Well, maybe for you expanding rights and removing rights is the same thing. For me, it's not. Actually, I remember there was such thing as a Constitution where some guys wrote that people have the rights and government should be restricted in curtailing these rights, and they seemed to think that people's rights are preferable and government restrictions can be made only in specific limited areas. But what do they know? They're long dead anyway.
But let me ask you this: if for you it's the same, what problem you have with Jim Crow? After all, Jim Crow laws were approved by many courts and were considered very constitutional for a long time. So for you there was no problem with them? I know why I'd have problem with that - because they remove people's rights, and for only reason that they are of a "wrong" race. For me it's bad. But if for you there's no difference between people's right and government restrictions and one is not preferable to the other, what exactly is the problem there for you?
> I remember there was such thing as a Constitution where some guys wrote that people have the rights and government should be restricted in curtailing these rights, and they seemed to think that people's rights are preferable and government restrictions can be made only in specific limited areas.
I think you're jumbling up various documents there.
> After all, Jim Crow laws were approved by many courts and were considered very constitutional for a long time. So for you there was no problem with them?
From a legal standpoint, no, there was no problem (well, except for state-sponsored school segregation, which was ruled unconstitutional). From my (and likely yours) moral and cultural standpoint, they were terrible and this eventually resulted in the act that abolished them all. Both the act that instituted them and the act that abolished them were perfectly legitimate in their own way.
Morality and law are different things. The former can provide impetus for forging the latter, but confusing them is a Bad Thing and it's what leads you to Iran.
No, what leads you to Iran is the stance "if it's legal then it's OK". There are a lot of things that are legal but not OK, and when pointed to something that is not OK arguing "but it is legal!" is exactly the confusion in which you implicate me. My argument is exactly that - that what the Feds are doing is immoral and makes no sense. "But separation of powers!" is an Iran-like answer to this, if you like such comparisons - it's just saying "who cares about moral if we have the laws that we ourselves crafted that allow us to do what we want".
> what leads you to Iran is the stance "if it's legal then it's OK".
Nope. What I said is that, if it's legal then it's OK from a legal perspective, which is a tautology really and I can't believe I'm still explaining it to you.
> "But separation of powers!" is an Iran-like answer to this
To the contrary, the Iranian answer is to implicate moral into everything so that the law has to answer to "superior values", and to be honest I struggle to understand how you could fail to see this (unless you don't really know how Iran runs -- hint: religious/moral authority trumps regular law).
Separation of powers starts with the "two swords" of religious and temporal power being handled in different ways by different people, back when these topics were first seriously discussed in Europe (one could argue that the "unto Caesar" line is the start of this particular debate, but it was basically ignored for centuries afterwards). When people realized that this separation alone was not enough of a guarantee, they split it further (roughly along Montesquieu's lines) exactly so that nobody could inflict its own personal moral code on the whole of the community without the community agreeing first. When the community changes its stance (because of moral or technical changes or whatever), then it collectively agrees that laws should change, and new law supersedes old law. This is how the system should work in a democratic society (which is not to say that's actually what happens, but it's the ideal we strive for, so to speak).
Law shouldn't answer to anything but future law. The US Constitution lives about most other laws, but it's still "just" law.
That is how progress is achieved and how we can all live together without starting religious wars every other day.
But let me ask you this: if for you it's the same, what problem you have with Jim Crow? After all, Jim Crow laws were approved by many courts and were considered very constitutional for a long time. So for you there was no problem with them? I know why I'd have problem with that - because they remove people's rights, and for only reason that they are of a "wrong" race. For me it's bad. But if for you there's no difference between people's right and government restrictions and one is not preferable to the other, what exactly is the problem there for you?