From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 13:45:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: Talk of Banning Research into Human Cloning (fwd)
Message-ID: <199801130612.AAA25763@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 06:10:14 +0100 (MET)
> Subject: Re: Talk of Banning Research into Human Cloning
> From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)

> > Though I'm not a constitutional expert, this would seem to me to be a
> > violation of various rights. A First Amendment right to speak and publish
> > as one wishes for one, a Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure
> 
> Actually, not at all.
> 
> There is no ban on publishing information on cloning, "just" a ban on the
> activity.

Spin doctor bullshit. Without the research there isn't anything to publish.
By banning the basic research we would in fact be banning the publishing of
the results of that scientific research.

>  Hence the first amendment is not implicated.  If it were the
> case the every action (as opposed to speech/publication) were protected by
> the 1st Am. then every statute making robbery a crime would be
> unconstitutional too.

Not at all. Equating swinging of ones fist in a empty field and swinging it
into somebodies nose and then taking that supposition as justification to
ban fist swinging *is* most certainly unconstitutional. Furthermore, robbery
isn't illegal under the Constitution unless its the federal government
taking the material and refusing to follow the Constitutional directive to
pay for *all* property, irrespective of how it was gained, for public use as
those duties are relegated per the 10th to the purvue of the states.

> Similarly, the 4th Am. is not implicated.  The right to be secure against
> UNREASONABLE search and seizure is not violated when and if congress
> passes a law defining a new crime, or you are arrested for committing it.

The question here is whether Congress even *has* the power to regulate those
sorts of behaviours without an amendment being passed by the states to
surrender their authority per the 9th and 10th to the federal government.

> > and to be secure in one's papers, and probably more general rights that
> > have long-held that government agents cannot tell people what books they
> 
> again, note that the ban is on CLONING, not THINKING OR WRITING OR READING
> about cloning.  It's not the same thing. 

Without doing the research it isn't possible to think very much about
cloning except in a *very* abstract manner. That forcing of abstraction
against ones will may very well infact be unconstitutional.

> > may read, what thinking they may do, and  whom they may asssociate with (if
> > the Civil Rights Act is viewed as the unconstitutional anomaly it is).
> 
> This is an aside, but the CRA is in no way anomalous given the 13th, 14th
> and 15th Amendments.  It is only "anomalous" if one sticks to the
> Constitution as written in the 18th century... and ignores the articles
> written in that same century that clearly contemplate amendments....

The articles contemplating the amendments are irrelevant to this issue. Only
the actual amendments are relevant. What people might *want* to do has
nothing to do with what they *can* do under the limiting documents of this
country.

> > But a ban on cloning research would not be a matter of "national security,"
> > only of ethics and religious beliefs. Whatever the arguments for banning
> > unapproved research into CBW and nuclear weapons, banning cloning research
> > is an entirely different set of issues.
> > 
> 
> Arguably, many of the legal bans in force today are due to ethics, e.g.:

No, they are a result of political wrangling by small groups to gain
political power and the economic and social conseuences thereof. They also
result from a clearly premeditated absolution of the Constitution that these
self same 'representatives' gave an oath to uphold with their lives. The
justification that is profered is the ethics of the constituents.

> A. Michael Froomkin          +1 (305) 284-4285; +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax)
> Associate Professor of Law   
> U. Miami School of Law       froomkin@law.miami.edu
> P.O. Box 248087              http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/
> Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA   It's warm here.

Your a law professor and your logic, respect for the Constitution, and
basic scientific comprehension is this bad? No damn wonder we're in the shit
hole we're in now...


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