Hehe, just have some code (magnetic strip or whatever) on the licence that describes the iris pattern (that's what they use, no?) of the owner. But I don't think we're quite there yet :)

Retinal scans aren't nearly as intrusive as DNA scans. I have no problem with retinal scans or fingerprint scans, but the fact is that they're too expensive to be a viable solution right now. When fingerprint scanning or retinal scanning becomes cheap enough we can switch over to those. But until then all you're doing is beating a dead horse. Unless, of course, you want to foot up the HUGE tax increase that would be required to implement these things in such a portable manner as wuold be needed.

they let me wear a bandana for mine, not remotly the same thing at all, but still we got in a big fight at the place

Ok, I'm going to do my best to decipher what's going on here.

In the red corner!
Photo ID has been a definite requirement of many, many things across a wide variety of platforms. You can't walk into a bar and ask for a drink without being expected to produce a photo ID to verify that you're 21 or older. If a police officer pulls you over, you need to a) show him your driver's license, and b) be able to prove that the license is valid. In the current system, that's just not possible short of photo ID.

In the blue corner!
Yes, her religion restricts showing her face in public. Most people, when coming here, blend with the decidedly unreligious (NOT atheist) culture and abandon their religions entirely. She begs to differ, and I always pray for the underdog, so more power to her. Besides, a lack of religion is a bad thing, there are a lot of very rational theories about the world's problems being the result of a lack of religion in today's first-world society.

And now, the part you've all been waiting for... the Nonsense's decision.
It has often been said that religion is in the eye of the believer. In other words, your religion is what you say it is. (Debate it all you want, you cannot come up with a rational argument against this that I cannot strike down easily.) By this rule, if she says that she cannot be photographed unveiled, then she cannot be photographed unveiled. HOWEVER, just like with freedom of speech, when it comes to freedom of religion, you have to draw a line somewhere; much as you can't run into a crowded theater screaming "fire" unless there really is a fire, you can't kill someone because your religion says you have to. So the real debate is, where do you draw the line? Specifically, does photo ID fall under the category of making compromises with religion in the name of public safety? Hm. I think that having a common ID is important for public safety; it is not easily enforced unless a public official can identify beyond a reasonable doubt any person they come across, which is nearly impossible short of having a common ID system. And I don't think there is an affordable, reliable form of ID that we can use except for photo ID. Thus, until someone steps up and PROVES that there is a common ID system that is affordable and reliable besides photo ID, the judge's ruling stays. (I'm really looking forward to magnetic strip iris scanners though :) )

Take or leave my argument, do your best to shoot it down, whatever you want. BUT, the next person to debate whether or not her religion permits her being photographed, and I'm going on record by saying this, will be shot in the foot. Repeatedly, if needed. And that's after I shoot down their argument in the most humiliating way possible.

OK, I'll go for that :)

(On a side note though: I doubt she would have much need to prove she's 21 to buy alcohol. And she never "came here" she always was there."

Well I think this has pretty much run its course. roothorick has even begun the post-thread analysis :)

I am glad that Atanvarno has been able to seperate the case from the principle and between us we may have made some small stand for reasoned debate. To those who disagreed with us, but still engaged with us on this level, thank you. If you do not try and question what your government does in the name of security or cost or practicality then you will one day find yourselves living in a country where the state dominates your lives without check or balance.

I have during my time lived in China and the UK.
In China you must always carry around an ID card and show it on demand to the police. Failure to do so will lead to a court appearance and possible imprisonment.
In the UK I am required to carry no such identification. In fact if I wanted - and was willing to stay in England and not claim state benefits - I need never own a single piece of ID in my life. I can drive freely and do not carry ID with me. My driving licence has no photo and if a policeman wants to see it they must ask me to bring it into a police station.
These are two ways to run a country. In one, it is the individual who must bend to the state. What freedom people have is granted to them by the government. In the other, the state must bend to the individual. It is considered that I am a free person going about my innocent business - which I am. If the police or state wish to check up on me or control me then it is they who must go out of their way to prove the necessity and must go out of their way not to tread on my toes in doing so.

For those who are interested in why I am so passionate about this persons freedom and am so concerned by the ease with which the posters here want to limit it, I have quoted part of an Observer (the weekend Guardian) article and attached a link to the whole thing. It only touches on the ID aspect and not the religious freedom aspect but is insightful nonetheless:

It is perhaps a tribute to the success of the American state machine, John Ashcroft and his predecessors that it is an Englishman and a Norwegian who are now trying to convince Americans to uphold freedoms that they do not believe they hold.

I am not a fan of Ashcroft - he does indeed take things too far. That said, I don't like the situation you described in China OR the one described in the UK. I believe in moderation. Not requiring some sort of ID - at least for specific tasks - seems silly to me. I personally think it makes perfect sense and is right that we are required to carry a photo identification when we drive which says we are capable of driving (and says a lot of other things as well in other situations as secondary purposes). Unlike China however, a police officer cannot just simply demand to see ID - there must be a reason. In driving, that reason is being puled over - which by your description apparently happens a LOT more often in the US than the UK. Being that it happens so much more often, I think that may be the basis of some of our disagreement over how required it is. Police here simply do not have the kind of time required in a long, drawn out identification process which, at the moment, is the only option other than photo IDs.

To sum up my relation of this to religion, it comes from the fact driving is not a right but a priviledge. Protecting people from persecution because of their beliefs is there to protect people from persecution BECAUSE OF THEIR BELIEFS. This woman - and anyone else who is opposed in any way to a photo on a driver's license - are not victims of something set in place specifically to victimize them and others like them. They are simply realizing that having religious beliefs - especially those not shared by a significant number of people - is hard. Do I think it unfortunate that their beliefs cause a situation where they can't drive? Sure. Do I think we should try to use a system that allows people with such beliefs to drive without compromising the speed and relative accuracy of our current system? Absolutely. However, at the moment, such a system doesn't exist. In fact, I'm not so sure - upon further thought over the idea of fingerprint scanning and retinal scanning - that a better one can ever exist. Any other system requires the government to have MORE personal information on database than they do now. Photos that are used on driver's licenses, if I'm not mistaken, are not entered into some mega-database spanning the state or country. They are simply taken, printed, and removed. In order for retinal scans or fingerprint scans to work, it would require a state or country-wide databse of all drivers' retinal or fingerprint information. I'm all for the government not having any more information than is reasonably necessary, and when photo IDs can accomplish, to acceptable accuracy, definitive identification on the spot, retinal and fingerprint data is not necessary.

Not everyone has eyes? Granted, there aren't too many eye-less people who'll need a driver's license.

They shouldn't have, unless the bandana is welded to your head.

Provide a mechanism for that, and I'll consider using it. As it is, it'd require too much effort.

Not really necessary, the data could simply be stored on your licence (magnetic strip or a small chip). But of cours ethe equipment isn't up there yet, unfortunately. But this is also a much safer method of identification. Identifying someone from a picture is not a fool-proof method.

Yes, you're mistaken, at least in some places. They're working on a national database for such things. I'm not certain what they already have.

The last time I went to school, they took a b&w digital picture and printed it on my student ID. I protested, but it was either that or not go to that school.

Denim

The "all comments in one post" request means that when you want to say something you put it in a post. Then if you want to add another comment (and no one else has said anything since your last post) you should click "edit" at the bottom of your last post rather than typing in the big white box or clicking "post reply".

If you knew this already (and I suspect you did as you are Insane) then I apologise, I missed your sarcasm.

You appear to have missed my comment about the lack of a mechanism. The only way to comment on a vB is to a message. There's no given way to comment to more than one. I'd have to do it by hand, making sure to get attributions right and appropriately set up quote and b commands.

It's not worth my time. If the people behind vB want to come up with a way to do this, more power to them. I can think of a way, but I won't bother to code it: that's their problem. :)

repeat until out of messages:
read a message
specify, maybe with a button, an interest in commenting on it.
end repeat
Press "comment" button
all messages are included, with attributions, in a comment dialog as per normal.

I could see working with that, but it's not there yet.

(edit) while they're at it, they can add a "nested list" capability. Hey, HTML can do it, why can't vB?

denim, we're happy with just a copy-paste of the text you comment with [.quote.] [./quote.] around :) Which in the end is less time consuming than clicking send, waiting for page to load, waiting for redirection, clicking quote, erasing unwanted text.

And you could of course go to vB site and look for a hack, maybe they have one ready :)

When I want to quote multiple people in one post, I open a text editor, click the quote button at the bottom right of their post, then copy and paste everyone that I want to quote.

Yuck!

Thanks for the amazingly insightful comment :D

Hey, it was very to-the-point, wouldn't you say? :p

No offense, but 4thTimeLucky amazes me. I never thought that with my views, I would ever run into someone I can honestly consider to be "too liberal". I certainly stand corrected.

And he knows how to argue, too.

I thought true Muslim women were not allowed to drive a car. So there shouldn't be a problem.

As far as I'm concerned...."separation between state and church" its as simple as that......

velcro, the problem lies then in the fact that the laws of the United States has never been separated from the Christian religion since most of them have been built upon Christian beliefs and moral values, so the "state" and the "church" have never really been separated completely.

At its base, both Christianity and Islam are based on Jewish ideals. The issue of saying this is a Christian state is rather bogus, though there's a kernel of truth to it.

I actually reckon that Drivers licences should have all people photographed from the waist up, to better show the "stature" or build of that person. The face should be clearly visible. Question? does this person have a passport? with photo?

The rules were established before 9/11. Yes - 9/11 is an easy scapegoat for those that think they are not part of it. But here's some basics, for those that have not stood up for our nation:
1) Our Constitution allows certain rights for our citizens (Driving is a priveledge - not a right).
2) This lady was prosecuted for violations (in Illinois) where she had no problem showing her face. Yes, the past should stay in the past, but what you did is what you did.

I hate people....this woman is one reason why. First she beats 3 yr. old foster children and now this?!?! WTF?!?!?!?

denim, much change in 1300 years :)

And if the laws were based on a morale that said polygamy wasn't bad, then there would be no law against polygamy.

what I find interesting is the argument of "seperation of church and state" in the first place.

Whether you agree with it or not - and people agreeing with it is what has created this myth of its existence - the "seperation of church and state," the way most people intend to mean when they mention it, does not legally exist.

The first amendment, which supposedly creates this right, simply says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

In other words, congress can't make a law saying people must adhere to one religion or another or make laws that people can't adhere to certain religious beliefs.

The term "seperation of church and state" came from a LETTER (i.e. no - that is, ZERO - legal precedent) written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in response to a rumor that they had heard that a different Christian denomination was to become the national religion.

He wrote,
This was a direct reference to something which a Baptist preacher had said - remember, he was writing to Baptists - which was:
In this, he means that there must be a seperation between the church and the state so as not to corrupt the church. In Jefferson's view - and his is the view that matters if you're going to bring the phrase "seperation of church and state" into this - the church must be protected from the state, but the state needs no protection from the church. One needn't look very far into the lives of the founding fathers to see that they felt this way - the Declaration of Independence, while not a legal document, doesn't say NATUER cerated all men equal. It says God, and that says a lot about the mindset of the people who wrote it.

America, having been founded on the heels of a situation in England where people were persecuted for not following the state religion there, was created in such a way that a LEGALLY state sponsored religion could not exist - enter the first amendment. That's not to say that a de facto state religion cannot exist, just that the state cannot make it a law so that those who are not part of the de facto standard are not persecuted outright for their beliefs.

People who do not believe in being photographed are not being persecuted because of their religion. They are simply living an unfortunate inconvenience of not being part of the de facto standard in America.

Like I said, when something comes that can reasonably replace a system such as this, we should look to it. But the "seperation of church and state" - which doesn't even exist in the way people intend it to - has nothing to do here. If you want that kind of seperation - legally - you'll have to work for another amendment to the constitution. Until then, what we have are legal rulings with no actual precedent to them which, if anyone was truly interested in the intentions of laws rather than what they WISH the intentions were, would be stricken down immediately. And, frankly, I have no problem with de facto standards, so long as peple aren't being persecuted for not adhering to them. It's no different than de facto standards for social behavior - it may make it a little more difficult if you're a bit different, but there is no legal persecution of you for it.

Yes, and much has changed in the last 1300 years as well. That doesn't change what I said earlier today, though. :D

LOOK... we seem to be straying from the real point here...

to re-state what many have already stated...

1) driving is a PRIVELEDGE... not a right...

2) separation between church and state was intended to save people from religious persecution based on their beliefs...

this is not a case of persecution, or a rights violation... it's a legal playground for lawyers and the ACLU... it's stupid... it's bullshit, and in my opinion... a WASTE of our tax dollars...

there are millions of well deserving causes for our tax $$ in this country... the lack of care for the elderly... the milllions of children in need of better eduction, food, clothing, shelter, etc...
the list as you know... could go on and on...

this woman... if she lived in a "true" muslim culture would not even be allowed to drive in the first place...
her lawsuit... is a joke... she should be ashamed of herself, and her lawyers to boot.

this world is full of rules... some of them don't seem "Fair"... but they are there for the greater good of the masses...

i say... GROW UP and GET OVER IT.

*stepping off my soap box & kicking it under my desk*
sorry if that sounded like a rant folks... i just can't believe this is even an issue.

Driving is a previlage, not a right

Something just occurred to me. (drum roll, please!)

Given that she's a "proper" Moslem woman who won't let her picture be taken w/o a veil,

Given that her sect doesn't allow her to drive in the first place,

Given that the veil allows her to hide her identity,

"Her" driver's license is clearly for someone else who will dress in "drag"!

Therefore, the "terrorism" reference was well made, and they should just throw the rest of the case out of court.

brilliant denim!