That is not what she wrote. She wrote that there must be a weighing between the severity of the alleged abuse and the consequences of judicial interference into 1st amendment rights and in this case she decided "religious freedom" was more important.
Naturally, I disagree. I hope they will be able to appeal this decision, and next time the balance is not in favour of Scientology.
Yes, fair comment, Acker.
I am of course responding to the post content I cited.
Fact is, "human trafficking," which I believe was one of the allegations of the Headleys is a crime, as in felony, even gazetted as such by the US State Dept, as noted earlier.
While the judge is making her/himself right by way of citation, I'd say she/he is shirking duty in the exercise of intelligent balanced judgment of what is protected "behavior" and what falls outside of religious protection.
Example: enforced imprisonment surely can't be protected behavior.
I'd say the Headley's attorneys screwed up
For the record, I'm quite familiar of these nuances of Constitutional Law versus Local and state statutes.
In 1988-9 I fought an arbitrary ruling by the NY State Medical Director that prevented my "patients" (they were on an HIV+ clinical trial I was running) from getting a specialized HIV test available commercially only in CA.
The CA lab would not do the tests based on the prohibition from NY State. I saw this as a violation of the Constitutional Guarantee of Interstate Commerce
I raised a stink. When I took it to the ACLU for support . . . thinking they would support this violation of a Constitutional guarantee on the newly beloved and politically favored HIV/AIDS population . . . how wrong I was. The ACLU think was that the ban on HIV test was for the protection of privacy of HIV infecteds
It didn't matter that I was saying that it was the HIV positives themselves that were trying to buy the tests and were having their Constitutional rights violated . . . hell, no.
Idiot think reined!
Again, when we were denied being able to buy wine in from CA vineyards to NY because of some old state laws, I saw it as again a violation of the Interstate Commerce clause . . . . we won on that one!!
But again, the above two cases show how stupid judges and the legal profession can be, and it demonstrates the inability to think that reins when you see a prohibitive law, as in the case of the shipment of wine, being enforced by authorities for something like 70-80 years!!
As an Ozzie, I actually find it deplorable when I look at some of the instances of how "The Constitutional Amendments/Clauses" have been interpreted/applied by the justices
The tragedy is that bad law then proceeds from these judgments.
R
