Dehumanizing People

You would think after the Dred Scott debacle our unelected jurists would be leery of trying to resolve a legal dispute by classifying human beings as objects. And you would be wrong. You would think, as we terminate 90% of babies with Down's Syndrome every year, that some judge's Equal Protection bells would be ringing like mad. And again, you would be wrong.
 
Now what you need to know is that everyone on the Supreme Court agrees with this doctrine. They have all signed on to the dehumanization of the unborn. All the right-wingers on the Court nod their heads in agreement. Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Bork. (This is where the liberals start yelling, "Bork's not on the Supreme Court! We borked him, we borked him!" Yeah yeah, I remember). But all the right-wingers are in agreement with the liberals, that's what I'm saying. The unborn is a legal non-person, an object outside our law. It's a big zero. Not human, nothing like that. Some kind of weird alien we call a fetus. Some kind of fish, I think.

Scalia's nodding his head in agreement: "Yeah yeah yeah, legal object. Kill her if you want to, Vermont. None of my business."

In his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Scalia writes, "The whole argument of abortion opponents is that what the Court calls the fetus and what others call the unborn child is a human life. Thus, whatever answer Roe came up with after conducting its balancing is bound to be wrong, unless it is correct that the human fetus is in some critical sense merely potentially human. There is, of course, no way to determine that as a legal matter; it is, in fact, a value judgment. Some societies have considered newborn children not yet human, or the incompetent elderly no longer so."

Uh, okay. I would like to think that if some crazy ass State started defining newborn infants as "not yet human," that maybe some clueless bastard on the Supreme Court might actually start thinking about applying the equal protection clause to the issue. Cause, you know, they can't do that shit.

I would hope that if some State starting sending the incompetent elderly off to the gas chambers, somebody on the Supreme Court would jump up and down and say, "No! Can't do that, you crazy fucks, it's unconstitutional." I'm pretty sure that's kind of why we have an equal protection clause in the first place. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Justice Scalia, but one of the things we don't want our government to do is classify human beings as objects in order to kill us off. Am I right? Or am I right?

Yes, as Scalia points out, these are value judgments, but as he fails to point out, in our country we have enacted our value judgments into law, namely this one: "No State shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

So, contra to what Scalia seems to be arguing, it is not up to a State to define who is a person and who is not one. And he knows this. If some State starts defining Jews as non-persons, would Scalia actually say this is a value judgment for the State to make? Hell no. We've already made our value judgment, and we wrote it into law, and our value judgment is that we are not Nazi fucks.

So, I am sure, hopefully sure, kinda sure, that Scalia and the rest of the Court would call bullshit on any State classifying very old people, or very young people, as legal objects. I am pretty hopefully sure that Scalia and the Court would remember that it is okay to strike down bad laws that offend our Constitution. You know, like when a State kills off innocent people on the grounds that they are morally insignificant to the powers that be. Cause that's bad. And I'm pretty sure it's illegal.

What this means, Scalia, is that you actually have to know what a person is. Yeah, I know. What a pain in the ass it is being a Supreme Court Justice. Got to lug my big ass out of my comfortable chair and walk over and pick up a dictionary and look up that "person" word. Cause I got to make sure the State's not dehumanizing real people.

What Scalia knows, what we all know, is that words are not defined by the powerful. Words are not defined by nine Supreme Court Justices sitting in a room. The all-powerful Justices do not actually get to decide what words mean. They do not get to make shit up. Words are defined by us, by ordinary people, by common usage, by dictionaries.

Nazis think they can classify Jews as non-people, cause they got the power. Slave-owners think they can classify black people as non-people, cause they got the power. The Supreme Court thinks it can classify unborn babies as non-people, cause they got the power. But people are people. That is a truth that is outside your power. When you say people are not people, all you are really doing is telling a big lie.