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It does seem like a sound argument, but it'll probably take the ACLU or a million dollars and a private lawyer to convince them. Spending $50 on a court-ordered name change is probably the simplest way to proceed.
Sadly, I already took this “coward's way out” cutting a check to the local probate court rather than raising the matter the hard way, and am now far too satisfied with my legal name to fuck with it any further; someone else with a similar impulse will need to tackle this.
(I wonder if we'll see the ACLU stepping up on this matter only after someone is actually refused a court order for name change... which they generally only do for sex offenders and other criminals whose “crimes involv[ed] moral turpitude”...)
Why is this the coward's way out? If it's more convenient or efficacious to do an extremely minor amount of paperwork and pay a trivial filing fee, that seems totally reasonable.
[ For real law nerds, the real question is why does Alabama use
-as the delimiter for their legal clauses rather than.like everyone else. ]Not challenging illegal government authority is a slippery slope. Presumably.
If nobody does anything about undue power it becomes normal, and eventually legal.
Presumably one doesn't challenge the illegal actions of the government unless they are both illegal and have some specific articulable harm to someone.
The harm here (if there is any) seems trivial enough not to
Incidentally, one could make the inverse of a slippery slope argument -- if you cry "fascist" at every government overreach no matter how minor, it detracts from the real battles. Save your powder and so forth.
I always wondered what was actually more effective, to ruthlessly attack even the most minor of transgressions or to keep around the potential of a killing blow.
Seems to me that the logistics of maintaining power require constant use and practice. But that goes both ways. Power will learn to contain what it is confronted with.
In France we are fond of violent riots, but that means any French regime has riot police, vastly limiting the utility of direct action as a political tactic.
But then again I see the US's 2a growing ever more theoretical a right to contest the government militarily precisely because that's not a button you want to press often.
I think it's both situational and tactical. Lawsuits are very expensive and you can waste 8 years only to have them thrown out because you didn't pick the right vehicle. At the same time, in a situation where one has a benefit in leverage and relative effort, it is beneficial to flood the field. I don't see a one-size-fits-all piece of advice.
Also I think the 2A is doing rather well. There will always be some gap left when imposing federal dictat on recalcitrant States (same when it was abortion from the left), but most of the US has shall-issue CCW.
Most of the US by state, or most of the US by where the population is? The latter is much more important in this instance- sure, it's great if the flyover states have decent gun laws, but if 100 million people live in the Northeastern Megalopolis or California, where shall-issue CCW for the most part does not exist (and AWBs universal- their laws tend to be worse than Europe's are)... then that's still a significant problem.
Outside of Cali, Hawaii, Massachusetts and the NYC and DC metros the shall issue permits are genuinely shall issue- even Chicago has shall issue CCW. The biggest states are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio- and other than NYC(and that means not upstate) and California CCW permits in those places are available to any law abiding citizen who wants one.
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