A Vagina Dialogue
It has been suggested that I was engaging in hyperbole by suggesting that the recent Kelo decision by SCOTUS was akin to date rape.
I felt that it was an accurate analogy and not in least bit hyperbolic. So, I want your opinion. It is hyperbolic to suggest that Kelo is nothing more than legal government date rape?
The government can take your property, against your will, sell it to a private body for private development and because they gave you money, it is okay. That is what SCOTUS ruled.
I feel that this is no different than date rape. A man takes you to dinner, drinks and a movie. You say thanks but no sex. He takes what he wants even though you said no. His rationale? He didn't do anything wrong because he paid, you owed him.
How is that any different than Kelo? The government says that it wants your property, you scream NO, and they TAKE it anyway and throw some money at you. Rationale? It's okay because they paid you!
I felt that it was an accurate analogy and not in least bit hyperbolic. So, I want your opinion. It is hyperbolic to suggest that Kelo is nothing more than legal government date rape?
“The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.
—Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
The government can take your property, against your will, sell it to a private body for private development and because they gave you money, it is okay. That is what SCOTUS ruled.
I feel that this is no different than date rape. A man takes you to dinner, drinks and a movie. You say thanks but no sex. He takes what he wants even though you said no. His rationale? He didn't do anything wrong because he paid, you owed him.
How is that any different than Kelo? The government says that it wants your property, you scream NO, and they TAKE it anyway and throw some money at you. Rationale? It's okay because they paid you!
Posted by Rosemary on
07.28.2005
R.I.P. Steven Malcolm Anderson
Minion
of the Week
I'm just saying.
That is the exact analogy I thought of myself immediately after that socialist decision. I thought that a Communist could argue that the men in a town should be allowed to vote democratically to rape the women provided they paid each the going price of a prostitute, the "fair market value". An obscene analogy I'll admit, but the principle itself is obscene. It is theft. Kelo allows any government anywhere to seize anything they want on whatever pretext their lawyers can invent. I'm against it.
Eminent domain has been part of the bargain for a long time. It's older than communism, older than socialism. And its an inherent part of liberal democracy.
See for example here.
Also, I recommend understanding the decision before spouting off about it. Kelo does not empower the federal government in any such ways. It empowers local government - which, as a conservative, you should realize is a good deal more within your power to affect.
Don't want to see your city or county legislature seize property this way? Then pay attention to your local representatives. Or better yet, run for office yourself.
I also recommend uber-commie Ann Althouse's take on this.
No, her analogy relies on neither of those things. Your argument that it does is a complete non-sequiter. I hate Kelo but the first thing I and almost everyone I know who hates it noticed was that, unlike Raich and Roe we could make things better at a local level.
Yours,
Wince
I don't think so. Conservative judges are usually concerned about at least three conflicting goals:
1. The text of the Constitution, to conserve its meaning and protect against radical change.
2. Precedent, to conserve its meaning and protect against radical change.
3. The will of the people as expressed by the legislatures so that the court does not usurp legislative power.
Judges differ in how much they value each of these things - often on a case by case basis. Roe valued precedent too much. Raich and Kelo valued precedent and legislative power too much.
But all of these are conservative positions, and principled ones as well - and it is possible for any given conservative judge to hold all of them as important and try to find the right balance between them.
Jonathan Rauch picks a different set of three positions, but his article is very good. But not everyone agrees, though.
Yours,
Wince
I would not! "Judicial activism", like "extremism" and "unilateralism", is an anti-concept, undefined and undefinable, contradictory, invalid, a Newspeak smear word designed to kill thought. Conservative courts of the pre-New Deal era were extremely "active" in striking down laws they knew to be un-Constitutional. Conservatives from that era into the mid-1960s were adamant in insisting that America was founded as and intended to be a Constitutional republic, not a democracy, with a stringently limited government established to protect the God-given rights of the individual to life, liberty, and property against the tyranny of the majority. Today, thanks to Robert Bork's revolution, "conservatism" has been re-defined to mean the exact inversion of that doctrine. It has thus become meaningless. "....If the salt loses its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?...."
If "conservatism" means merely accepting whatever happens to have become the status quo at any given time, as I thought in my youth (when I called myself a radical), then I want no part of it. If a conservative means anything at all worth anything other than contempt, it means one who is loyal to the historic tradition of one's country (in America, that means the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence -- in France, it means Throne and Altar), and of one's culture (for us, the high culture of the West). It means one who is loyal to values which are ancient and eternal -- "a paradigm of essences" as Richard Weaver put it -- ultimately to the eternal striving of the Individual for the Divine. Nothing less will do.
That is what I, for one, will fight to conserve and to restore, whatever may be fashionable at the moment, whatever any majority may decree at the moment, whatever successive subversions of our Constitution and our civilization, of my ancient and eternal values, may have become entrenched due to the cowardice of spineless judicial passivists. If that means that I must go to the guillotine, to the gulag, or to a "sensitivity training" brainwashing camp for daring to oppose today's Political Correctness, then so be it. Pim Fortuyn (like John Birch, like Joan of Arc....): With his death and in his death, the battle lines were drawn....
We need another E. Merrill Root, another General Horemheb....
To twist that into "we can use eminent domain to take property, pay some value and turn it over to a developer" is perverse.
As far as Rose's analogy, I buy it. In both cases somebody's getting screwed badly.
Deference to precedent goes back to the common law, which preceded the founding of this nation by hundreds of years, and on which our legal system is based. It's a conservative value, designed to allow people to rely on the courts without being whipsawwed back and forth between competing judges.
Refusing to go beyong one's own power by trying not to overstep one's own authority is commendable whenever it is practiced. It is also a conservative value, with millenia of history behind it.
At the same time, of course, the Court should overturn bad precedent (justice is a conservative value going back millenia) and should not refuse to exercise their power to protect minorities from the depredations of the majority (protecting the weak is a conservative value going back millenia).
It's a heck of a balancing act, huh?
Yours,
Wince