Roe v wade should have been left to the states and so should gay marriage.
Roe v wade should have been left to the states and so should gay marriage.
Your right~~would make it easier to decide what state I want to go to after leaving California!!
>> Roe v wade should have been left to the states and so should gay marriage.
Abortion should be ruled murder at the federal level, and any legislation that forces citizens to support and service homosexual behavior should be thrown out as unconstitutional.
Please tell me you don't think states in 1973 should have had the right to decide whether to kill unborn babies. I'm sure you understand Free Republic's longstanding ban on supporting abortion.
That is a very different question from saying in 2013 that states should be allowed on a state-by-state basis to criminalize abortion.
The first, in a 1973 context, is to ignore the Constitution's equal protection clause, under the 14th Amendment, that “no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The second is to make a pragmatic political decision that reducing the number of murders is the best we can do at present.
Long term, we need to make baby murder illegal nationwide, but there is a long history of different states having different penalties for different types of murders. In principle there's not a constitutional problem if one state wants to execute abortionists and another state just wants to imprison them for life, but failing to punish murderers is bad public policy. It would be entirely legitimate if a predominantly traditional Roman Catholic state wanted to avoid imposing the death penalty for such offenses, based on current Roman Catholic teachings about the death penalty, while a predominantly evangelical Protestant state might be much more willing to put people to death for murder.
With regard to whether homosexual marriage can be left up to the states, we also have the problem of the contracts clause. Article I:10 of the Constitution says that "No State shall... pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts." Legally speaking, a marriage is a contract. We have more than a century of legal precedents with federalizing questions such as polygamous marriage, interracial marriage, and no-fault divorce. Based on that history, it is very questionable whether, once one state has legalized homosexual marriage, we can avoid federalizing the question.