I think you are trivializing the egregious nature of this particular “decision”.
For what it’s worth, I sat on many a bar stool back in my younger days,(including NCO clubs,AMVETS and VFWs around the world) and not once did any of the lying drunken sleezebags ever claim to be ex-SEAL/Ranger/Special Forces/ETC as a pick up line.
Even the “trash” at the few biker bars and honkytonks I visited refrained from such actions.
As an office manager for many years, having watched a lot of resumes pass my desk, again, I don’t recall ever seeing someone trying to lie their way into a job that way.
Apparently only politicians, media personalities and predatory sexual perverts make such false claims.
So SCOTUS tosses out the law against them because...?
I’m not trivializing this one bit. The written law is enforced by hired law enforcers who act as proxies for the people to enforce the written law. However, the written law itself is based on the unwritten “social sanctions” that exist in all times and places, if varying somewhat in content.
The social sanctions can change over time, or even be in conflict with the written law, but they will always win out in the end because the vast majority of the public are its enforcers, not the tiny number of LEOs or government workers.
A good example of a social sanction would be for an adult male to walk down a busy sidewalk in the US, wearing a t-shirt that says “I like to molest children”. In much of the US, he would not get far before at first getting a strong negative reaction from those individuals he encountered, with a high likelihood that he would be confronted by one or more of them.
A judge might say that it is his right to do so under the written law, but the social sanction says otherwise. And because it is so very powerful, eventually this individual would either not wear that t-shirt, or suffer the consequences, to include violence.
I wrote this to explain how very effective the social sanction can be, both in the case of flag burning, and now with Stolen Valor. Even the high and lofty Supreme Court of the United States might decree that individuals may burn flags to their hearts’ content, or steal valor. But the SCOTUS is not going to be out there on the street where the social sanctions are enforced.
Today, in much of the US, if some creep burns an American flag in public as part of a legal protest, there are many citizens who are inclined to punch him out. And there are many LEOs who will decline to arrest this citizen for doing so, and many juries who will not convict him, nor give monetary remuneration to the flag burner for his injuries in a subsequent lawsuit.
So it really doesn’t matter what the SCOTUS thinks.
And the same applies, perhaps even more so, to the enforcement of the social sanction about stealing valor, when it is done by veterans.
As a final note, it is unwise to assume that the “trash” at biker bars and honkeytonks are any the less patriotic than those in “polite” establishments. In fact, many of them are not just patriotic, but intensely patriotic. And I know of at least one motorcycle club whose membership is exclusively combat veterans, many of whom have decorations for valor.
For some fool to pretend valor in their presence would be beyond dangerous, as these are men of action, not legal niceties.