Also, people who know ladies.

  If you are pregnant, or are going to be pregnant, and you are going to have a complication which could cause you severe, crippling health problems if you complete the gestation, make sure you have those complications before the middle of the second trimester. Otherwise, the government is going to force you to carry the baby to term.

  President Bush finally has his legacy. His conservative Supreme Court is going to haunt us for decades.

  If you look hard enough, and are willing to violently bludgeon any notion of context, you can find a quote from a respected authority to support most any proposition, from adult circumcision to zoophilia.

  Having said that, allow me to present a sentiment that I found particularly resonant in light of the recent furor over reproductive rights.

“[A] Constitution… is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.”

  - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
  Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  I heard you were in law school. How can you be that AND be such a slacker?
- Genevieve

Dear Genevieve,

Typical Answer: Thanks to secret alien time-travel technology, I was able to compete all three years of studying during one epic night on the toilet in 1963. Every Saturday night, I fire up the machine and pop back to pick up my completed assignments for the following week. This leaves my weeknights free for choking my liver with cheap vodka and posting angry screeds in random Livejournal communities.

“Aw, Snap!” Answer: The same way you find time to be such a bitch.

“Your Mom” Answer: My schedule is pretty open now that I’ve finally stopped banging your mom every night.

Passive Aggressive Answer: I have a lot more free time since I stopped hanging out in dank alleys, blowing strange men for crack. You should try it.

  That clicking sound you just heard was Genevieve deleting me from her bookmarks. Pretty soon, my readership number will actually be negative.

LAW SCHOOL MUSICAL

Please scrupulously
honor the invocation
of Miranda rights.

Right to be silent
is invoked for each offense.
Ask about past crimes.

Right to have counsel
is custody specific.
No further questions.

EDIT: Okay, so this isn’t entirely correct. Under some circumstances, police can resume questioning about a crime even after the suspect invokes her right to remain silent, so the right isn’t purely crime-specific. The preceding stupid poem makes no representation of accuracy.

  When applying the Rational Basis standard of review, the Court seems to be giving the government ever-wider freedom to act as it sees fit, without any meaningful check from the judiciary. In 1949, Justice Jackson’s concurrence in Railway Express v. New York lauds the “salutary doctrine that cities, states and the Federal Government must exercise their powers so as not to discriminate between their inhabitants except upon some reasonable differentiation fairly related to the object of regulation.”

  In 1973, the Court said that a suspect classification would be “examined to determine whether it rationally furthers some legitimate, articulated state purpose.” San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 17 (1973).

  By 1980, United States Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Fritz saw Justice Rehnquist proclaiming that “where, as here, there are plausible reasons for Congress’ actions, our inquiry is at an end.” The Court no longer required that the actual reason for a law be rational. Rather, any sufficiently convincing post hoc justification that could be conceived of would suffice.

  In 1993, the Court in FCC v. Beach gave up all pretense of oversight, and instead placed the burden on litigants challenging a discriminatory law “to negate every conceivable basis which might support it.” One pictures competing attorneys filling up notebooks with possible justifications and counterarguments. If the government attorney manages to think of just one more than the challenger, it’s a check in the win column.

  The Court has done a neat job of ruling itself into a corner. When the Court found that the challenged Amendment in Romer v. Evans was discriminatory and motivated purely by hatred for homosexuals, the Court had to bludgeon the Rational Basis standard into a nearly unrecognizable state to enable it to strike the Amendment down. Critics who say that the Court was actually engaging in a stricter review are right. Unfortunately, the Court had very little choice. The Rational Basis standard has so little practical power to invalidate a law that the Court had to choose between dressing Intermediate Scrutiny in a hand-me-down Rational Basis t-shirt, or declaring sexual orientation a quasi-suspect classification and granting it the automatic protection of that stricter standard.

  Comparisons to the sexist reasoning in Muller v. Oregon immediately spring to mind. Again, the Court granted a much-needed protection, while (albeit a tad more subtly) endorsing intolerance toward the class it was protecting by upholding a particular discriminatory perception, namely that sexual orientation is a voluntary, rather than immutable, characteristic.

  All of that was the long way around to the following question; can the Rational Basis standard of review possibly get any more deferential? Is the chance to argue about the justification for the challenged legislation a certain thing, or will we see a day where the Court will simply deny certiorari if the government’s list of justifications is longer than the challenger’s list of arguments against them?

A routine resolution to formally recognize a convention taking place in Harrisburg stalled because the group in question practices the wrong religion.

The 60th annual convention of the U.S. chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community is scheduled to take place in the state capital this weekend. Speaker Dennis O’Brien (R., Phila.) proposed the resolution for formal recognition by the House, noting the convention’s mission to “increase faith and harmony and introduce various humanitarian, social and religious services.”

Unfortunately, there was a slight problem with the whole “Muslim” thing. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R., The Crusades) objected. “The Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God,” Mr. Metcalfe helpfully pointed out, “and I will be voting negative.”

After this impromptu lesson in comparative theology, Rep. Gordon Denlinger (R., Bigotry) tried to classy-up the debate by invoking September 11th.

“Certainly this nation went through an attack some years ago that is well-burned into the subconscious of our society,” he said. “What I sense on our floor today is that, for some people, this evokes very strong passion and emotion.”

You know what else evokes strong passion and emotion? Legislators who fail to grasp the basic principles of the Constitution. I’ll admit that I think the resolution itself is a bit of a time-waster; shouldn’t the approval of their god be enough to sustain them? But to squash the resolution because the subjects don’t worship the same god as you and your colleagues? You’ve in effect created a religious test for resolutions by a legislative body. And did you not notice that you’ve now said on the record that some portion of our state legislators hear the word “Muslim” and immediately think “terrorist?”

Thank you, Reps. Metcalfe and Denlinger for showing the world just how intolerant and prejudiced Pennsylvania politics can get, over something as silly as a pat on the back for a locally scheduled convention. It’s a proud day for all of us.

CNN.com/crime is reporting that a 16 year old Oregon boy, whose parents raised him in a faith-healing only church called the Followers of Christ, has died of a urinary tract blockage. The blockage caused a buildup of urea in his bloodstream, which poisoned his organs and caused heart failure.

He probably had a congenital condition that constricted his urinary tract where the bladder empties into the urethra, and the condition of his organs indicates that he had multiple blockages during his life, said Dr. Clifford Nelson, deputy state medical examiner for Clackamas County.

“You just build up so much urea in your bloodstream that it begins to poison your organs, and the heart is particularly susceptible,” Nelson said.

Nelson said a catheter would have saved the boy’s life. If the condition had been dealt with earlier, a urologist could easily have removed the blockage and avoided the kidney damage that came with the repeated illnesses, Nelson said.

In March, the boy’s 15 month old cousin died of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection, after her parents refused to do anything but pray for her recovery. The two children are the latest in a series of deaths among younger church members, which in 1999 prompted the state of Oregon to remove protections based on religion for parents who treat - or rather, FAIL to treat - their children with prayer rather than actual useful medicine.

Unlike the parents of the little girl, who were charged with manslaughter and criminal mistreatment, the parents of the latest victim have another out. Oregon law allows minors over the age of 14 to refuse medical treatment. If it turns out that the boy was offered treatment and refused it, his parents are off the hook.

Two things spring to mind. First, these people are serial child abusers. Points to Oregon for having the stomach to prosecute them. We can only hope that their planned religious freedom defense doesn’t stand up in court. A competent adult should have the right to refuse medical treatment for any reason, but withholding medical help from a sick toddler is crazy and criminal, and no amount of faith should shield willfully neglectful parents from prosecution.

Freedom of religion, like every freedom, has to have practical limits. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect the proverbial guy shouting “fire” during the premiere of the latest summer blockbuster. Freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference shouldn’t protect parents who routinely let helpless children die from easily treatable diseases. We as a society need to come to some kind of consensus that exempting churches from property taxes is acceptable, but subjecting children to potentially fatal neglect isn’t.

Second, and more personal, are some variations on the question I asked above. How many times does the power of prayer have to fail before these parents will wake up and stop letting their children die? I don’t expect them to stop believing in their god, but is a healthy dose of “those who help themselves” to much to ask? How deeply indoctrinated do you have to be to believe that your all-powerful, benevolent deity has a plan that includes your son or daughter dying for want of a bottle of penicillin? Is there any way to shake these people awake before another child dies? If anybody has answers to any of these, I’d love to hear them.

You. Yes, you. I don’t care how little (or how much) you know or care about politics. I don’t care how much you know or care about the Supreme Court, or the law in general. If you’re a citizen of the United States, or you know someone who is, you need to read The Supreme Court: A User’s Guide, by Dalia Lithwick of Slate. Why? Ms. Lithwick sums it up:

While the justices cannot bring down gas prices or bring home the troops, their decisions in the coming years will affect just about everything else: your rights regarding privacy, reproduction, speech and religion; how to count your vote and where your kids go to school; as well as your occupational and environmental protections. You name it, they’ll decide it. Or they’ll decide not to decide it (which may be even worse).

You need to know what’s happening in the Supreme Court, and the federal judiciary in general. You need to know that the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between you and the total abolition of your civil rights. If the Court abdicates its role of reviewing laws for constitutionality, Congress and the President will have free reign. (Free “reign.” Get it?) If they agree that it’s okay to start disenfranchising old people who don’t have a favorite bible verse and college students who’ve ever discussed having an abortion, shipping them abroad to be waterboarded with crude oil drilled in your local park, and paying female torturers half as much as male torturers, while tapping the phones of their relatives, nobody will be able to stop them.

I know this sounds alarmist, but sometimes a little bit of alarm is really goddam necessary. This is one of those times.

WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE?

A group of activists has successfully challenged regulations passed by the New South Wales government, imposing a $5,500 fine for “annoying” Catholics attending World Youth Day celebrations in Sydney. They argued that the laws infringed on their civil liberties, and three judges of a federal panel agreed with them.

Members of the NoToPope coalition plan to use their newly restored freedom to express their opposition to the church’s medieval stances on contraception and abortion. They’ll try to engage the attendees by handing out condoms, stickers and leaflets.