Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association
This case involved in a law which prohibited the sale or rental of video games to children which contained one or more of a number of violent images including maiming or sexual assault. One passage in the law restricted sales based upon the inclusion of any act “depicted in a manner that a reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors.” The irony is that the law applied only to direct sales to minors. If the minor was accompanied by a parent or legal guardian whom the sales or rental clerk knew was making the transaction of the child, the sale would not be prohibited despite knowledge that the minor would be subjected to images “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors.”
Strauder v. West Virginia
A black male is tried for killing his black wife. He files an argument that his constitutional right to trial by a jury of his peers is being violated since West Virginia law mandates that only white men can serve on the jury. The trial reaches the West Virginia Supreme Court which strikes his appeal down on the basis that there was no reason to assume that “a jury of white men would not be quite as likely to do justice to the prisoner as a jury of negroes.”
The irony, of course, is that the West Virginia Supreme Court was at the time comprised entirely of white men whose history of sitting in judgment on how black Americans think was notoriously far off the mark. (The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed that decision.)
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah
The overall community of Hialeah, Fl. became “disturbed by the faith’s animal sacrifices” of a newly settled church which included, among other things, decapitation of beasts and the collection of blood in pots. In response, the city passed a law prohibiting killing animals as part of either a private or public ritualistic sacrifice. The irony enters with the wording of the rest of the statute which states that this prohibition upon killing animals does apply in cases when it is done “for the primary purpose of food consumption.”
Frontiero v. Richardson
Lt. Frontiero applied for benefits from the government to cover the lack of income generated by a spouse who was attending college full-time. This request was routinely approved for enlisted members of the United States Air Force. Frontiero’s request was turned down, however. Ironically, had Frontiero been identified only by the end-all and be-all of military service—rank as a Lieutenant—and not as a woman, the request would have been automatically approved. Instead, the rules of benefit dispensation was determined upon gender classification operating under the assumption that a husband naturally was not dependent upon his wife’s income for support.
Salmon P. Chase
In 1862 Congress enacted the Legal Tender Act which asserted the constitutionality of using paper money. Salmon P. Chase was the Secretary of the Treasury at that time and his face actually adorned the brand new dollar bill. Eight years later, however, when he was now Chief Justice of the U.S., Chase ironically changed course substantially by agreeing with the majority in Hepburn v. Griswold which ruled that certain parts of the Legal Tender Acts were unconstitutional after all.
