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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2187 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 22, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Apparently some Amish people about 15 years ago were charged with hate crimes for cutting other Amish men's beards.

They tried to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute them, but the judge ruled that since the scissors used to cut the hair, and the vans used to drive to the men, had at some point crossed state lines, this was a valid prosecution under the interstate commerce clause.

I don't really have the time right now to make this into an effortpost for the main thread. But this is crazy. I'm living in crazytown. How we reached the point where such rulings aren't immediate grounds for revolution, I'll never know.

If you like that, then you will love Wickard v. Filburn, where the supreme court ruled that the federal government had a right to prevent a farmer from growing wheat in his own land for his own use because, if a bunch of farmers did that, it would substantially lower the price of wheat in the national market, thus affecting interstate commerce.

And of course, we have all heard about Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, so it's not a problem specific to the commerce clause; a court that can find the right to abortion and gay "marriage" in the fourteenth amendment is a court that can find anything in anything.

Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.

I mean, if we had a clean EPC opinion, you might have a case. (Of course, Skrmetti is already casting doubt on whether there's support to push the (often claimed dubious) Bostock reasoning in Title VII into EPC.) But we didn't get that opinion. We got the cluster that is Obergefell. It should be pretty high on the list of people who are pro-SSM-from-a-policy-perspective for "opinions where I agree with the outcome, but disagree with the reasoning".

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