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Polygamy (and Much Worse) will Follow Gay Marriage

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Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue

With the Supreme Court set this week to hear two historic challenges to the traditional definition of marriage, pro-family advocates are charging that legalizing gay marriage would “inevitably” lead to the legalization of polygamy as well.

“No question about it,” Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview Monday afternoon. “If you make the ultimate value a person’s right to express their sexuality with another person and to have that identified as marriage, then how do you keep polygamy from happening?

“How do keep consensual adult siblings from getting married?” he added. “How do you keep a consensual father and adult daughter from getting married? Incest and polygamy will come right after it.”

Land’s conclusion: “You shatter the definition of marriage if you try to expand it to include same-sex marriage.” Land is far from the only social conservative making that argument. The Christian legal organization Liberty Counsel filed a brief with the Supreme Court that states: “Ultimately, there is no principled basis for recognizing a legality of same-sex marriage without simultaneously providing a basis for the legality of consensual polygamy or certain adult incestuous relationships.”

The remarks of Land, a leading social conservative, came in the context of what is expected to be one of the most important weeks in the history of the battle that pro-family forces are waging to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, as the Supreme Court holds two hearings on gay-marriage cases.

Read more from this story HERE.

Boy Scouts Should Not Backtrack On Values

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Photo Credit: National Library of NorwayA national uproar apparently caused the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America to postpone until May a vote on whether to allow homosexual Scouts and Scoutmasters among their ranks.

After more than 100 years as a private organization with the highest of moral standards, top scouting officials had initially floated the idea of rescinding the prohibition on homosexual members and leaders after reaffirming their policy last summer.

This reaffirmation followed just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Scouts to set their own membership policy in regards to homosexuals in the 2008 case, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Rather than resolving to uphold the Scout Law, which says that Scouts are to keep themselves “morally straight,” some members of the executive board began a covert campaign to change the policy. Two members of the executive board in particular were instrumental in pressuring their fellow board members to reconsider the ban.

Reportedly the strongest advocates for changing the common-sense policy were board members Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, and Jim Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young. Pro-family groups have called for their resignation from scouting, as well they should.

Read more from this story HERE.

If you thought feds wanted to track you before, check out now

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The federal government is arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that police investigators and other authorities should be allowed to track American citizens in the U.S. to develop the “probable cause” needed for search warrants and other investigative tools.

But a team of civil-rights experts says such permission would pose a grave danger to freedom-loving citizens who may become the targets of the political influences that hold power at any given moment.

The Supreme Court announced yesterday it will weigh in on the controversy of police attaching GPS tracking devices to citizens’ vehicles to obtain information that may lead to the “probable cause” necessary for search warrants and arrests.

“The court of appeals’ decision, which will require law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant before placing a GPS device on a vehicle if the device will be used for a ‘prolonged’ time period, has created uncertainty surrounding the use of an important law enforcement tool,” said the government’s brief in the case, U.S.A. v. Antoine Jones.

“Although in some investigations the government could establish probable cause and obtain a warrant before using a GPS device, federal law enforcement agencies frequently use tracking devices early in investigations, before suspicions have ripened into probable cause. The court of appeals’ decision prevents law enforcement officers from using GPS devices in an effort to gather information to establish probable cause.”

Read More at WND by Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily

First Amendment Wins in Arizona Campaign Finance Case

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The Supreme Court continued its rollback of campaign finance “reforms” that have seriously infringed our First Amendment rights over the past 35 years.  The court, in a 5-4 ruling Monday, struck down as unconstitutional Arizona’s public financing system for state elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, issued in the final week of the court’s term, sealing the fate of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Act.

The Arizona law challenged in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett benefited candidates for state office who accept public financing.  The law allowed them to receive more taxpayer money in direct response to the campaign activities of privately financed candidates and independent groups.

A candidate got these additional matching funds if his or her initial funding was exceeded by the combined spending of a privately financed opponent and that of independent groups either opposing the candidate or supporting his or her privately financed opponent.

The result?  For every dollar spent by privately financed candidates on political speech and political activity above a certain low threshold, their publicly financed opponents received an additional dollar.

Read More at Human Events by Hans von Spakovsky, Human Events

Elder: Supreme Court to California – ‘Release the Hounds’

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“Today the court affirms what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” So began Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s enraged dissent.

Release up to 46,000 convicted felons, the court recently ordered the state of California. In a 5-4 decision, the court gave California two years to reduce its prison “overcrowding” — or set tens of thousands free. The ACLU, which brought the suit, successfully argued that poor prison conditions violated the prisoners’ rights as a class, not individually, thus the threat of mass premature release.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion, agreed with the lower court, which said that overcrowding and an undermanned medical staff mean “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days.” California houses 143,000 inmates in 33 adult prisons designed for 80,000. The prison conditions, including under-treatment for the mentally ill, wrote Kennedy, “(fall) short of minimum constitutional requirements.”

Where to start with this outrageous decision?

First, elections matter. A Republican president would have seated neither Sonia Sotomayor nor Elena Kagan, who together comprised two-fifths of the majority. President Barack I-look-for-justices-with-empathy Obama filled two liberal vacancies with two liberal justices. Given that the major Republican presidential candidates promised to seat justices in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Sam Alito, this decision would have gone 6-3 the other way.

Read More at GOPUSA

 

Supreme Court’s Scary Power Grab

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The U.S. Supreme Court effectively ordered California on Monday to release 33,000 inmates over two years from an in-state prison population that numbers about 143,000.

Kent Scheidegger of the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation blogged that Californians shouldn’t “bother investing much in a car. It will be open season on cars, given that car thieves (nonviolent offenders) will never go to prison no matter how many times they are caught.”

The 5-4 Plata decision upheld a federal three-judge panel that in 2009 found that overcrowding in California prisons is “criminogenic” — likely to produce criminals — and ordered state prisons to run at 137.5 percent of design capacity. The state’s prisons are designed to hold 80,000 inmates. (Be it noted, 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell.)

Read More at Real Clear Politics By Debra Saunders, Real Clear Politics