But if those Chick tracts have taught me anything, it’s that if you follow the wrong kind of Christianity, you’re actually following Satan…
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But, can they throw you in jail? When did this guy agree to arbitration, when he got married or when he was born? I can’t find much about the Israeli legalities.
Also, avoid D&D like the plague… because also Satan!
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FTFY
Dunno, but getting a religious divorce in addition to a legal civil one is a big deal in the Jewish community, so much so that one Rabbi offered a Thugs for Hire service to beat husbands into granting a religious divorce:
What the Rabbi did was wrong and he had no right to physically assault people and deserved prosecution, but I also think that what the husbands were doing was wrong. The Rabbi, however illegally, was standing up for women against a patriarchy - for a price. Just a messed up situation from all sorts of directions.
Newt can advocate anything he likes, doesn’t mean there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that such a law would withstand being struck down by the Supreme Court.
And he probably knows this, so why he would publicly call for it is curious. I guess he’s just looking at the way the GOP is moving and wants to make sure he’s still relevant to them. “Oh, you guys like the bullshit Trump spouts? I can do that too, check this out. . . .”
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Agreed.
I’m pretty skeptical of the notion of rights being intrinsic to humanity. As a legal concept, I think it’s perfectly valid. But even then, depending on the legal philosophy of a given nation-state, a ‘right’ may either be ‘something that is allowed’ or ‘something that is not explicitly forbidden’.
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The current supreme court. But a supreme court packed with Trump nominees?
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Packed, nothing. All we need is one Trump-approved nominee for a solid conservative majority that’ll let things slide that’d never get by today.
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Well, how does Trump or anyone else “pack” a Supreme Court? You first need Justices to step down, then you need to get them confirmed in Congress, both are hindrances that prevent Trump from putting whatever lickspittle he wants in there. Even FDR couldn’t pack the court to get his way.
But then you also need them to be completely oblivious to the Constitution. I doubt even Scalia (were he still with us) would uphold a law that singles out one religion over another.
Sharia Law is this magical bogeyman for a lot of conservatives. I’ve talked with people who think one day we will wake up and it will actually be the law of the land, because it will slowly creep up on us and get put in place a tiny bit at a time. Nope. Separation of church and state protects us from that, the same as it protects Muslims from being singled out as Newt suggests.
The most interesting tactic I’ve seen is conservatives promoting this idea that “Islam is not a religion, it’s a form of government” (eyeroll), which is some kind of half-assed attempt at an end-run around the 1st Amendment. That argument wouldn’t even survive a state court, let alone the Supreme Court.
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He already did in the case of monotheism over pantheism and atheism. He was a man who started with his desired result then tortured language and the law until he got it. He used his intelligence and education to rationalize his constitutional contortions as “orginalism”.
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Fair enough, but 1.) he isn’t on the court anymore, 2.) he did still acknowledge Islam as being a legitimate religion, since it’s not polytheistic. (Plus other Reagan appointees disagreed with him, so he was kind of an outlier even among other conservative judges.)
Can a President Trump find someone as craven as Scalia? I don’t know.
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Everything old is new again.
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If Trump gets elected president, the GOP will almost certainly retain control of the senate. That means easy congressional approval of his appointments, since the Dems eliminated the filibuster-proof majority requirement for judicial appointments before they lost control of the chamber. Sure, the Senate election map is tilted in the Dems’ favor this time around, but if Trump overcomes the structural disadvantages and gets elected, it’ll either be because of enormous GOP turnout or pathetic Dem turnout, either of which jeopardizes the chances of Dems taking back control.
Also, you don’t need justices to step down in order to pack the court. Packing the court - contrary to Republican assertions since Obama’s election - means increasing its size, not just replacing departing justices. FDR failed in his attempts to do this because Congress (including members of his own party) wouldn’t go along with it, and only Congress has the power to alter the size of the court. It hasn’t been done since the mid 1800s, but with the GOP in control of both chambers, a president Trump willing to sign the legislation, and the entire party having gone off-the-rails crazy enough to do it, I wouldn’t put it past them.
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The current situation is so annoying I might be tempted into rescinding the First Amendment, provided we can also rescind the Second Amendment as well. Take it or leave it, Newt.
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Too bad nobody set a precedent for simply not approving judicial appointments.
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Look, I agree a lot of this is hypothetical scenario is possible, I just don’t know how probable it is. I still have faith in the way the separation of powers will stifle a Trump Presidency. History has shown you can’t always predict how a Supreme Court judge will lean (like Roberts upholding the Affordable Care Act), nor can you always count on congressmen voting the party line all the time (I bet there are plenty of Republicans who would still chafe at legislating anything like what Newt wants.) So while all this hand-wringing is good exercise for our fingers, I’m not about to move to Canada anytime soon, despite how nice Nova Scotia is this time of year.
November is a long way off, and for all we know Trump could lose AND screw lots of down-ticket Republicans in their own races, leading to quite the opposite outcome we’re debating here.
Yeah, I thought the D&D comics really displayed an understanding of the thought processes and priorities of gamers…
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Jack Chick tracts… so wise. So, very wise.
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