Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Pondering
While awaiting the final grim resolution, trying to sort it out, thinking like a programmer.
One obvious result is a useful polarization. We now know which politicians and pundits are for life, which are for death, and which are just gutless. For some reason, previous questions like abortion and capital punishment didn't pull the iron filings into such a nice sharp pattern.
Another obvious result: more people understand just how thoroughly broken the 'rule of law' is. I don't think we've quite reached a Berlin Wall moment yet, but it's beginning to show on the horizon. With luck, someone in authority will understand how stupid and counterproductive the system looks, before the citizenry decides to just walk around it.
There are tons of fine-grained details, most of which are irrelevant in the long run, even if they are necessary to make a legal case for one side or the other. Consider these to be 'local variables' that should stay inside the function. Exactly what do we need the black box to do?
Well, let's go back to the last time we had a collision between federalism and involuntary servitude. Dred Scott. Before that decision, slaves were escaping to northern states and finding a free life. If that trend had continued, slaveholders would have found it necessary to give up their 'peculiar institution' in a natural way. Plantations would have continued to exist, but they would have figured out the sharecropping system a few decades earlier.
But because of the decision, slaveholders could count on Northern states to send back escaped slaves. The box was closed, so the feedback signal had no way to move the system gradually. The change had to happen explosively.
Now in this case, we have a "husband" who claims the right to kill his wife as part of the marriage contract. For various and nefarious reasons, which are just starting to come to light, the captor/"husband" was able to keep his property in the same state. Her family, unwilling to break laws, felt unable to remove Terri to a state free of the strange Hemlock Conspiracy*.
So: what change in the law would fix this?
How about an alteration to the Full Faith and Credit Clause, stating that marriages must be re-validated in each state, under the laws of that state? Hmmmm.... Seems like that change is also being discussed in some other context right now....
Twofer, anyone?
-----
*Hemlock Conspiracy: a tip o' the fishing pole to JunkyardBlog.net (my Mother Ship in the blog world) for locating this invaluable narrative:.
http://hyscience.typepad.com/hyscience/2005/02/the_hapless_mis.html
----- ¶ 8:34 PM
While awaiting the final grim resolution, trying to sort it out, thinking like a programmer.
One obvious result is a useful polarization. We now know which politicians and pundits are for life, which are for death, and which are just gutless. For some reason, previous questions like abortion and capital punishment didn't pull the iron filings into such a nice sharp pattern.
Another obvious result: more people understand just how thoroughly broken the 'rule of law' is. I don't think we've quite reached a Berlin Wall moment yet, but it's beginning to show on the horizon. With luck, someone in authority will understand how stupid and counterproductive the system looks, before the citizenry decides to just walk around it.
There are tons of fine-grained details, most of which are irrelevant in the long run, even if they are necessary to make a legal case for one side or the other. Consider these to be 'local variables' that should stay inside the function. Exactly what do we need the black box to do?
Well, let's go back to the last time we had a collision between federalism and involuntary servitude. Dred Scott. Before that decision, slaves were escaping to northern states and finding a free life. If that trend had continued, slaveholders would have found it necessary to give up their 'peculiar institution' in a natural way. Plantations would have continued to exist, but they would have figured out the sharecropping system a few decades earlier.
But because of the decision, slaveholders could count on Northern states to send back escaped slaves. The box was closed, so the feedback signal had no way to move the system gradually. The change had to happen explosively.
Now in this case, we have a "husband" who claims the right to kill his wife as part of the marriage contract. For various and nefarious reasons, which are just starting to come to light, the captor/"husband" was able to keep his property in the same state. Her family, unwilling to break laws, felt unable to remove Terri to a state free of the strange Hemlock Conspiracy*.
So: what change in the law would fix this?
How about an alteration to the Full Faith and Credit Clause, stating that marriages must be re-validated in each state, under the laws of that state? Hmmmm.... Seems like that change is also being discussed in some other context right now....
Twofer, anyone?
-----
*Hemlock Conspiracy: a tip o' the fishing pole to JunkyardBlog.net (my Mother Ship in the blog world) for locating this invaluable narrative:.
http://hyscience.typepad.com/hyscience/2005/02/the_hapless_mis.html
----- ¶ 8:34 PM
