding the citizen militias. This was a concern of antifederalists at the time, and this amendment (like the rest of the Bill of Rights) was a bone thrown to them.

Most of the corpus evidence on the subject has concluded that, at a minimum, the phrase "bear arms" would not have been understood by "any honest English speaker" (no hyphen, btw) at the Founding as necessarily conferring a right outside the military context. I'm not sure what you're trying to do with these kinds of assertions. Do you think they make you look intelligent?

You are talking about an alternative interpretation of the phrase "keep and bear arms," which has been proposed by academic scholars and was featured in the Heller dissent, but which has no force of law. It's an interesting proposition and worthy of debate, but sadly it is not relevant to the argument I was making, which was that all honest English speakers accept that the prefatory clause neither limits nor expands the right enumerated in the operative clause of the amendment. You are changing the subject from the "well-regulated militia" portion (which is not debatable) to the "keep and bear arms" portion (which is debatable, but which I still disagree with you on). Important to keep track of these things when discussing the law!

[John Dule]

But I do NOT understand, JD, why you think that the Privileges or Immunities Clause is so mysterious. That is one that I have no trouble figuring out what it means, and I don't think I have ever seen a SCOTUS opinion that ever misexplained what that clause means. But two other provisions of the Constitution that ARE much more "vague and debatable" are the Ninth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause. Those two clauses have been distorted and twisted like a pretzel by the SCOTUS far more often than the 2nd. Those two are at least just as vague, and they get debated even more often, than the 2nd, from where I sit.
(This will be deleted later tonight.)

I think the Slaughterhouse Cases were rightly decided but they misinterpreted the POI clause and mangled it for subsequent generations. I agree with Clarence Thomas that this clause should be the avenue for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Republican.

[°Leprechaun]

It will be interesting to see where this thread goes, so for the time being I will refrain from putting in my two cents on abortion or the second amendment. I do think both topics are complicated, so there is much more I could say, at some point.

[Benjamin Frank]

The ultimate virtue signallers.

[John Dule]

What a creative explanation! It's your theory because you are the one arguing in favor of it. That should have been plainly obvious, but maybe you are not a native English speaker, or (more likely imo) you are being dishonest and falling back on this explanation once it was pointed out what you're doing.

Bro. Just stop. Take the L. You misrepresented what I was saying, so I clarified it for anyone else who happened to be reading. Chucking out inaccurate "logical fallacies" willy-nilly doesn't win arguments. It just makes you look like this:

Heller itself talks in terms of a "people's militia" that is broader than—and necessarily encompasses—"the citizen militias." The second clause would logically achieve that absent the first. And so we are back at square one, where the first clause of the amendment is surplusage. Do you have any better ideas?

I suppose it depends on whether you consider announcing the purpose of the law to be "surplusage." It think it's a good thing for clarity's sake, and I wish other amendments had included similar language. It protects the militias with an extra layer of text and suggests that any abridgement of the operative clause that impinges upon the existence of the militias should be held to higher scrutiny than, say, a ban on felons owning guns. I don't consider this "surplusage."

You are obsessed with whether something has the "force of law." If we didn't all know better by now I'd say it was a pathetic attempt at an appeal to authority. Fortunately, we know this was a clarifying note for everyone who may have been led to believe that the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly was binding federal law.

It's a simple observation that happens to be true. I think you should know by now that I have no regard for precedent if the underlying legal reasoning was correct, so I don't know why you're bothering to persist with this pointless line of argumentation.

The meaning of "bear arms" is the more interesting part, but you seem to want to fight this on more challenging ground for yourself; fair enough.

The bigger challenge to my side is the idea that "keep and bear arms" is one term that, when viewed through the corpus linguistics perspective, denotes a different right than "keep arms in your home" and "bear arms in public." I think there is truth to this analysis, but ultimately I believe the right to keep arms in one's home is present in either interpretation.

That the phrase limits the operative clause is the natural reading of the text and, as Heller itself acknowledges (n.24), was the majority reading of the judiciary up into the 1990s. Did they not speak English back then?

Wait, so you're saying that the majority interpretation pre-Heller should inform our interpretation of the amendment? Sounds like an "appeal to authority (precedent)" to me!

[John Dule]

Being dishonest, I take it. Good to have that settled.

Now you're just embarrassing yourself. Sorry, but high school debate club tactics do not work here.

lmao what?? "It cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution is intended to be without effect" — literally Marbury. "For clarity's sake" is not that, nor is "an extra layer of text." And wishing other amendments had similar language doesn't change the fact that they do not. Your reading uniquely singles out this line to have no meaning.

I just explained to you what effect the words have. The fact that they do not limit the operative clause does not mean that they have no meaning. If you choose not to read my explanation then that is not my problem.

You're dodging the question — I didn't say anything about how we should interpret the amendment. You post with an utterly undeserved arrogance and I am only interested here in tearing down your ideas, not asserting my own claims. Your claim is "Those who disagree [with my theory] are either dishonest or not fluent English speakers." Hundreds of individuals who we can presume were at least somewhat literate, as Heller acknowledges, nevertheless disagreed. Were they all part of a vast conspiracy, or were they actually not fluent English speakers? A or B?

I think it's a well-established fact that judges routinely construe the Constitution so as to deliberately expand or restrict rights or powers as they see fit. See: substantive due process, the commerce clause, the privileges and immunities clause, etc. While we might disagree on specifics, I'm not aware of a single legal scholar who would deny this general fact.

I'm not sure why you're acting as though this is such a novel concept. Haven't you said in the past that the Constitution "can say whatever you want it to say?" That sounds like a full-throated admission that you are not even trying to engage with the text (which makes me wonder why I'm bothering making textual arguments in this conversation).

[Mr. Reactionary]

Hundreds of individuals who we can presume were at least somewhat literate, as Heller acknowledges, nevertheless disagreed. Were they all part of a vast conspiracy, or were they actually not fluent English speakers? A or B?

They were dishonest hacks. Like anyone who claims the 2nd amendment does not protect an individual right to own and carry weapons is either lying because they hate guns or an idiot.

[John Dule]

However, I will say that I made a misleading statement when I said the prefatory clause "has no operative effect." What I meant was that it does not restrict the right enumerated in the operative clause.

[SWE]

So your theory here is that the Framers, who otherwise labored extensively over the precise wording of our governing document, decided to add some meaningless surplusage to the Second Amendment — and only the Second Amendment? Interesting.

1. You say “your theory” as if I made this up myself. This is the law as it stands under Heller.

Appeal to authority fallacy. You should first attempt to defend your theory on its merits, not immediately fall back on whether a handful of judges agree with you.

It's not an appeal to authority to cite what the law is when arguing what the law is. Scalia is not some random judge, he (alongside the majority of The Court, of course) had the authority to determine what the law is, and what they've determined has yet to be struck down. That the Second Amendment operates in the way Dule says it does is an objective statement of fact, and citing the law to prove that is no more an appeal to authority that citing a statute prohibiting murder as an argument that murder is illegal would be. If you disagree with his interpretation, you are arguing for the law to be changed.