Recreational cannabis has met the required signatures to be on the ballot in Nov. 2024, but still needs to be approved by the state supreme court. We'll see how that goes.
Florida is attempting to get it on the ballot for November, but already has the 60% rule in place that they were trying to pass in Ohio. That rule is why Florida doesnt have recreational cannabis, as it failed at 59% last time it was on the ballot.
The conservative court is being asked to revisit precedents protecting abortion rights.
Florida was once a bastion of women’s rights in the otherwise conservative South. It even recognized a state constitutional right to abortion. Those protections are vulnerable this year as the Florida Supreme Court, where five of the seven justices were appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the remaining two were appointed by then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, is poised to reconsider its abortion precedents.
On September 8, the court will hear oral arguments in Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida v. Florida, which is a challenge to Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, H.B. 5. The 15-week ban was modeled on the Mississippi law that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. However, if Florida wins, then a new six-week abortion ban will be triggered because of another recently enacted law lying in wait.
State courts like Florida’s have taken on new significance in the reproductive rights arena in the aftermath of Dobbs, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that abortion is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Invoking federalism, the Supreme Court punted the issue of abortion’s legality to the 50 states.
Post-Dobbs America is a tale of two nations. When voters have had their say at the ballot, reproductive freedoms have won, even in states like Kentucky and Kansas. In states with progressive legislators and governors, abortion care and reproductive rights are stronger than they were pre-Dobbs. For instance, California added protection for abortion to its state constitution in 2022, and New York provides confidential abortions up to 24 weeks and now provides access to reproductive care through telehealth including for women from out of state. Further, the New York State Legislature passed an Equal Rights Amendment that will let voters decide in 2024 whether they wish to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution.
Even as reproductive rights have been expanding in progressive states, 13 Republican-led states have banned abortion, according to Guttmacher Institute. This has resulted in near-death experiences and trauma for women seeking care for pregnancy complications, as exposed in a lawsuit in Texas.
Dobbs makes state constitutions pivotal for women’s full bodily autonomy. While state courts’ records are mixed, even state supreme courts in conservative states such as North Dakota and Oklahoma have recently ruled in favor of reproductive freedoms, albeit on very narrow or technical grounds.
In North Dakota, plaintiffs argued that the state constitution protected the right to abortion. In March 2023, the North Dakota Supreme Court temporarily blocked a state law that banned abortion with limited exceptions to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest but had no exceptions for the mother’s health otherwise. The court concluded that the plaintiff “has a substantial likelihood in establishing there is a fundamental right for a woman to obtain an abortion in instances where it is necessary to preserve her life or health.” The trial court will hear further litigation about this law. The North Dakota legislature’s response to this ruling supreme court was to enact a near total abortion ban, which is now also being challenged in state court.
In May, the Oklahoma Supreme Court reaffirmed a prior ruling that Oklahoma’s heartbeat law and a separate criminal ban on nearly all abortions both violated the state constitution’s limited right to an abortion to protect the life of a pregnant person. The court’s reasoning was based on a provision of Oklahoma’s constitution that has no federal analogue: “All persons have the inherent right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry.” Thus, Oklahoma women have some access to reproductive care after this narrow decision.
While privacy is an implied right in the U.S. Constitution, state constitutions — including those of Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Montana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Washington — protect privacy explicitly. Post-Dobbs, courts weighing the issue of abortion access in these states have often looked to these privacy provisions to resolve the matter. For example, a lower court invalidated Florida’s 15-week abortion ban in 2022 based on the state’s privacy protections, but the ban was reinstated on appeal.
The current precarious state of abortion rights in Florida stands in stark contrast to the once-expansive protections upheld by the state’s highest court. In 1989, Florida’s supreme court ruled in In re T.W. that Floridians’ right of privacy under Article 1, Section 23 of the state constitution “is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body that one can make in the course of a lifetime.”
Similarly, in the 2017 case of Gainesville Woman Care v. State, the Florida Supreme Court stated, “Florida voters have clearly opted for a broader, explicit protection of their right of privacy. Indeed, Florida voters rejected a constitutional amendment in 2012 that would have interpreted Florida’s explicit constitutional right of privacy as being no broader than the implicit federal constitutional right of privacy.” The Gainesville court added that “Florida’s constitutional right of privacy encompasses a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy.”
The Florida Supreme Court already signaled its hostility to abortion rights in January by refusing to block the 15-week ban while litigation was ongoing. This ruling reduced access from 24 weeks to 15 weeks of pregnancy. If the court were being faithful to its own precedents, then it would rule that the 15-week ban violates the state constitution’s right to privacy. However, just as the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t hesitate to overrule the precedents of Roe, Casey, Hellerstedt, and June Medical Services when it ruled in Dobbs, the Florida Supreme Court may follow suit and either overrule or ignore its precedents described above.
For those who believe in women’s autonomy, the prospect of the Florida Supreme Court stripping away reproductive rights that were once guaranteed by the U.S. and Florida Constitutions is a grim one. But the women of Florida may yet have the last word. There is an effort to enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution. Signature gatherers are already two thirds of the way to their goal. If they succeed, the question of reproductive freedoms will be on the Florida ballot in 2024.
those two things seem to have high comorbidity
Don't threaten pudding fingers with a good time.
A mi no me molesta, los de habla inglesa estan tratando de mejorar. Si algun latino lo dice en castellano ahi empiezan los problemas.
perdoname la mala autografia
That's true. I wonder if they're going to gag him now?
They've already performed their duty. Silly boys can't even stochastic terrorism right.
I guess this is what the bloviating one was talking about when he twatted "if you come for me i'll come for you."
Little slow on the draw there, gordito.
This is not a personal attack, the truth is I know nothing about you, and my assumption is that you're most likely a decent human being, as most of us strive to be.
The first reason for my comment is that we've already had a series of 'common sense' laws (in the US) that were used to not allow certain people to participate in the electoral process. These were called literacy tests, and you can read about them here and see an example test.
The other reason is that advocating for stripping rights from other people should not be taken lightly. While young people can be misinformed and make silly mistakes, they are old enough to reason things out and understand the consequeces of their actions, and older people are not immune to any of the things that you mentioned.
Furthermore, the issue of young people not having enough knowledge about the civic process falls squarely on the shoulders of those people in their lives that are teaching them. If your their own parents, teachers, and other role models do not stress the importance of these things, it is unreasonable to expect the average person to be interested.
Finally, this idea of raising the voting age has been floated (recently) since the demographics of the last election came back and showed that young people voted in much higher numbers than usual. It is seen by many people as a naked attempt to game the system to keep people who are voting against republicans from casting their most likely dissenting votes.
Look, you didn't do anything wrong here. You expressed yourself, and a lot of people are jaded because there are a lot of people online who just like to rile people up or are being paid to say intentionally inflammatory things, or they're having a bad day, or take your pick. This is how we learn.
When my daughter was born, we asked the nurses about things our parents had taught us that were now considered not the best way to do things. They told us "when we know better, we do better," and that phrase has really stuck with me.
I hope this interaction hasn't turned you off politics in general, and I wish you the best in your future online commenting endeavors.
We already had unpassable tests used to disenfranchise people for a long time. I wonder if you don't know about those or just agree with how they were used.
The most ignorant and racist people I know are all over 25, why would you only want it for those under 26?
What is it like to run lemmy?
We recently received a message from a concerned Rammy user regarding their instance not having an active admin team. We have made attempts to contact the Rammy admins, which other instance admins have tried as well, to determine their current status. Due to their admins being absent and their unmode...
A cool look at running a lemmy instance
As someone who has done similar things professionally, I am not envious.
Is /c/bestof a thing yet?
Thank you. I hope I didn't come across as aggressive, and I genuinely appreciate your concern for our collective teeth.
You're right, she might do a good job, and I sincerely hope she does.
I think lack of experiece and poor performance in the past is a good indicator that she's likely to do a bad job in the future.
Why does it matter if "the media" is trying to make her look bad? There's no election, the choice has been made. The point of this article is to provide information about her past performance, specifically because she has already been rebuked by a higher court for what they considered to be poor reasoning and lack of understanding of the case and because it is going to be such a prominent and complex case with so much riding on it.
You are right, of course, the people who labored to make the things should be compensated if they want to be.
What's at issue is that if you own something you can do as you please with it. Once the electricity has been delivered I can charge batteries with it or power lights or give it to my neighbor for free if we agree to do so. I should be able to buy a piece of software and back it up or give it to my neighbor, or any random person I choose if I own it. I would buy much more media if I could just own it and do as I please with it, but because of DRM and the greed of companies that distribute the media most times you can only rent it. Piracy is in resurgence because it is becoming so difficult and expensive to just pay for the media.
I pay for Netflix, so I think I am entitled to whatever is on the service. If I have a copy of a Netflix show on my hard drive in 4k, am I taking something from Netflix? What about when I watch that show in VLC because I'm on an airplane? What about when I let the man next to me have a copy so he can watch it on his device?
While I have plenty of disposable income these days to spend on media, they simply do not sell the product that I want, and if I did not have the other means of accessing that content I doubt I would pay for Netflix.
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I hope the tone of my comments do not come across as negative, I am trying to illustrate my thoughts on the subject, not argue, and I find questions more illuminating than just explanations.
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edit: i guess the OP was about software and this rant doesnt really apply
Software-wise I dont pirate that because I try to only use open source software, for mostly the same reasons of disliking DRM and prefering to own things.
When you steal electricity, someone else can't use it, the capacity is consumed. When you won't pay the maid, he can't get his labor and time back to use elsewhere. When you squat in a hotel room, someone else can't use it and it needs to be cleaned afterwards.
When you "buy" a piece of software or a digital copy of media, you're really just renting the license to use it as long as the company that rented it you feels like it.
The difference is that when you make a copy of something digital, the original is still completely intact. The thing is not consumed, you can copy that file 10,000 times on your own machine and see for yourself.