Aussie wrote on May 21
st, 2017 at 2:08pm:
freediver wrote on May 21
st, 2017 at 2:03pm:
Aussie wrote on May 21
st, 2017 at 11:31am:
freediver wrote on May 21
st, 2017 at 11:19am:
Would you say that caning gay people is a human rights issue Aussie?
No more than any other sort of criminal justice punishment is a human rights issue. Better than being hung or made dead in an electric chair, or poisoned, or whatever is your preferred method of delivering capital punishment.
So if we make being Jewish a crime, it is OK to send them off to the gas chambers? Respect for the law trumps all else? You never actually were a lawyer, were you? You just idolise them for some reason.
And how do 'we' just 'make being Jewish a crime?' Magic wand? How do 'we' just ignore Section 116 of the Constitution, Effendi?
It's the principle that counts - in my (still) developing thesis, the Rule of Law based on solid bedrock rights is the constitution for lawmaking... and none may create a law that does not fully accord with the rule of law.
The point of departure for me began when I first spied the incoming 'domestic violence' laws and the way they were designed deliberately for entrapment and in a manner so that they could be used as an end run around legal and civil rights - by generating a climate in which guilt could be accorded without proper proof in the first instance, and then expanded into criminal action against the accused without proper legal constraint.
Somewhere in the Law Reform Commission, buried as deep as The Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark, methinks, is my submission in 1991-2 to that commission over this issue.
'Whenever we leave principles and clear positive laws we are soon lost in the wild regions of imagination and possibility where arbitrary power sits upon her brazen throne and governs with an iron scepter' .- John Adams, 2nd President of the United States.
'The power of government is abused and directed to an end for which it is not constituted when employed to promote rather than to detect crime and to bring about the downfall of those who, left to themselves, might well have obeyed the law. Human nature is weak enough and sufficiently beset by temptations without government adding to them and generating crime'.Justice Felix Frankfurter, US Supreme Court.
"... that someone carelessly had lied; that someone carelessly had blundered; and that all concerned were determined not to own themselves or anyone else...to be in the wrong. A mistake had been made; and, by quibbles, by evasions, by threats, by every hole-and-corner means conceivable, the mistake was going to be perpetuated".- Frederick Rolfe, Hadrian VII.