bruto
Penultimate Amazing
ATTENTION!
ALL CONTRADICTING SKEPTICS ARE DEAD WRONG, IN REGARD TO THEIR INTERPRETATION THAT THE SKAMANIA COUNTY ORDINANCE AGAINST HARMING A BIGFOOT, ARE SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY, INVALID. SKAMANIA COUNTY ORDINANCES HAVE THE FULL FORCE OF THE LAW. READ IT AND WEEP. END OF STORY!
1.01.170 Constitutionality.
If any section, subsection, sentence, clause or phrase of the Skamania County code is for any reason held to be invalid or unconstitutional, such decision shall not affect the validity of the remaining portions of the code. The board declares that it would have passed this code, and each section, subsection, sentence, clause and phrase thereof, irrespective of the fact that any one or more sections, subsections, sentences, clauses, or phrases had been declared invalid or unconstitutional, and if for any reason, the Skamania County code should be declared invalid or unconstitutional, then the original ordinance or ordinances shall be in full force and effect. (Ord. 1979-07 § 17)
Gee, apparently some legislators somewhere, have the wherewithal to devote considerable to to enacting laws to protect people that do not look exactly like us. Although the revised ordinance is a mere misdemeanor if Bigfoot is found to not be hominoid, I will be volunteering my testimony for the Skamania County prosecutor, to elevate the violation as equivalent to assault with intent to kill, attempted murder, etc., since Bigfoot clearly demonstrate that they are people, in my presence. In other words, it will not be a misdemeanor. It will be a felony to harm a Bigfoot.
I have no idea (and no interest, really) exactly what law exists in that county protecting bigfoot. I contend that your reading of the clause previously cited was mistaken, and did not mean what you think it means. It's a much narrower question. I think you'd find if you ask anyone who has dealt with this stuff that your reading was in error, and does not
The paragraph you just cited above applies explicitly to laws that are held to be invalid or unconstitutional. It does not apply to laws that are repealed, or superseded unless the entire ordinance is declared unconstitutional, in which case, the previous ordinance is declared to have persisted. It's a common, garden variety, boilerplate separability clause, present in practically every complex ordinance in existence. It says simply that the whole ordinance will not fall if a part is found to be unconstitutional or invalid, and that if the whole ordinance is found to be unconstitutional or invalid, it will not result in a period of lawlessness on the subject of the ordinance. That's all it says.
If, by some chance, you should convince the courts that non-hominid bigfeet deserve greater protection, it would be a very big stretch indeed to invoke that separability clause, because a revision of a law, even if it's a revision because the law is lousy, insufficient, poorly thought out or just plain wrong, is not a finding that it is either unconstitutional or invalid. Since the United States Constitution forbids retroactive laws, the only way you could win on this would be if a previous law declared harming a non-hominid bigfoot to be a felony, and if then you were able to prove that the revision to make it a misdemeanor was not just a bad idea, but unconstitutional or invalid, which is not at all the same thing as just "bad."
Your reading of these things is really idiosyncratic, to say the least.
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