If You Dont Know Your Rights, Do You Still Have Them?

[Shyne]

i dunno if this has been posted yet, but what ya think?

[Vladimir]

yes

[Shyne]

no

[Avamatha]

Depends.

Example: when my father passed away, nobody told us that we could get some money allowance from the state. It should have been automatic, but for some reason it wasn't right then.

Mom somehow heard about this, and now we are getting that money, like every single parent in Finland should.

[Shyne]

^ greedy

[Anonymous]

In a perfect society yes you would have because in every action you would be served by someone who knew all of your rights and took care to fulfill these rights.
In todays society i dont think so, authorities will take advantage of any ingnorance on your part. Just another reason to look up what you are entitled to.

[Michael De Panama]

Of course you do.

If you didn't know that you have HIV, do you still have it? If people thought like Shyne, the human race would have been extinct long ago.

[Shyne]

Quote: from Michael De Panama on 4:12 pm on July 14, 2002
Of course you do.

If you didn't know that you have HIV, do you still have it? If people thought like Shyne, the human race would have been extinct long ago.

hey idiot, HIV is a phyical thing and your rights are just written some place on paper in the east coast.

[Nateddi]

No

I am sick and tired of people suing because someone didn't put up a wet floor sign. or because you decided to jaywalk and you got hit. If you don't know what you can do, you don't deserve to do it.

[Xvall]

Right are not given to people. Everyone has rights. No matter what country you live in. The government might kill you for using them though.

[Sasafrás]

Quote: from Nateddi on 6:55 pm on July 14, 2002
No

I am sick and tired of people suing because someone didn't put up a wet floor sign. or because you decided to jaywalk and you got hit. If you don't know what you can do, you don't deserve to do it.
Ditto.

[LeonardoDaVinci]

Certainly, everyone must have their civil rights. For example, mentally disabled people might not know or understand their rights, does that mean that we could take advantage of their disability and deny them those rights as citizens? I believe that when you grant people their rights you do so without discrimination, and thus regardless of whether you're rich, poor, black, white, healthy, sick, intelligent or ignorant, you should never be stripped of your basic rights.

[Stormin Norman]

When people become ignorant of their rights or request that they be removed for some sort of convenience factor, they inevitably start to erode. The very nature of government demands that people stay aware of their rights. The power monopoly established by government naturally weathers away the right of the people, as governments naturally tend toward tyranny. This fact is as guaranteed as the universe tends towards chaos as entropy increases.
I believe it was funky monk was stated; "In a perfect society yes you would have because in every action you would be served by someone who knew all of your rights and took care to fulfill these rights." This is a naive notion. Would you really trust such a servant would not capitalize on the fact that you had forgotten your unalienable rights? I believe it was Washington who said; "Government is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." That such a society would ever exist, which allowed the citizen to abdicate their personal responsibility and automatically upheld the rights of the people is a fallacy. Since evil exists in the world it becomes necessary to fight for the kinds of rights that you enjoy, which all people are entitled.

[Avamatha]

Quote: from Shyne on 5:01 pm on July 14, 2002
^ greedy


Huh?

[Conghaileach]

ONE (CONSTITUTIONALLY ILLITERATE) NATION UNDER GOD
The Constitution Can't Protect Our Rights If We Don't Understand Them
by Jamin B. Raskin

[Jamin B. Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American
University and director of its Marshall-Brennan Fellowship Program. He
is the author of numerous works on the electoral system, including The
Wealth Primary, with co-author John Bonifaz.]

On the spectrum of constitutional abuses in John Ashcroft's America,
the God-infused Pledge of Allegiance is surely not the gravest. But
courts take cases as they come, and the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals' explosive decision in June ruling the pledge unconstitutional
was built on a brick wall of Supreme Court precedent.

In 1962, the Court struck down officially organized prayer in public
schools. In 1980, it forced the removal of Ten Commandments displays
from public school classrooms. In 1992, it rejected religious
invocations and benedictions at school graduation ceremonies. In 2000,
it invalidated the practice of electing students to perform
"solemnizing" statements at high school football games.

It is plain as day that, when Congress inserted God in the Pledge in
1955, it intended to infuse the morning classroom ritual with an
explicitly religious content. The whole point was to distinguish God-
fearing America from godless atheistic communism. The people who now
comically deny that "God" has a religious meaning manage to be
simultaneously disingenuous, blasphemous and contemptuous of the
separation of church and state. As the reviled Judge Goodwin
suggested, if the state can put "under God" in the Pledge, then why
not "under Allah," "under Krishna," or "under Confucius"? Any symbolic
"endorsement" of religion by government, as Justice O'Connor has
argued, violates the Establishment Clause.

This rather banal decision provoked an hysterical reaction among
politicians. A bipartisan stampede of members of the House of
Representatives took to the steps of the Capitol to recite the Pledge,
giving clench-fisted emphasis to the deity's name, and then spent the
rest of the day blasting the federal appeals court in San Francisco
and its deciding judge, Alfred T. Goodwin, who was appointed to the
bench by the undeniably satanic President Richard Nixon.

It was a grim show of preening self-seriousness, recalling memories of
the surreal 295-125 vote on March 5, 1997 when the House of
Representatives endorsed the Ten Commandments and their "display in
government offices and courthouses." Unfortunately, the members
wrapping themselves in the Decalogue refused to vote on each
commandment separately so we may never know how they really feel about
taking the Lord's name in vain, bearing false witness, and coveting
their neighbors' wives.

The current hullabaloo reflects a perfectly predictable Republican
strategy to change the subject away from Enron, WorldCom and the
colossal ethical and business collapse of corporate America. But what
is stupefying is how well the time-honored diversionary strategy of
God-and-flag has rolled over the Democratic Party leadership and
mobilized millions of Americans against rudimentary constitutional
principles.

Why is it so easy? Because the nation is suffering a profound crisis of
constitutional literacy. According to a National Constitution Center
poll five years ago, "only 5 percent of Americans can correctly answer
10 rudimentary questions about the Constitution," such as naming any
of the rights contained in the First Amendment or declaring true or
false whether the president is elected directly by the people.
Notably, one out of six citizens (this means tens of millions of
people) actually believes that "the Constitution establishes America
as a Christian nation." A lot of high school students mix up the Ten
Commandments and the Bill of Rights, which may explain why so many
congressmen make the same mistake. Many high school students I have
spoken with in inner city areas think that Brown v. Board of Education
established rather than overthrew the doctrine of "separate but
equal." After all, de facto segregation is their lived experience and
no one has taught them the decision itself.

We need a national movement for constitutional literacy, and not just
so Americans will be prepared to absorb the shock of judicial
decisions that enforce the Establishment Clause. We need
constitutional literacy as a basic tool of intellectual self-defense.
America's "conservatives" are prepared to push constitutional
amendments to deal with a host of symbolic, cultural and even
supernatural problems: flag desecration, prayer in the schools, display
of the Ten Commandments, even the words "under God" in the Pledge.
Meantime, the Court has denied the existence of basic democratic
rights that we all thought were part of the constitutional fabric,
such as the right to vote and the right to education. A movement for
constitutional literacy would set the table for the meaningful
constitutional reforms that we need.

Perhaps we could put the proper focus on things by rewriting the Pledge
this way: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of
America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under
the Constitution, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

[timbaly]

You are exactly right. It sickens me that i know more about the constitution or how the gov't runs then people 10-15 years older than me and this would idea of yours would definetly help. BUT as always we don't have the resources to spread this news into the TV or radio media and besides that most people wouldn't even care and if they do at the start they'll probaly loose interest