2012.02.06 South African Constitution
While discussing Egypt's Constitution, she advocated using the South African Constitution as a better model than the U.S. Constitution. A cluster fuck of Social Justice that allows injustice, racism, outlaws capital punishment but not abortion, open borders, a universal healthcare. It's a great compendium of liberal causes, but lousy fucking law, with no flexibility unless it is ignored: which it is, as it must be.
She advocated using the South African Constitution as a better model than the U.S. Constitution, for those creating a new one in Egypt. Like these sections:
- Section 9 — Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits all discrimination "on one or more grounds, including...", but specifically lists the following grounds "race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth."
- Section 8 includes the limitation "Discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair."
- You can't be a racist, unless you decide racism is fair. Oh, and in case you think this is purely academic, the South African Supreme Court ruled that it was OK to seize white farmers land from them, because that kind of discrimination was "fair".
- Section 10 states “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.”
- Dignity is a subjective standard, thus hard to codify into law. Are you allowed to have strip searches in prison? Mandatory showers in Jr. High School Gyms? Or lose your dignity (pride) while being arrested for a crime. Life attacks our dignity from the first times we shit ourselves as babies and our parents have to clean it up, until we do so at the end of our lives and make the nurses do it.
- Section 11: the right to life, which has been held to prohibit capital punishment, but does not prohibit abortion.
- Section 14 contains detailed provisions on the right to privacy. Defining the scope as follows: “Everyone has the right to privacy, which includes the right not to have the person or their home searched; their property searched; their possessions seized; or the privacy of their communications infringed.”
- So no warrants or wiretaps, ever? No x-rays or strip searches while entering prison? Do you buy that this will be enforced as written? If so, it's bad. If not, it's worse. Who writes laws that sound good, but will be ignored? (Or worse, selectively enforced). Liberals: no sense of history or consequences.
- Section 20 states that “No citizen may be deprived of citizenship.”
- Why shouldn't someone who leaves and joins a foreign army against your nation, be considered a foreign actor, and not welcome back?
- Section 23: labour rights, including the right to unionise and the right to strike.
- Seems a little out of place for a constitution, that is supposed to be about ideas, not implementations.
- Section 27 sets out a number of rights with regard to health, including right to access to health care, including reproductive rights, the right to social security, the right to food, and the right to water. And, “The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights."
- So they're enshrining Socialism and the lack of individual rights, over collective rights (which aren't rights but powers). So if you're a doctor/nurse, I can force you to offer your services to others. If a violent criminal comes over, you have to give him food, or the government has the right to take it from you and give it to him? And the State is empowered to steal whatever it wants from individuals in the name of progressive redistribution? Pretty ugly laws if you ask me.
- Section 29: the right to education, including a universal right to basic education.
- Again, what's "basic" education? How can you ever have a healthy school competition/system, when your services must be given for free?
It's so dumb, only a liberal could love it. The point of the constitution is find common ground which most everyone can agree, and write laws (implementation) around those common goals. This reads like the DNC platform of desired implementations, and so is way too specific for a constitution. But since they're liberal causes, a consummate partisan liberal like RBG shows that she's a bad Jurist and theoretician to love the idea/implementation. Instead of being able to separate her emotions/logic from her political agenda -- and recognize it stinks on ice as a constitution.
|