'Stolen Valor Act ' Declared Unconstitutional By Circuit Court

Where is Loki? I want to see what he has to say about this

Judge Bybee wrote: "Such false representations not only dishonor the decorations and medal themselves, but dilute the select group of those who have earned the nation's gratitude for their valor,"

Weirldy asserts that the deeds meriting the honor and gratitude are validated by a decoration.

'No lying about your medals' is a meep statute.

My Purple Heart seems to have the same value either way.

Bybee was also the architect of our current torture policies, so double-meep him anyway.

I actually agree with Loki. The dissents argument rests too much on the value of speech in the market place of ideas and assigning a value to it. The concept of valuing speech based on its truth is totally meeping anachronistic. False speech can contribute to the market place if only to be known as being patently false and allowing people to denounce the ideas. With Alvarez his contribution to the market place of ideas might be to serve as an example of what a total meep move it is to claim to have won the Medal of Honor when he didn't (which by the way is meeping ludicrous since the Medal of Honor has not been awarded to a living person since Vietnam [this excludes people like Sen. Inouye who was given his medal about 50 years after earning it.)

Such a frame work also can create problems with the Religious protections of the First Amendment. We cannot quantifiably prove God exists, as such, under the framework in which 'true speech' is given protection and 'false speech' is not, it would create a question of whether religious speech has value since it cannot be proved. For example if a court held that religious speech was indeed a form of 'true speech' would that court violate the establishment clause? Perhaps another court would see the religion clauses of the First Amendment as an exception to the bar of flasehood. In such a case there would be a split among the courts. This would be too much of a clustermeep for the courts and they would want to avoid it.

That said I believe this case will work its way up to the Supreme Court because the government is pissed about it. It usually would be easy to predict, but the strange logic of FEC v Citizens United has created so much confusion that it is impossible to predict how the Justices will vote and which precedent they will use. Four would call the act unconstitutional (Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Breyer). According to FCC the other five should agree, however they are ideologues at heart and might uphold the law by some twisted test of logic that would be inconsistent with their last major first amendment decision.

Personally I like the law, I come from a military family. I have all cousins and uncles with Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts, and other awards for valor. But I the law is completely unconstitutional in its current form.

Dismas: 'I actually agree with Loki.'

So far, arguing with LOki re: 1st Amendment earns Dismas . . . RHETORICAL NAME CALLING!

Your prize==> meepgot.

You're welcome.

This is far from over