Supe, if I see you "locking arms" with Mul, I'm calling the cops. Cause someone is likely to get hurt :)

Read the case. It is not about curriculum or sex ed. It is about a psych. student asking elementary age students sexually explicit questions without parental consent.

Or parental knowledge.

Burnin' I get your point, but the analysis is the same. There is no constitutional right to control the decisions of the school department. It is not a right grounded in the constitution that can be enforced by the courts. That's all the court held.

Please don't tell this to the Bush people, they'll just propose another constitutional amendment :( Always good for a few points in the polls

All this gets me to a pet peeve of mine. Probably 95% of the people that denounce "legislating from the bench," or praise "strict construction," or argue for "original intent," have no real idea of what they are saying (not directed at you Burnin', I don't knwo your position on this).

Its all just become code for appointing "judges that rule the way I want them to"

The holding is that a school district - its employees - can ask, say, and teach anything to a child of any nature, regardless of how explicit or personal, and the parents have no constitutional right to prevent it.

Rodeo,

I am going to have to agree with you here.

I was initially opposed to the SC decision on eminent domain. As I realized that the decision simply said "nothing restricts this in the Constitution, but laws can be passed that do", I understood why this was the right decision.

This one will take me some time to ponder, but my knee-jerk reaction is that the 9th Circuit has messed up again...

That's basically it - page 15074. What's the alternative - what would the law look like? Why just sex? etc etc

The problem was the Master's student. She wasn't forthcoming enough (morally - although legally there appears to be no "problem") on the contents of the questionnaire.

(edit) In case you're wondering, from a New Zealand perspective this is fascinating. We have no Constitution, so there is no fallback position on which these sorts of things get legally assessed. I believe it basically boils down to the current moral flavour of the nation - whomever controls the Ministry of Education probably ultimately sets the degree of sex ed. We argue about it in the same way you guys do, but the framework is totally different...

In this case, the questionnaire was administered to children whose parents had consented to it. The parents now claim they didn't understand what the nature of the questionnaire would be. A case of poor communication, poor administration, poor parental oversight of their childrens' school, perhaps. Hardly a case of constitutional dimensions.

Given that analysis of the Kelko case, why this reaction on the current case? The court is saying basically the same thing - the constitution does not prevent this, but laws or political action can.

Because the media (with a lot of help from the Republican Party) has convinced everyone that they are constitutional scholars, ready to jump on every decision they disagree with with a charge of judicial activism. Then they start throwing around terms like "original intent" and it really gets fun.

In real life, it kind of breaks down this way:

Court strikes down a "good" law = bad activist judge (Roe v. Wade)
Court refuses to strike down a "good" law = good conservative judge
Court strikes down a "bad" law = good conservative judge
Court refuses to strike down a "bad" law = bad liberal judge (Kelo and this thread)

Of course, every label attached to every decision is dependent upon how one feels about the statute under consideration.

I saw a study recently that the four judges on the Supreme Court considered most conservative (in common parlance, less "activist") voted to overturn legislative enactments at a much higher percentage than the five moderate and liberal judges. Its not that they are less likely to overturn the "will of the people" as expressed through the legislature, its just that they pick the "right" laws to override.