Journal eglamkowski's Journal: So damn annoying! 5
I can get info from the census bureau about:
Age, Ancestry, Births, Children, Computer Ownership and Use, Deaths, Disability, Education, Elderly, Families, Fertility, Foreign Born, Grandparents, Health Insurance, Hispanic Origin, Households and Families, Immigration, Income, Journey to Work, Labor Force, Language Use, Marital Status and Living Arrangements, Migration, Occupation, Overseas U.S. Population, Poverty, Program Participation, Puerto Rico and the Insular Areas, Race, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, School Costs, School Districts, School Enrollment, Voting and Registration, Wealth, Well-Being, Working At Home
But I can NOT get info from the census about religion.
Don't tell me it's a first amendment issue, that's just non-sense. If it were a concern over constitutionality, than the would not be able to ask about race (15th amendment) or sex (19th amendment), but they do. There's no good reason not to get some sort of info on religion, even if it is a high-level question (e.g. you would get to pick only just "Christian" without having a list of various sects to choose from, or "Muslim" without indicating whether sunni or shite or sufi, etc.).
We don't concern ourselves over the government collecting info on race, sex, education level, income level, age, immigration status, ancestry, occupation, marital status or anything else, but like hell we're gonna let them know our religion? In what world does that possibly make sense? Either they need to collect none of these things, just a count of the number of people, or they should just go ahead and collect everything. It's no better that the government might discriminate based on race than the might discriminate on religion - either one is equally wrong, so why worry about them getting one of those pieces of info and not the other? Either they already use it for evil or they don't, they won't suddenly start being evil (if they weren't already... *cough*) just because they got one more piece of info.
*rolls eyes*
Not the same thing (Score:2)
Those are biological facts. Religion is a choice. False comparison.
Re: (Score:1)
You're basically saying it's perfectly ok for the government to discriminate on race or sex, but not religion. Why? Why is one ok and the other not? Either its wrong to discriminate on ANY of them, in which case NONE of them should be asked, or it is ok, in whic
Re: (Score:2)
I said nothing of constitutionality (damn you for making me type that word! It's been a rough enough day as it is!). I just said apples and oranges. One of those things, being a choice AND highly mutable, is not like the others, and you were making the argumen
Re: (Score:2)
Whether or not it is a choice is irrelevant. If you're going to argue that collecting religious info is a constitutional violation, then there's no reason at all not to apply exactly the same constitutional standard to sex and race. None at all.
I basically agree with that. I think all of it is unconstitutional, as per the Fourth Amendment.
That said, a case can be made that government has a legitimate interest in race and sex, that they do not have with religion, for example in order to make sure that the 15th and 19th amendments are being followed, or to make sure that we have enough women to keep the population increasing. But it doesn't follow that the government can force you to reveal that information.
I got the long form for the 2000 census
Re: (Score:1)
Typing "census religion" into google gave me this:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/population