On Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:02:28 +0000 (UTC), moshes@mm.huji.ac.il wrote:
>
>> But it won't come to that. It's one man's musing, a man no longer
>> with us.
>
>Umm it's hard to dismiss a Supreme Court Judge's writing as "musing".
Not for me. :) I'm pretty sure it was obiter dictum, often just
called dictum, Latin for "something said in passing", "a comment made
while delivering a judicial opinion, but ... unnecessary to the
decision in the case and therefore not precedential (although it may
be considered persuasive)." It's not rare, maybe not unusual, and my
law instructor (professor), made it sound even less important than my
wikip quote above, as in "just dictum. Don't worry about it.".
>>
>>>, challenges to kosher slaughter
>>>would have to be answered on a factual basis - is it "crueler" than
>>>practical alternative methods? -
>
>On the contrary, it is orders of magnitude less cruel. But as I asked
>before, where does the Constitution guarantee *right* to animals?
Not everything is in the US Constitution by any means. For one thing,
while some parts of the first 10 Amendments have been applied to the
states via the 14th Amendment, and while some of the other amendments
explicitly limit the powers of all the states, and while there is in
it (in the original Constitution, not the Bill of Rights), a list of
things only the federal governnment can do, and another list in it of
what the states (and therefore subdivisions with the state) cannot do,
nothing in those lists or the rest of the US Constitution has anything
to do with animals, one way or the other. And most of the entire
Constitution, including the bulk of it which is about the organization
of the US national goverment, is not applicable to the states.
Nor does everything have to be guaranteed as a right in a
constitution. Things also become legal rights when laws are passed.
Those rights are easier to repeal, except in California where it is
very easy for the public to amend their constitution, and thus
inactivate a law where applicable, and even easier for the public to
pass or amend a law.. AFAIK, California is the only state like that,
and its Constitution is now 100's of pages long. I'm sure the system
there was a reaction against other states which made it too hard for
the people to do anything, leaving too much power in the hands of
wheeling-dealing, sometimes corrupt legislatures**.
There are already state laws, in every state I think, against cruelty
to animals. If anyone has ever challenged them, as against a state
constitution, since they are surely not against the US Constituation,
I doubt it, I don't know about it, and it wasn't very successful.
Well, I know of one challenge, involving Santeria in Florida which
tried to stop them from sacrificing animals for religious reasons.
The challenge failed because they do it for religious reaosns.
IIRC the challenge was as much or more or entirely about disliking
those who practiced Santeria as it was about being nice to animals. I
think because they are black, Carribean, and strange, in what is still
a southern state despite all the Jews and Italians who live there.
Wikip on the court case says it was a local law, 'passed in Hialeah,
Florida that forbade the "unnecessar[y]" killing of "an animal in a
public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of
food consumption." .... The law was enacted soon after the city
council of Hialeah learned that the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, which
practiced Santer?a, was planning on locating there.'
more below.
>> It's less cruel than treif slaughter. Most gentiles, including PETA
>> folk, don't think so because they want to be comfortable in their own
>> practices.
>>
>> Even those who don't eat meat dont' want to think that their parents,
>> friends etc. do worse that some other group (like Jews, but this
>> wouldn't mean they are antisemitic, only that they are
>> pro-their-own-family-and-friends)
>>
>> Many Jews don't think so because they grow up in a gentile world where
>> gentile notions are as omnipresent as grass and trees and the sky, as
>> sheetrock walls and wooden doors. They either believe the majority
>> view or they want to believe it, like I wanted to believe the Beatles
>> were especially talented.
>>
>> I don't think there will ever be a hearing on this, but if there is,
>> it might do a tiny bit of good for this group of Jews to find out that
>> treif slaughter is not less cruel. Of course some will worry about an
>> increase in antisemitism is there is one fewer way to dump on us.
>>
>> BTW, I read a short book where they tried to use an elecroencephagram
>> to measure responses of a cow during slaughter, but just like it
>> didn't work for me when they wanted to watch me faint, it didnt' work
>> for the cows. My muscle movement or the brain instructions to the
>> muscles generated so many signals that they overwhelmed other signals
>> that might have been there. Maybe they can improve EEGs.
>
>Hmm I read a book put out by a dayan in England where he
>_demonstrated_ the lack of brain signals immediately following kosher
>slaughter. The blood dtops going to the head so the brain stops
>functioning.
This experiment was trying to get to the period before that.
>>
>>> without the protection afforded by the First Amendment.
>
>I don't agree with this last point of Yisroel's.
>
>--
>Moshe Schorr
--
Meir
"The baby's name is Shlomo. He's named after his grandfather, Scott."