1267 replies to this topic

[Mr. Roboto]

Court to Kansas group: ‘No, school science curriculum is not unconstitutional’

[Mr. Roboto]

A racist woman mistakes two Brazilians as Terrorists.

 

[freedom78]

A racist woman mistakes two Brazilians as Terrorists.

 

 

Trump, 2016.

[Mr. Roboto]

Painful to watch...not sure if I can make it all the way through. 

 

[freedom78]

[freedom78]

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Pharmacy's Religious Objections Case

by Pete Williams

 

 

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Tuesday to take up a challenge to a Washington state law that makes it illegal for pharmacies to refuse to dispense medications for religious reasons.

The court's action, bypassing an invitation to wade back into the issues of religion and contraception, allows the state to enforce the law.

 

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito called the court's refusal to hear the case "an ominous sign."

 

The case involved a small family-owned business whose owners objected to stocking birth control pills.

 

The nation's pharmacies are generally allowed to make decisions about which drugs to stock, for business reasons or convenience. When a drug is not in stock, the pharmacies typically refer customers to a competitor nearby who has the medication.

 

In 2007, Washington state adopted a rule making it illegal to refuse to stock a drug for reasons of conscience. It was challenged by the owners of a supermarket-based pharmacy who declined on religious grounds to handle morning-after pills.

 

"Dispensing these drugs would make them guilty of destroying life," their lawyer said.

 

A federal judge declared the regulation unconstitutional, citing previous Supreme Court rulings that said states cannot pass rules that are aimed at limiting specific religious conduct, while exempting the same conduct undertaken for non-religious reasons.

 

But an appeals court reversed that ruling, and Tuesday the Supreme Court declined to step in, leaving the law intact.

 

"If this is a sign of how our religious liberty claims will be treated in the years again, those who value religious liberty have cause for great concern," the three dissenting justices said.

 

The state defended its policy, saying it did not interfere with the religious freedom of individual pharmacists, who can refuse to fill prescriptions for moral or religious reasons. But the employers — the pharmacies — must ensure that customers get their prescribed medications.

 

There's more than a slight suspicion, the dissenting justices said, that the Washington regulations and the rules for enforcing it "reflect antipathy toward religious beliefs that do not accord with the views of those holding the levers of government power."

 

http://www.nbcnews.c...ns-case-n600261

 

[PERM BANNED]

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[artcinco]

^ At least they are up front about it. 

[Mr. Roboto]

Seems like a good idea actually. Are students also debating math or biology with their professors? Or just climate change?

 

Nasa: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years'

[freedom78]

I hate to ban things in my classroom, though I have done it on rare occasions, and always to maintain civility rather than to punish discourse.

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[freedom78]

What subjects have you banned? I remember I was in a 300 level philosophy course discussing Mill and after I used slavery and the holocaust as example of utilitarian philosophy, the professor banned those examples from discussion as those ideas upset other students. This was a Harvard trained professor who studied under Rawls.

 

I do some in-class debates, where the students pick the topics.  It's a nice break from lecture and I basically use it as a grade boost, since they struggle with my exams.  I've never let them debate abortion, both because it's going to get mean and because it's entirely based on a supreme court case and, thus, there's little to debate as to actual policy making.  But I have had a number of opinion papers on the topic.  I've also had a few debates on gay marriage and there's always that one person who uses it as an excuse to gay bash.  So, I disallowed the topic.  I've almost had to do the same with immigration.  Pretty much any topic that addresses the rights of a particular group of people has a tendency to devolve into bigotry. 

 

For the record, if these topics come up in our discussion of the role of federalism or courts or anything else, I'm happy to discuss them.  But the organized debates cause the trouble.  There isn't much legitimate ground on which to compose an anti-gay marriage stance, so they fall back on biblical principles and suddenly we're condemning a group of people as sinners, which is and should be irrelevant in a class on American government.

 

I don't find your slavery/Holocaust examples that troubling, if they're designed to point out the failings of utilitarianism (as opposed to advocating for those positions, which I strongly doubt is what you did).  If we can generally agree, nut-Os aside, that the Holocaust is bad, and you can make a utilitarian case for the Holocaust, then that undermines a pro-utilitarian argument.  Just the kind of discussion one should be having in a philosophy class.  I would liken it to questioning Rousseau's "General Will".  Can the collective, largely consensus will of the people be wrong?  If not, then we have to accept something like slavery as a moral right, at least for a period of time.  Moral relativism has its appeals, but also its limits.

[Mr. Roboto]

Watched this last night: 

 

[Timothy]

all you need is Jesus!!!