this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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A Supreme Court judge (Scalia) made the case that torture was legal under the US Constitution, as it only prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. So, torture for other reasons is obviously fine.
I think, never stopping to consider the implications must count as an example of "white privilege".
Yeah it’s only punishment if they’re guilty. The founders obviously intended that the feds could torture any innocent person for any reason.
What a psychopath. Glad he’s dead.
I will also never understand that whole obsession in the US with what the founders intended over what makes sense. It reminds me of people reading religious books.
What really confuses me is the expectation that they should never change. Doing so is essentially seen as an act of blasphemy.
These people will say "But amendment XYZ says this!!", but the second anybody wants to amend it again, they lose their bloody minds.
Sometimes I want the country I live in to have an actual codified constitution, but other times I look over to the US and I'm wary of that "constitution cult" mentality spreading...
In my opinion, the big problem is it wasn't interpreted strictly enough for way too long. If it had been ruled super strictly from the beginning, as little wiggle room as possible, amending it regularly would have been necessary in order for the government to function at all, and thus a constitutional amendment wouldn't be considered such a wild or difficult thing.
It is absolutely absurd and I realize that my comment could be seen as endorsing this thinking. I only point it out because such arguments underpinned many of Scalia’s legal opinions and he was a big proponent of this reasoning, not only in the public sphere but in law.
Of course it was all nonsense that was never consistently applied, as this example demonstrates. The real reasoning is that some people like Scalia want to reinforce the dominance of people at the top of various social hierarchies and remove protections for people at the bottom. Since the founders were all wealthy, white landowners, their views are fairly compatible with this ideology, making it a useful fiction for people with such goals. And for the rest of us, it gives us some vague fuzzy feeling to believe our great ancestors will be smiling down on us or something.