The belief that people should be killed because of their religious beliefs, or lack of them, is in direct conflict with the part of the constitution it's being suggested has been contravened. If the judges are going to assess risk to life, which, you say, can be used to justify religious discrimination, assessing the proportion of the religious adherents who hold such beliefs is certainly relevant.
Sure, one could make that argument, indeed one could make the argument for all sorts of people presenting a risk to life - the point again is that if the US decided it want to adopt this kind of criteria, it couldn't only apply it to Muslims. Christians and Jews who think gays should be put to death should face the same scrutiny, for instance.
If that was the case, then it wouldn't be religious discrimination. It might be argued to infringe on the freedom to practice - but that's already established as constitutional in certain conditions, so it wouldn't necessarily be an issue.
While Faith is greatly exaggerating the evils of Islam, it's important that others don't lean too far the other way. I questioned your "nearly all" with the example of the young Brits being 36% in favour of apostate killing.
Well now you know I was talking about membership in terrorist organisations so this point is moot.
However, there are certainly unconstitutional interpretations, and they are certainly fairly popular, and they certainly can be lethal.
The only things that matter for Constitutional arguments is government action. I could deny my child the freedom of speech and it wouldn't be unconstitutional to do so. If it was a broad and long term denial it may well be illegal, but that's a different matter.
Exactly. And this is where the judges are going to have to assess the group concerned, and will have to think in vague terms like "some" , "most" and "nearly all".
And nearly all Muslims are NOT members of terrorist organisations etc, therefore the plain interpretation of the law is clear: The President does not have the power to deny them all visas.
You might have a valid argument here, if
Congress had issued a law declaring it valid for the President to deny Muslims on the grounds that most of them have beliefs that are a threat to life - though I'd still argue this was empirically false. Most Muslims aren't murderers, after all.
Believing there should be a death penalty for x or y does not mean one necessarily executes people for those offences.
Mine maybe more to do with the idea that even if it did clearly discriminate against Muslims (like Trump's original suggestion) that still wouldn't make it unconstitutional because it could be justified
The question is, is the justification sufficient? And that's what the courts are there for. I would argue, that banning all Muslims cannot be sufficiently justified on the grounds they pose a threat using the evidence that they don't. There are 3 million Muslims in the USA, nearly as many in the UK. I don't see any evidence they are so much more criminally inclined than anyone else that it would justify denying all Muslims just to be on the safe side.
And it would certainly be a problem if they didn't also deny Christians and Jews etc with the same problematic beliefs as Muslims.
That's why I thought that there might be too much rejoicing amongst some of the wacko liberals around here, although they will still probably be able to rejoice, because, as I've pointed out to Faith, ultimately economic considerations will come into play, and they will trump Donald.
I still don't see why there is too much rejoicing. It doesn't seem like a reasonable proposition to ban all Muslims, no argument has been put forward that justifies the action. So yes, it is good that the Order is suspended pending review, and worth rejoicing. It doesn't seem reasonable indeed to ban all refugees and all students and all construction workers and all scientists and all charitable workers, and diplomats and children from certain countries, so yes it is worth rejoicing when the courts restrain the order to do this.
To me, that seems similar to what you describe as me saying that the U.S. discriminates anyway.
YES!!! That's what I've been saying. Discrimination is not forbidden! Discrimination BECAUSE OF RELIGION ALONE is forbidden, but discrimination on the basis of membership in a religious terrorist organisation or because you have committed murder and intend to continue doing so is perfectly legitimate.
That 36% apostate killers would be compatible with the 17th century West, but isn't with the 21st, 20th or 19th.
Are you claiming that 36% of UK students would actually commit murder? Or have you taken 'should be punished by death' and converted it to 'will kill'?
Given you criticized me for using the term 'most' and 'almost all', which are phrases that are not in disagreement with one another, I think you might consider this a little. I know what you meant pragmatically, and it's silly to argue the semantics, right?
Many UK citizens support the death penalty for serious crimes, that doesn't mean they'd actually kill someone they thought had committed one. They might wish them dead, wish the state would do it, but it's something of a different league to actually kill them.
Our 18th century just didn't happen in the Islamic world, and it's arguably suffering from that fact.
This is, in fact, not true. It did happen. In the late days of the Ottoman empire a strong trend of thought was to embrace Western ideas, reject sectarianism, accept secularism and so on. The most striking modern day remnant of that movement is Turkey (who, for instance, decriminalized homosexuality in the 19th Century, beating the West to that liberal victory by a century).
The movements used the prevailing feeling that Islamic culture needed to change. Unfortunately, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed - Western colonialism decided it was time to move in and divide the land amongst themselves to govern as they saw fit, breeding resentment. The feeling Islamic culture had to change was still there, but now the West had become their overlords - the feeling turned insurmountably against Westernisation. When the societies had stabilized and they demanded independence but were eventually were granted their independence just before or just after the West had finished the mass violence of WWII. Much of the time this independence was nominal, with much power being in Western hands through companies and puppet leaders, resulting in more anti-West sentiment. This takes through the the revolutions of the 1950s through to the 1980s into Western funding of Saddam to take out Iran and then into the 90s with the West taking aim at Saddam into the 21st Century when the region was completely destabilised.
The window opened, but the West caused anti-western sentiment and nationalism to become the order of the day and those hopes were basically crushed.
The liberal movement lives on, in Egypt and in Iran and in Jordan and Kuwait and so on, but there are still many key regions that have not had the freedom and opportunity to secularize.
So in short, they had their 18th century. The republicans lost. The West has a fairly large portion of blame for helping this happen. The only hope from the more recent excesses of evil is it results in a new cultural shift towards Abdolkarim Soroush and Raif Badawi's way of thinking. I don't think increasing resentment of the West by turning refugees and scientists away at the borders is going to maximise our chances at fostering the kind of change we want.
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