As the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in cases involving the freedom of states to make marriage policy, thousands gathered Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the third annual March for Marriage.
The event’s largest crowd to date called on the Court to respect the voice of the American people, urging the justices not to impose a redefinition of marriage on the entire country.
More than 50 million Americans have voted for laws affirming the definition of marriage as one man and one woman (representing more than 60 percent of those voting on the matter). But courts have not respected the constitutional authority of the American people and our elected representatives to make marriage policy.
Only 11 states have redefined marriage democratically. In the 37 states that currently recognize same-sex marriage, 26 have been forced to do so by courts.
Photo Credit: The Daily Signal
The diverse crowd from across the nation at the March for Marriage made its voice heard loud and clear this weekend. Now the action moves to the Supreme Court, as it considers whether the American people will be free to make marriage policy recognizing marriage as being between one man and one woman. (Read more from “You’ll Never Guess How Many People Voted for Traditional Marriage” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-29 03:04:362015-04-29 03:04:36You’ll Never Guess How Many People in the U.S. Voted for Traditional Marriage
Last week I asked: Are opponents of same-sex marriage just rehearsing the same kind of bad arguments used in past decades to oppose interracial marriage? Are Christians who defend biblical sexual ethics relying on dogma or irrational prejudice? Are we engaged in hate speech when we argue the following?
What we mean by “marriage” includes by its very nature the union of a male and female. Same-sex marriage is simply impossible.
Raising same-sex unions to the same level as real marriage amounts to a legal fiction.
Forcing citizens to recognize and even participate in such weddings violates their civil and religious rights.
Destabilizing the very nature of an already fragile institution, the family, harms the most vulnerable members of society, helpless children and the poor.
Destabilizing the very nature of an already fragile institution, the family, harms the most vulnerable members of society, helpless children and the poor.
Does saying all this put us in the same moral sewer as racists who claimed that interracial marriage was unnatural, unhealthy and bad for society? If so, we deserve to lose. We deserve to face the choice that NY Times columnist Frank Bruni wants to impose on Christians: Change your doctrine, or go out into the wilderness with what’s left of the white supremacists. Your institutions will have to comply with the new status quo, or you will have to go rogue — lose legal protections, face fines and even jail time, lose tax exemptions and accreditation, and be treated by your country with less respect and tolerance than we grant Islamist imams who favor sharia law.
So let’s examine those old, bad arguments against interracial marriage, and contrast them with the reasons offered by defenders of natural marriage.
In the scholarly paper, “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia,” Paul A. Lombardo collected representative legal rulings issued by highly educated judges in support of bans on interracial marriage. They make for bracing, painful reading. While it’s often amusing to troll the exploded scientific and political ideas of the past, there’s nothing funny about the widespread acceptance of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-Christian racism. Such superstitions helped white supremacists such as the Klan keep in place unjust laws against interracial marriage, and gave eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger ammunition in imposing forced sterilization in a dozen U.S. states.
Advocates of same-sex marriage claim that our arguments against it are no better grounded, no morally different from these. Well, let’s gather them up and explain exactly why these racist arguments fall flat, and compare with them the reasons for defending natural marriage. Shall we? Below I’ll just give representative fragments of the larger arguments, which you can read for yourself in Lombardo’s paper.
Racist Argument #1
“[T]he off-spring of these unnatural connections are generally sickly and effeminate, and … they are inferior in physical development and strength, to the full-blood of either race.” (Scott v. Georgia, 1869.)
There is simply no evidence for this. In fact, it was the practice of inbreeding — whereby aristocratic white southern families preferred to marry close relations, even first cousins — that produced genetic defects. Anyone who has ever paid the vet bills for a pure-bred dog knows this much nowadays. Biologists speak of “hybrid” vigor, of the genetic advantages of “exogamy,” of crossing different strains within a species.
By contrast, same-sex marriage produces no offspring, not because of any medical problem among the partners, but by its very nature. It is not and cannot be fertile. So in one key respect, the biological, the verdict of science is clear: Interracial marriage is natural, and same-sex marriage is not.
Racist Argument #2
“The laws of civilization demand that the races be kept apart in this country.” (Doc. Lonas v. State of Tennessee, 1871.)
This is simply an unsupported assertion. Whose “laws” and whose “civilization”? Many flourishing civilizations allowed for intimate contact among different races. The Roman Empire, various vast and wealthy Muslim kingdoms, the Spanish and Portuguese empires — while they were often unjust in many respects — allowed for the free intermingling of people of different races, and extensive intermarriage. In fact, the idea of identifying “races” and keeping them “pure” is quite a modern one, dating back no earlier than the English conquest of North America.
By contrast, every human society of which we have any record regards the union of man and woman as the primary unit of society. None, not one, has ever recognized same-sex unions as the equivalent of marriage — no, not even ancient Greece.
Racist Argument #3
“[W]hom God hath joined together by indelible peculiarities, which declare that He has made the two races distinct.” (Green v. State of Alabama, 1877.)
In other words, God intended to create distinct races, and forbade them to interbreed. In support of this assertion, some Christians cited Old Testament passages that prohibited the Israelites from mixing their seed with the Gentiles’. But the Old Testament itself makes it perfectly clear that the difference between Jews and Gentiles was religious, not biological. Jews were not to marry pagans who worshiped idols and practiced human sacrifice. Pagans who converted to the worship of God were welcomed in, and no barriers whatsoever were placed to their intermarriage with the children of Abraham. For this reason, the Catholic church always declared that interracial marriage was perfectly moral — though in certain social conditions, it might attract persecution and therefore be inadvisable.
By contrast, both the Old and New Testaments unambiguously condemn erotic activity between people of the same sex. No Christian church or Jewish synagogue accepted same-sex unions until the 1980s, and those that changed their positions didn’t do it because of new “scholarly” discoveries, but because they were adjusting their doctrine to follow secular mores.
Racist Argument #4
“The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization require that [the races] should be kept distinct and separate. …” (Kinney v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 1878.)
This is mostly empty rhetoric, contradicted by the facts. Cruel laws that forbade slaves from even marrying each other, and the practice of breaking up families and selling off wives and children, helped shatter the black family in North America — while in South America, awful as slavery was, slave marriages were conducted in church and families couldn’t legally be split. Nor were public morals improved by the intrusion of laws that required racial segregation — serving as constant temptations to cruelty on the part of whites, and resentment among oppressed blacks.
By contrast, heterosexual marriage is based entirely on the encounter with the other, on the need to accept, accommodate and learn from the profound differences between the sexes. It is now primarily social conservatives who insist that the sexes are real, grounded in humans as among other animals in the facts of mammalian biology. Many advocates of same-sex marriage, on the other hand, have accepted the unhinged assertions of “Gender Theory,” which pretends that one’s gender is a social and psychological figment, an empty construct. That’s why, at last count, gender theorists claimed to have discovered some different 50 genders — you can pick any one of them now on Facebook.
Racist Argument #5
“[I]f the issue of a black man and a white woman, and a white man and a black woman, intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny. …” (State of Missouri v. Jackson, 1883.)
The judge here had read some crank scientific opinion asserting that people of mixed race had fertility problems, and therefore mixed marriages should be banned. There was no real evidence for this.
By contrast, no defender of natural marriage wants to ban unions of older people, or sterile people. Nevertheless, we recognize that marriage exists first and foremost for the sake of children. Protecting their well-being is the main reason the state has an interest in regulating marriage. And solid psychological evidence suggests that same-sex marriage in fact hurts kids, that “emotional problems are more than twice as prevalent for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.”
So there is no resemblance at all between objections to same-sex marriage and those to “miscegenation.” In fact, the people relying on cultural prejudice, ideology and outright pseudo-science are all on one side of this issue: the pro-same-sex marriage side . . .
Journalists and transparency activists across the country have done a phenomenal job of shining light on how local law enforcement agencies use emerging technologies to surveil everyday people on a massive scale. It’s often like playing Whac-A-Mole and Go Fish at the same time. One day, the question may be whether police are using drones. The next, automatic license plate readers. After that, facial recognition or IMSI catchers (i.e. Stingrays) or Rapid DNA analyzers.
So many technical terms, so many acronyms. Unfortunately, we need to put yet another one your radar: Automated Vehicle Occupancy Detection, also known as Automated Vehicle Passenger Detection or Automated Vehicle Occupancy Verification.
For years, government agencies have chased technologies that would make it easier to ensure that vehicles in carpool lanes are actually carrying multiple passengers. Perhaps the only reason these systems haven’t garnered much attention is that they haven’t been particularly effective or accurate, as UC Berkeley researchers noted in a 2011 report.
Now, an agency in San Diego, Calif. believes it may have found the answer: the Automated Vehicle Passenger Detection system developed by Xerox. . .
Documents obtained by CBS 8 reporter David Gotfredson show that Xerox’s system uses two cameras to capture the front and side views of a car’s interior. Then “video analytics” and “geometric algorithms” are used to detect whether the seats are occupied. (Read more from “Emerging Privacy Threat: Automated Vehicle Occupancy Detection” HERE)
U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this week that, despite the federal government’s best efforts to “stay ahead of the bad guys,” the nation’s energy infrastructure remains “a major target of cyberattacks.”
“The energy infrastructure is a major target of cyberattacks. That is increasing in frequency and perhaps source,” Moniz, said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
According to Moniz, U.S. natural gas pipelines represent a particularly weak link in the infrastructure chain.
“The natural gas system, the distribution pipes, are a big issue,” he said. “About half of the distribution pipes in the country are 50 years old or older, so that’s a very obvious area.”
According to the energy official, small gas distribution pipelines that carry fuel to gas customers are aging and at capacity. Some high-volume pipelines, meanwhile, remain “underutilized” despite the U.S. shale boom of the past decade. (Read more from “Energy Official: Cyberattack Could Bring U.S. Grid Down” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-29 03:03:462015-04-29 03:03:46Energy Official: Cyberattack Could Bring U.S. Grid Down
More than 10,000 people are now known to have been injured in Saturday’s 7.8-magnitude quake, home ministry national disaster management division chief Rameshwor Dangal told AFP.
Helicopters crisscrossed the mountains above the remote district of Ranachour Tuesday near the epicenter of the weekend earthquake, ferrying the injured to clinics and taking emergency supplies back to villages cut off by landslides.
Meanwhile, some 250 people were believed to be missing following a mudslide and avalanche in Ghodatabela, an isolated village not far from the epicenter of Saturday’s powerful earthquake.
District official Gautam Rimal said heavy snow had been falling Tuesday near the village. He said officials received initial reports of the disaster by phone but then lost contact.
The village, about a 12-hour walk from the nearest town, is along a popular trekking route, but it was not clear if the missing included trekkers. (Read more from “Nepal Death Toll Tops 5,000 as Rescuers Reach Hard-Hit Rural Areas” HERE)
Young women and girls take captive and used as sex slaves by Islamic State militants are now having secret abortions to avoid being alienated by their communities, a new report has revealed.
In September, ISIS militants abducted between 1,500 and 4,000 women and children from the Christian and Yazidi community, according to the Human Rights Watch. Because they viewed the females as “spoils of war,” the fighters reportedly felt entitled to use them as sex slaves.
“When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled,” said Christian author and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer.
“[However] Islam avoids the appearance of impropriety, declaring that the taking of these sex slaves does not constitute adultery if the women are already married, for their marriages are ended at the moment of their capture,” he added.
According to the Sunday Times, some Kurdish doctors are now performing illegal abortions and hymen surgeries on girls who have been able to escape in an attempt to reverse signs of sexual abuse. One Yazidi business man, who is helping to “re-kidnap” captured girls and bring them back to their homes, revealed that many victims, some as young as eight, feel deeply ashamed about the rape they have undergone. (Read more from “Escaped Yazidi Girls Ashamed to Return Home After ISIS Used Them as Sex Slaves, Undergo Secret Abortion” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-29 03:03:142015-04-29 03:03:14Escaped Yazidi Girls Ashamed to Return Home After ISIS Used Them as Sex Slaves
Today, the Alaska Legislature is being held over by the governor in an attempt to force our representatives to address two of his “pet projects.”
These are (1) Medicaid expansion, and (2) increased educational funding.
Regarding Medicaid funding:
At this point, Alaska has approximately 160,000 citizens who are receiving Medicaid services. The current system is inculcated with fraud and abuse throughout. One example of this abuse is at ANMC where travel expenses are covered by Medicaid reimbursement. Last year alone there were 5900+ “no shows” for medical appointments even when travel was validated and expenses were paid. This is just one example of the fraud and abuse. The system is filled with these examples.
Medicaid reimbursement is paid at a higher rate than Medicare for the elderly and Tricare for veterans. Elderly citizens have been paying into Medicare their entire employed life, and veterans have paid with their service. Medicaid recipients have paid nothing for their coverage. Why should the elderly and veterans get in line behind single, young individuals fit for work who have paid nothing?
Additionally, within 2 years, the State of Alaska will be on the hook for 10% of the cost of Medicaid expansion. Where are we going to get the additional funds for the expansion of this program when the current budget is approximately $4 billion in the red? Within 2 years, we will have depleted our entire budget reserve and will be looking at various revenue enhancement sources to maintain the largess of government. It is extremely unwise to expand a program which will force us to incorporate additional taxes and fees to maintain this expansion.
Regarding Educational funding:
Alaska currently spends more than any state in the country for educational services and certainly more than most anywhere in the world. Currently we rank 39th overall in the nation. One must ask why we are not getting a better result. For many years, the Alaska legislature’s response was to simply throw more money at the educational system with the idea that more money would surely encourage a better outcome. It has not. Currently the overhead, to include a top heavy administration is over 52% of the total cost. One would think the bulk of money expended should go directly into the classroom. This is not the case.
Today, considerable pressure is being applied to the legislature through the Alaska Democrat Party and their support associations like Great Alaskan Schools to simply advance more money to fix the “broken window” instead of evaluating the root cause for the broken window of education.
NEA and the monopoly of Public Education has a substantial stranglehold on the educational services of Alaska even when other states all over the country are developing a variety of educational options which will give Alaskan students an even more difficult time competing with students of other states. Unfortunately, this monopoly is not for the advancement of educational excellence, but simply for force and control.
The system is generating one idea that in order to fix the discrepancy of education competition, we must throw more money at the existing system and develop a robust pre-school program. At some point in time, advocates of this concept will be recruiting their future students in the maternity wards in all the hospitals. It is as if children should have limited contact with their parent units in order to progress in their new “educational model.”
What to do? Please take the time to write all your legislators immediately that they “stop the excessive bleeding.” At some point in time we must say enough is certainly enough. I would suggest that this time has come as we are OUT OF MONEY!
Michael Chambers is a political activist who is the Chair of the Alaska Libertarian Party and the Chair of United for Liberty which is the largest umbrella organization for liberty and less government citizens in Alaska.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-28 23:59:592015-04-28 23:59:59Alaska Legislature Being Held Over by Governor in an Attempt to Address ‘Pet Projects’
We live in an age of sensationalism. We find ourselves in an era where every headline has to grab your attention, regardless of its substance in order to generate your digital patronage.
That’s the news industry in which we live.
I’m hoping this can cut through that.
To the looters, to the vandals, the felons, the people in Baltimore (and elsewhere) ruining this great Republic of ours: before you call me a racist, before you call me insensitive – understand that to use both would be an oxymoron.
It is my complete lack of any interest in your race, background, gender, personal beliefs and/or struggles that makes me an insensitive jerk. I accept that. It also makes me incapable of discrimination.
You are animals. If you are able to destroy the home or business of your neighbor, you’ve lost your humanity. If you are able to harm your fellow man, to scare their children, to do so with a clean conscience, merely because of something that some cop may or may not have done, which has nothing to do with you – you are a horrible human being. You disgust me, as you should anyone who wishes to be a part of civilized society.
Leftists will come to your defense and demand “understanding”. You deserve none. We are past the point of understanding. You deserve justice.
I reserve my “understanding” for the people you’ve hurt, for the businesses you’ve cost countless sums of money, blood, sweat and tears. If that makes me “insensitive”, then you are the one who is placing greater value on the grievance of the felons, than that of the tax-paying, law abiding citizen. You are siding with the criminal, over the local business owner.
I was raised in Canada, and moved to the United States as soon as I was legally able. This is not the America I sought. This is not the shining city on a hill which I admired from afar. It turns my stomach, and it makes me even more sick to know that people like me will be vilified for voicing these opinions.
This isn’t just a dark day for America, this is a dark day for humanity. These actions don’t merely bring shame on any individual race. Rather, the human race. To all the decent people left, kiss your wives and hug your children. We are on the cusp of darkness the likes of which this country has never seen.
Signed, One Insensitive Jerk.
(See “Dear Racist, Looting, Rioting Scumbags in Baltimore…”, originally posted HERE)
It should have been a routine abortion in the early second trimester. The woman was having her ninth abortion, as former Serbian abortionist Stojan Adasevic describes in the documentary “The First Hour.”
Adasevic, who is now a pro-life leader in Serbia, had performed over 48,000 abortions before doubts about the procedure made him stop —other sources claim that number is closer to 60,000.
Adasevic credits his pro-life conversion to two things: an unusual series of dreams, and this particularly disturbing experience he had while performing what should have been a routine abortion. He describes the procedure:
I opened up the womb, tore the placenta, the birth waters flowed out, and I got to work on the inside with my abortion forceps. I grabbed something, crushed it a little, removed it, and threw it onto a cloth. I look, and I see a hand – quite a large hand. The child was 3, perhaps 4 months old. I had no tape to measure it.
At three months, a preborn baby is fully formed with fingers and toes. All of the organs and body systems are present. The baby has fingerprints, and breathes amniotic fluid in preparation for life outside the womb. Adasevic goes on to say:
Someone had spilled some iodine on a part of the table and the hand fell in such a way that the nerve endings came in contact with the iodine. And what happened? I look and I say, “my God, the hand is moving by itself.” I nevertheless carry on with my forceps, and again catch something, crush it, and pull it out. I think to myself, “let it not be a leg.” I pull, and look. A leg.
I want to put the leg on the table, carefully, so that it isn’t near the moving hand. As my arm falls, I hear a bang behind my back. I jumped, and automatically, my grip on the forceps loosened. At this very moment, the leg completed a somersault and fell next to the hand.
I look – both hand and leg are moving by themselves. I nevertheless, once again, direct my instrument into the womb, and begin to crush everything inside. I think to myself that all I need to complete the picture is the heart. I continue to crush, and crush, and crush, and till I am sure that I have ground everything inside into a pulp, and once again pull out the forceps.
As I pull out the mess, thinking it will be bone fragments I lay it on the cloth, I look, and I see a human heart, contracting and expanding and beating, beating, beating. I thought I would go mad. I can see that the heartbeat is slowing, ever more slowly, and more slowly still, until it finally stops completely. Nobody could’ve seen what I had seen with my very own eyes, and be more convinced than I was — I had killed a human being.
This strange and terrible experience opened Adasevic’s eyes to the horror of what he was doing. This powerful encounter with the humanity of the preborn was stark in contrast to the training he received. In the documentary, Adasevic describes his daily work as an abortionist:
There were times when I used to carry out 20, 25, 30 or even 35 abortions every day. We used to work five days a week….
He had been trained to regard the preborn baby as subhuman. He had been taught that life did not begin until after the baby was born.
They taught us and they taught us, told us that life began with the first cry. When a baby cries for the first time. That up to that moment, a human being is like any other organ in a woman’s body, like an appendix. The removal of an appendix from a mother’s body is not murder.
Only a child that had been born, and had cried, could be killed. It hasn’t cried, then there can be no talk of murder. That is why, immediately after birth, children were taken and their heads submerged in a bucket of water. A child that would take in water instead of air. And would never cry. That was, therefore, not regarded as murder. Terrible, but that was how things were.
Abortion and infanticide, then, were morally permissible. Both were legal. Adasevic said he first began to question abortion when he began having unusual dreams. The documentary notes:
He dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence.
The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night, he asked the man in black and white who he was. “My name is Thomas Aquinas.”
“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked me in my dream.
“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,” St. Thomas told me.
Thomas Aquinas would be a strange figure to appear in an anti-abortion dream. He didn’t address abortion directly in his writings and did not believe life began at conception. He believed that the soul did not enter the preborn baby until 40 days after conception (for a boy) or 80 days (for a girl).
Ultrasound had recently become available, and it showed moving pictures of preborn babies. The new technology did not sway Adasevic – but he started having the series of dreams.
After the disturbing dreams and the horrific abortion experience, Adasevic told the hospital where he worked that he would no longer do abortions. His pro-life conversion came at great cost:
Never before had a doctor in Communist Yugoslavia refused to do so. They cut my salary in half, fired my daughter from her job, and did not allow my son to enter the university.
Adasevic has worked to change hearts and minds. He was responsible for the airing of a pro-life documentary on Serbian television. His dramatic conversion story is chilling, but also inspiring. A dedicated abortionist has become a pro-life hero.
Incidentally, Adasevic owes his life to another abortionist’s mistake. His mother was pregnant with him when she sought an abortion, but the abortionist botched it and he was born alive.
(See “Abortionist Who Performed Over 40,000 Abortions Becomes Pro-Life Activist”, originally posted HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-28 01:56:582015-04-28 01:56:58Abortionist Who Performed Over 40,000 Abortions Becomes Pro-Life Activist
One of the more destructive behaviors of those engaged in politics is the willful conflation of political or moral arguments with constitutional and legal arguments. Nowhere is this more evident than with debate over coercing states to recognize same-sex relationships as marriages.
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear two and a half hours of oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, and three other cases in which district and appellate courts were split, on whether to toss out state marriage laws or not. Two months ago, the 6th Circuit upheld Ohio’s right to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman, thereby establishing a split with other federal circuits and creating the need for intervention of the Supreme Court.
What is before the Court?
In order to understand what is at stake this week, and eventually in June when the court renders a decision, we must first discern what is not before the court.
The court is not rendering an opinion, nor should it, on the morality or prudence of same-sex relationships. That is a question for society to answer.
The court is not rendering an opinion on whether two consenting adults have the liberty to live together in all ways. They certainly have that right and have been doing so for quite some time.
The issue before the court is whether there is a federal constitutional right for same-sex partners to obtain a marriage license, thereby preventing the people or legislators of sovereign states from defining marriage as it always has been since the nation’s founding.
This is not a question of religiosity or a debate over culture. That is a societal conflict that will be settled outside of court. Even the strongest supporter of homosexuality or the idea of a same sex marriage cannot deny the fact that there is no mention of any form of marriage in the Constitution. States have plenary authority over marriage. Justice Kennedy’s primary argument for overturning DOMA was that it represented federal encroachment on a state’s “broader authority to regulate the subject of domestic relationships” (even though DOMA only defined marriage for federal purposes); certainly it would be hypocritical of him to now create a federal mandate barring states from defining marriage.
Corrupting the 14th Amendment
Supporters of federal coercion contend that their aspirations are mandated by the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. But that is a prima facie absurdity because everyone in this country, including homosexuals, indeed have the right to marry. If they don’t desire or feel unable to marry the way the term has been defined since creation, that is not a denial of their due process. Remember, every homosexual couple also has the right to live together without a marriage, much like many heterosexual couples do in our generation.
What plaintiffs are asking is for the federal court system to simultaneously change the definition of marriage (which is not mentioned in the Constitution) while precluding states from maintaining their own definition through their democratic processes. It is simply beyond reason to believe that the 14th Amendment was drafted to prevent states from denying a status that nobody would have conjured up at the time, especially a status that runs counter to Natural Law and Common Law. In the very least, proponents of same-sex marriage need to use the democratic process to change the definition of marriage in order to achieve their goals. And judging by their bravado about recent polls, what do they have to fear from letting the people decide?
In order to assert a new fundamental right, the Supreme Court has laid out a constitutional test in Washington v Glucksberg (1997) when the court ruled unanimously that assisted suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest. The asserted right has to be so “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” that “neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed.” To prove a substantive due process violation of that right the court has ruled in Malagon de Fuentes v. Gonzales (2006) that the aggrieved person must show how this right is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”
How can anyone assert such a claim of a concept that was not even conceived until this generation, thereby bypassing the political process to create that right?
Where is this headed?
Furthermore, what plaintiffs in the marriage cases can never answer is this: if marriage – as dictated by federal courts – is no longer defined as a special union between one man and one woman, what is the definition of marriage? They would have to define marriage, in the course of redefining it. They would have to draw parameters but it seems there is absolutely no legal jurisprudence one can employ to include homosexual relationships in the definition of marriage and not polygamist or incestual relationships
If anything, there is more of a Natural Law argument to include those relationships before homosexual ones because they can procreate. Unless of course, the court here is more interested in solving a political matter, than a legal one.
Accordingly, there is no rational basis for any one of the Justices to decide in favor of coercing states to adopt homosexual marriages but not all other relationships. Yet, four and possibly five Justice are so driven by personal beliefs that rational basis and legal jurisprudence will never sway their decision. So what is this really about?
The only way the Court can arrive at the conclusion so many in the media are supporting is for them to create a new protected class carved out exclusively for homosexuals. By using the court to create a new fundamental right and protected class instead of the political process to resolve a societal question, the Court will codify the anti-religious bigotry we’ve witnessed over the past few years into law. An Oregon baker, for example, is facing a $135,000 fine for not engaging in involuntary servitude to provide a specific service for a homosexual wedding.
Perforce, what is really before the court tomorrow has nothing to do with liberty, love, and equality for homosexual relationships; it is all about corrupting the Constitution and using the boot of government to violate the individual and religious rights of the other 97% of the population. (See “What’s Really at Stake With SCOTUS’s Marriage Decision?”, originally posted HERE)
[Editor’s note: The following is a recent interview with this article’s author]
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-28 01:56:352015-04-28 01:56:35What’s Really at Stake With SCOTUS’s Marriage Decision?
