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Reason and the heart By Ronald Roy 12/16/2010

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Reason and the heart

By Ronald Roy 12/16/2010
Smart kid, this grandson of mine. I just found out that Jack, who wants to be a lawyer a la Perry Mason, occasionally browses over my 50-year-old law textbooks with marginal scribbles. He stunned me when he said, “Gramps, I don’t see how the (Gloria) Arroyo people can claim Executive Order No.1 is an act of vindictiveness and discrimination. The President simply wants to know if they committed serious crimes, so what’s so wrong with that?”

Then he dropped a bomb: “Maybe the Supreme Court is the one being vindictive because the President clipped its budget — well, it is not quite like that, Jack — for austerity reasons.” Hmm, a little ahead of his age, this kid, who manages to keep abreast of current news. Well, I’d like to share the following insights drawn from my conversations with Jack regarding the constitutional guarantee of the equal protection clause (EPC).

Shorn of suspected ill motives shrouded in highfalutin legalese and specious reasoning, the EPC is an uncomplicated common-sense principle that nobody should be discriminated against for such reasons as relate to gender (e.g. homosexuals and lesbians being denied employment opportunities), color (e.g. Ilocanos being segregated at a restaurant section away from fair-skinned Visayans), religion (e.g. public transport facilities banning members of a particular non-Christian church), and physical disability or defect (e.g. denial by public amusement places of entrance for the handicapped)..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101216com7.html

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