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Some weeks ago I mailed a printed-out letter on paper via the Postal Service to the newest Supreme Court Justice, Neil M. Gorsuch. It was sent anonymously, and a few months previously I had also sent (anonymously) somewhat similar (but longer) letters to the other Justices. Perhaps their content might influence a Decision or two in the future (but of course there is only one way to find out!). I've decided to "open" the Gorsuch letter to the public, by posting it here. As printed, it fit on both sides of a single sheet of paper. Here, it needs to be split across 2 separate posts.
[post 1 of 2]
The Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
1 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20543
Hello.
This letter contains various facts combined with amateur legal reasoning, the latter of which your expert legal mind might find "laughable" --and thus entertaining. Hope you like it!
First we note that some things are mediocre while other things have greatness. It is possible that the greatest-of-all thing about the US Constitution (plus Amendments) is the fact that the word "person" is used throughout, and the word "human" is not used even once. In the era of the Founding Fathers the word "person" might have only been a legal construct, but today scientists have been studying the topic, starting with a very simple Question: "What characteristics does a person possess, that a mere-animal entity does not possess?" As a result, some scientists have become convinced that members of various species of dolphins (including killer whales) can qualify as persons, just as it is widely accepted that extraterrestrial alien intelligent beings can qualify as persons, plus computer scientists widely expect that True Artificial Intelligences can someday exist --all three possibilities completely proving that the concepts of "person" and "human" are totally distinct and unrelated concepts.
Basically, the Constitution promotes "person rights", a thing that can reduce inter-species prejudice (and possibly the chances of interstellar war) for millennia into the future. Note that in the era of the Founding Fathers, it was widely believed that angels (very powerful person-class beings) literally walked among men (often in disguise). Which of the Founding Fathers would have wanted to discriminate against them, by only associating Constitutional rights with human-ness??? The concept of "human rights" is, stupidly, nothing more than an invitation for humanity to be punished for short-sightedly paving the way for discrimination/prejudice against all types of non-human persons[SUP](1)[/SUP].
Thanks to modern scientific research, there happens to be an extremely easy way to understand what a person truly is. Just answer this (kind of messy) question: "IF you were visiting a modern well-equipped medical laboratory, and some madman with a machete cut your head off in an attempt to murder you, but rescuers arrived in time, would you want them to save your headless human body, or save your severed head, to save YOU-the-person?" See? A person is a mind, not a body! The type of body inhabited by a mind is totally irrelevant to the Constitution --and therefore persons can have extraterrestrial alien bodies, robot bodies, and even dolphin bodies. Furthermore, doctors and scientists and lawyers agree that if a mind doesn't exist, then no person exists[SUP](2)[/SUP] --even if a human body is still alive! Any controversy can be associated with an entirely different question: "How much mind does an entity have to have, to qualify as a person?" Well, the scientists have a lot[SUP](3)[/SUP] of data[SUP](4)[/SUP] about that[SUP](5)[/SUP], too!
Back to the Founding Fathers, who included a very relevant thing in the Constitution, the decennial Census, which required that every person must be counted (except Indians not taxed). The Founding Fathers were there in 1790 to specify the details of the very first counting for the Census. For this letter's purpose it doesn't matter that slaves were only partly counted; what matters is that pregnancies were totally ignored! In those days the unborn were not even considered to be alive before they began to "kick" in the womb (an event called "quickening") --and if they had ever been considered to be persons, the Constitutionally mandated Census required them to be counted!!! This legal Precedent about the non-person status of the unborn has been consistently maintained for well over 200 years, far older than the Roe v Wade Decision. In no Census have pregnancies ever been counted as persons[/SUP]
[post 1 of 2]
The Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
1 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20543
Hello.
This letter contains various facts combined with amateur legal reasoning, the latter of which your expert legal mind might find "laughable" --and thus entertaining. Hope you like it!
First we note that some things are mediocre while other things have greatness. It is possible that the greatest-of-all thing about the US Constitution (plus Amendments) is the fact that the word "person" is used throughout, and the word "human" is not used even once. In the era of the Founding Fathers the word "person" might have only been a legal construct, but today scientists have been studying the topic, starting with a very simple Question: "What characteristics does a person possess, that a mere-animal entity does not possess?" As a result, some scientists have become convinced that members of various species of dolphins (including killer whales) can qualify as persons, just as it is widely accepted that extraterrestrial alien intelligent beings can qualify as persons, plus computer scientists widely expect that True Artificial Intelligences can someday exist --all three possibilities completely proving that the concepts of "person" and "human" are totally distinct and unrelated concepts.
Basically, the Constitution promotes "person rights", a thing that can reduce inter-species prejudice (and possibly the chances of interstellar war) for millennia into the future. Note that in the era of the Founding Fathers, it was widely believed that angels (very powerful person-class beings) literally walked among men (often in disguise). Which of the Founding Fathers would have wanted to discriminate against them, by only associating Constitutional rights with human-ness??? The concept of "human rights" is, stupidly, nothing more than an invitation for humanity to be punished for short-sightedly paving the way for discrimination/prejudice against all types of non-human persons[SUP](1)[/SUP].
Thanks to modern scientific research, there happens to be an extremely easy way to understand what a person truly is. Just answer this (kind of messy) question: "IF you were visiting a modern well-equipped medical laboratory, and some madman with a machete cut your head off in an attempt to murder you, but rescuers arrived in time, would you want them to save your headless human body, or save your severed head, to save YOU-the-person?" See? A person is a mind, not a body! The type of body inhabited by a mind is totally irrelevant to the Constitution --and therefore persons can have extraterrestrial alien bodies, robot bodies, and even dolphin bodies. Furthermore, doctors and scientists and lawyers agree that if a mind doesn't exist, then no person exists[SUP](2)[/SUP] --even if a human body is still alive! Any controversy can be associated with an entirely different question: "How much mind does an entity have to have, to qualify as a person?" Well, the scientists have a lot[SUP](3)[/SUP] of data[SUP](4)[/SUP] about that[SUP](5)[/SUP], too!
Back to the Founding Fathers, who included a very relevant thing in the Constitution, the decennial Census, which required that every person must be counted (except Indians not taxed). The Founding Fathers were there in 1790 to specify the details of the very first counting for the Census. For this letter's purpose it doesn't matter that slaves were only partly counted; what matters is that pregnancies were totally ignored! In those days the unborn were not even considered to be alive before they began to "kick" in the womb (an event called "quickening") --and if they had ever been considered to be persons, the Constitutionally mandated Census required them to be counted!!! This legal Precedent about the non-person status of the unborn has been consistently maintained for well over 200 years, far older than the Roe v Wade Decision. In no Census have pregnancies ever been counted as persons[/SUP]