Posted on 09/14/2011 10:50:46 PM PDT by Libloather
Amish men jailed for not displaying buggy safety signs
By Steve Robrahn | Reuters – 15 hrs ago
LOUISVILLE, Ky (Reuters) - Eight members of a traditional Amish sect were behind bars on Tuesday after refusing to pay fines for failure to display orange-red safety triangles on their horse-drawn buggies.
The eight were being held in the Graves County Jail, serving sentences ranging between three and 10 days for failing to pay the fines on religious grounds.
Graves District Judge Deborah Hawkins ordered the men jailed Monday in Mayfield, about 200 miles from Louisville in western Kentucky. The defendants contend that paying the fines would amount to complying with a law that violates their religious restrictions against wearing or displaying bright colors or relying upon man-made symbols for their safety.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I don’t speak German ... so let me Babelfish that...
I certainly have nothing against the Amish, but I also think that maybe it’s not wrong to want to ensure that they don’t get slammed into at night traveling the roads.
/imho
Great idea!!!
It's like somebody said when they put flashing high intensity lights on top of school busses: "If you can't see that big yellow thing WITHOUT a light..."(and you know the rest).
And the persecution and sterilization of the "genetically inferior" in Germany was also done "For their good."
BTW I don't think the Amish commonly take their buggies out at night.
Why does everything get Godwined?
Now you are equating putting a reflective device on a buggy to persecution and sterilization in Germany?
The right thing to do would be to catch the idiot english drivers that terrorize the buggy drivers and try to spook the horses! I have seen it personally and it is NOT funny!
While I am sure that does happen, it is a distinct minority of cases.
However, virtually all of the black horse carriages are practically invisible after dusk.
Because allowing the government to exercise power in a small thing is likely to lead to their exercising that power in larger and larger things even if they are done, as they say, for the benefit of those regulated. The clear implication here is that these poor slobs need we the government to protect them because they are far too stupid to make the proper decisions. (Like not to drive a buggy on a busy road in the dark)
But you don't need to take my word for it
• "Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. " -- John Adams, Novanglus Letters, 1774
They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please."
-- Thomas Jefferson
• "[G]overnment, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." -- Thomas Paine
• "There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. "
-- James Madison, Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention [June 16, 1788]
• "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. "
-- Judge Learned Hand
Or in other words, Once you allow a little liberty to be infringed you have allowed the disease that will kill all liberty to take hold.
Seeing them around corners would be fundamentally difficult.
It reminds me of turn of the century requirements placed on the then-new horseless carriages (primitive automobiles) such as that a person with a lantern had to accompany the vehicle to prevent it catching horse carriages by surprise and spooking the horses.
I think that should be spelled “Godwinned” (doubling the n). This prevents a misreading as though it were God-wined. (And dined?)
The story reads these 8 Amish men were jailed for not paying the fines.
Interesting they were accommodated on their jump suits. Clearly the compelling state interest over road safety is the state's case, and not their clothing.
Better be careful. We don't want any radicalized Amish running loose.
Wonder why they didn't confiscate their buggies?
And driving is not a right, it is a privilege. It can be taken away from you, whereas a right cannot.
I can blow up 3,000 people and still have the right to claim to be Muslim, I will lose my privilege to drive if it can be shown I drove through a crowd of people with undo care and attention.
So yes, if you choose to drive, you are choosing to drive under the conditions that society has determined for you to ensure a reasonable amount of safety.
I think we had part of this discussion already...(see link)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.