Posted on 04/15/2005 4:56:59 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Chief Justice Roy Moore’s new book So Help Me God is a captivating and unflinching first-hand account of a man on the front lines of the battle between religious freedom and judicial tyranny. This Alabama Supreme Court Justice embodies the true definition of patriotism, inasmuch he has risked his career and reputation to stand by his oath of office and refuses to deny his allegiance to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God for the mere sake of catering to the frenetic, deep-seated anti-religious paranoia of the uber-secular left.
It was on June 9, 1993 that ACLU member Joel Sogol wrote to then-chief justice of Alabama Sonny Hornsby, threatening to sue anyone who continued the time-honored tradition of praying in court. After Roy Moore took office in 1994 and refused to bring a halt to the tradition, the ACLU stepped up their threats of suit over the prayer and, in addition, began hyperventilating over the Ten Commandments plaque Justice Moore had placed in his courtroom. At the beginning of the third month of Justice Moore’s first term of office on March 31, 1995, the ACLU filed suit in U.S. district court against him on the basis that he had illegally imposed his religious beliefs on others in the courtroom, denouncing the prayer as “a religious test.”
The ACLU apparently didn’t feel up to suing all 550 members of Congress and all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who have always begun their daily proceedings with prayers. It may even be a sobering revelation to them that our very first president noted in his inaugural address, “no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.” Nevertheless, it is doubtful that such words would bear much significance to a pathetic, subversive gang of rogue lawyers who have nothing better to do with their time than to bully public officials out of acknowledging their creator and to throw childish temper tantrums over harmless little plaques.
In a priceless act of civil disobedience, Justice Moore erected a 2½-ton granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the State Judicial Building. Moore would later write in his book that “[t]he display of God’s law was not done to make any bold statement, to intimidate or offend anyone, or to push any particular religion. It was simply a reminder that this country was established on a particular God and His divine, revealed laws; it reflected the Christian faith of our founders.”
Flabbergasted, on Halloween 2001, the ACLU ganged up with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Southern Poverty Law Center to file suit over the monument. Demonstrating what loving people liberals can be, in a letter to the legal director of Americans United, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to Justice Moore as a “religious nut in partnership with a fanatical church.” (And showing how smart liberals can be, the letter was accidentally sent to Justice Moore’s attorney, Steve Melchior. Whoops!)
The case was set for trial on October 15, 2002. Less than a month after it ended, on November 18, 2002, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled against the Ten Commandments display, declaring it unconstitutional. In his ruling, Judge Myron stated: “[W]hile the Chief Justice is free to keep whatever religious beliefs he chooses, the state may not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God and attribute to that God our religious freedom.” Perhaps Judge Myron would be compelled to rethink his words if he actually bothered to read the Alabama State Constitution which Moore had sworn specifically to uphold, inasmuch as it reads in the preamble: “We, the people of the State of Alabama, in order to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish the following Constitution and form of government for the State of Alabama” (emphasis added).
On March 2, 2005, the New York Times expressed its disapproval of similar displays in between the Capitol and the State Supreme Court in Texas, and in county courthouses in Kentucky, accusing the displays’ backers of not accepting the “separation of church and state” while explaining that “[t]he Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of a religion.” If nothing else, at least these circumstances have given liberals yet another excuse to evince their maniacal infatuation with the “separation of church and state,” a phrase which we are supposed to believe is somewhere in the Constitution.
If a liberal sneezed and you said “God bless you” he would begin spastically whining about the “separation of church and state.” To appreciate this situation from the perspective of the judicial supremacists, the ACLU lawyers and the New York Times editors, we will just have to pretend for a moment that a) the “separation of church and state” exists in the Constitution, b) Congress is somehow responsible for the placement of the Ten Commandments monuments, and c) the monuments in effect represent an establishment of a state religion.
There. Now it sort of makes sense.
To the contrary, however, the left’s beloved “separation of church and state” mantra originated not in the Constitution, but in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 (11 years after the First Amendment was incorporated into the Constitution) regarding their concerns that the Congregationalists may abuse their power to attain a favored position. Explicitly, Jefferson wrote: “[the] wall of separation between church and state…is a one-directional wall. It keeps the government from running the church, but makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government.”
The self-styled progressive elites have typically justified their anti-Christian bigotry by insinuating that religion must stay away from government, and any case in which it does not is an irrevocable step towards theocracy. Their interpretation of the language of the First Amendment demonstrates how little understanding they have of its actual implications.
By including the establishment clause in the Constitution, the framers were preventing the prospects of theocracy such as that which the Pilgrims purportedly fled from in England before settling on the North American shores. However, there is a reason why Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (emphasis added). What Jefferson was taking into account was the imperative necessity of our leaders and authorities to recognize their inferiority to the divine laws of the solar system and their subordinance to a Higher Power, so as not to confuse themselves with that Higher Power and in due course assume a despotic, tyrannical precedence.
The functionality of our democracy is contingent upon the Hobbesian doctrine that man is inherently corrupt and therefore in need of some degree of governmental supervision. The notion of human fallibility is quintessential of the Judeo-Christian doctrines with which our founders specifically harmonized their vision of a free republic. The acknowledgement of that fallible nature is what distinguishes our system from communism – a system which presupposes that man is basically good, and therefore capable of upholding and preserving a utopian, Edinic society. It distinguishes our system as well from that of monarchism and fascism, both of which presuppose that there is such a thing as Divine Right, or human infallibility; that it is possible for a human leader to take on a godlike authority over his people and govern them in a flawless manner. But because our system recognizes that there is no such thing as human infallibility, our branches of power are balanced, and our leaders are appointed through a democratic process by which the majority of citizens decide who gets to represent them, and for how long.
Secularist liberals tend to accuse Christians of seeing things too much in “black and white,” yet they themselves have adopted a black and white perspective by declining to consider the fact that not everything boils down to the two options of theocracy and secularism. A system of government that is religious in nature does not automatically take on the form of theocracy. It does not mean that its subjects must be coerced into submission to a certain designated religious faith. Whether or not we as individuals decide to subject ourselves to personal dependence on religion, we must recognize that our freedom to do so or not do so at our own will is dependent on our democratic system, and our democratic system is dependent on religion.
It is on account of this brand of narcissistic judicial hubris, this denial of subordinance to a Higher Law that an innocent woman was allowed to be inhumanly starved to death recently, that activist judges have been able to recklessly redefine the institution of marriage, and that an unremitting fetal holocaust has been sanctioned by the highest levels of government for 32 years and counting. The more we forget that we are “one nation under God,” the more we will become “one nation under the State.” If this becomes the case, then our rights will become conditional and susceptible to abuse, rather than God-given and immune to meddling. As many could argue, resting our rights solely on the state is like building a house on sand. (Note to liberals: Please pardon the biblical reference.)
She still appoints people to some boards, like the Board of Governors that oversee the BBC & then there are those powers derived from being the head of the Commonwealth, whatever the title of that position is.
Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner!
FOTFL What is it about dark humor that I always find so appealing?
The stupid war on drugs is a good example of how the moral police are trying to impose morality on people. One of the biggest freedoms is that people have a right to do with their own bodies what they want.
If I let you have whatever you want in your very own state, would you allow the same for me in mine?
Not in the United States. If you want to have a state here, you don't get to make your own rules. The SCOTUS says what the law can and cant be to prevent religious fanatics from stopping social progress.
Like Darrow said when he went down to that hick town in Tennessee, "we have to save the country from these ignorameses". Ignorant, supersticious myths do not belong in the law.
Just as right-thinking people have corrected wrongs in far away states in the past, they have to do the same now. (As when the ACLU lawyers heroically travelled from their New York home in 1925 to challenge education laws in far away Tenessee, so children would not be brainwashed by the myths of their hick religious parents.)
When the government changes that meaning to one white man and one white woman, they abuse the meaning of the word just like you would by changing it to mean the union of two people. Words and sentences have meaning.
So what you're really worried about is that judges might fail to uphold the dictionary?
This isn't about words and you know it. This is about the fact that you don't want same-sex couples to be able to receive any legal recognition of their relationships because you don't approve of them. Period.
Words change in meaning all the time, and it doesn't bother you or anybody else. 'Noon', from the Latin nona (hora), originally meant 'nine o'clock', but it migrated all the way to twelve without even any help from judicial activists. A 'dilapidated' building need no longer be made of stone, and you can 'decimate' your enemy's forces by wiping out considerably more than a tenth of them. This is not the sort of thing you're concerned about.
Words with legal significance change in meaning too, sometimes because a court changes their meaning deliberately. That's not what bothers you either. As I've pointed out before, the framers certainly didn't intend the word 'search' in the Fourth Amendment to include any sort of eavesdropping, yet the Katz court decided that electronic surveillance was going to count as a 'search' for Fourth Amendment purposes. If you genuinely objected in principle to judicial changes in the meanings of words, you'd be complaining that police shouldn't have to get warrants to perform wiretaps.
You don't care one way or the other about lexicography (and lexicography may not even be on your side anyway, since a significant minority is in fact willing to acknowledge same-sex marriages as marriages). What you care about is making sure that two gay men, or two lesbian women, are not able to receive legal recognition of any kind for a committed relationship, because you don't approve of such relationships.
If you're going to make that argument, at least make it honestly. You don't get to claim the moral high ground by posturing as a bold and righteous defender of the dictionary.
Kennedy's holding in Lawrence . . . was a simple case of equal protection turned into judicial mischief by Kennedy and his transcendent liberty interests. . . . [N]owhere in Lawrence does the court declare homosexual sodomy to be a fundamental right or a fundamental liberty interest which kind of kills your argument here dead.
No, it just held that the state doesn't further any legitimate interest by controlling private consensual behavior. That's actually much stronger, in part because it doesn't require that the rights thus protected be 'fundamental'.
But again, let's at least try to be honest here. What bothers you isn't the logic of Lawrence, which you didn't understand anyway or you wouldn't be talking about 'equal protection' (the case was decided under the Due Process Clause) or the 'right to sodomy' (the Court couldn't have been any clearer in its opinion that this is a mischaracterization of the right at issue).
What bothers you is that you don't approve of certain sorts of private consensual behavior and you want it to be possible to outlaw such behavior -- and Justices Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Bryer, Ginsburg, and O'Connor won't let you subject such behavior to the tyranny of the majority. (Which somehow makes them tyrants.)
There's no fundamental right to marry.
The Supreme Court has consistently held that there is, and that's what's relevant to a strictly Constitutional argument. If you're interested in tracing the history of this view, the five most important cases are Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374 (1978), and Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987). (I see jwalsh07 has already pointed you to a couple of these, but if you limit yourself to his list you won't go back far enough -- and you'll miss Justice McReynolds's famous and oft-quoted passage on the scope of liberty rights in Meyer.)
Now -- should the Court recognize a fundamental right to marry? Personally, I think the only consistent alternative is to do away with civil marriage altogether and limit government involvement strictly to the enforcement of people's private agreements, and I'm open to argument on this point. But if civil marriage exists, I see no Constitutional reason for refusing to extend it to same-sex couples. For example, consider the following:
Marriage affords legal protections, monetary benefits, exceptional financial access to one another's property, and a whole host of other rewards that require others to make sacrifices on behalf of the couple.
How about the two spousal privileges I mentioned? Two spouses can't be required to testify against each other, and each of them has the right to keep private marital communications from being introduced as evidence at a trial. These are due process rights that protect a couple's right to a relationship free from unwarranted government intrusion. Do you think that same-sex relationships are inherently less deserving of such due process protections? If so, why?
Monetary benefits, exceptional financial access to one another's property: Like filing joint tax returns? The right to make medical decisions on behalf of the other partner while s/he is incapacitated? The right to inherit from the other spouse in the absence of a written will? The right to bring a wrongful death suit if one's spouse is killed?
These don't strike me as requiring any 'sacrifice' on anyone else's part, nor do they strike me as things to which same-sex couples just obviously aren't entitled. Do you have something else in mind here?
Whatever it may be, please bear the following two questions in mind. If there are some other 'sacrificial' financial benefits conferred on married couples, should such benefits be conferred at all? And if there are reasons why they should, then why don't those reasons also apply to same-sex couples?
Marriage is a privilege and a collective approval for a given licensed couple.
This isn't true of civil marriage under U.S. law. According to at least a century's worth of jurisprudence, a civil marriage is the exercise of a fundamental right; the exercise of a right does not require, and therefore does not involve, 'collective approval'.
(I'll be fairly busy today and all weekend, so if I don't respond for a while -- even several days -- please don't take it for lack of interest.)
('Bryer' = 'Breyer'.)
Half a century on your side you say?
Well if a half century is powerful stuff, then how about a century and a half.
Homosexual practices were not considered a 'right' anywhere in this country for about a century and a half following the Constitution, and at least that long preceding the Constitution. That is three hundred years of precedent.
If the SCOTUS can ignore three hundred years, I can't see why they would think that fifty years of precedent is so powerful. Three hundred is a bigger number....but you also wrote that words change meaning, so maybe fifty is more.
Words change in meaning all the time, and it doesn't bother you or anybody else.
A word can change all it wants, but we are talking about the intent. If a word no longer describes the intent properly, you would simply go back and find the intent of the law which is exactly what conservatives have been saying. You can do this by finding out which laws they passed under their own Constitution that they had just signed.
Based upon your example you would be making the case that if the word 'right' changed in meaning to mean left someday, the laws of physics would no longer apply in chemistry or anything else. (you can drink that arsenic, the name has been changed to milk so its okay)
The writers of the dictionary could overrule reality itself with a creative (activist) stroke of a pen. That is not a good example for your side, in fact it is perfect for judicial conservatives.
Moral principles that were part of the presuppostions of the founding population cannot be simply discarded because a group of unelected judges decide their novel view of morality trumps all moral principles since Plymouth Rock.
We've begun to think about this upside down; the courts are making too many things a right now.
We don't extend marriage privileges because people have relationships.
We extend them because some relationships are biologically, morally, and economically likely to produce healthy, well-adjusted children; these children are our very future, and it is they who will maintain our nation's vitality. Practical concerns and a sense of restraint have kept us from verifying reproductive intent on the part of the couples.
Two guys holding hands are just that. The state shouldn't need to do anything more than what it would do for two friends: grant power of attorney upon request. Anything else is putting the two guys on the level of a "reproductively encouraged" couple. That's taxation without representation. That's moral encouragement from the state for something that is morally untenable to a majority of Americans.
Now if you can get the majority of Americans to agree to this uncomfortable situation, I would stand aside. But for now, I'm a staunch defender of marriage as tradition defines it. Making Christian citizens agree to support the redefinition of marriage (by demanding their stamp of approval in the form of marriage licenses) could bring down the Republic. It's that much of a hot button issue for some people.
The government no more has the right to represent a religious belief than it has to offer approval to behaviors that the majority of citizens find immoral.
I realize the courts don't see things my way, but I do think they're activist on a number of issues like firearms liberties, family values, death penalty, borders, immigration, and even some illogically restricted religious pageantry like the Cima Road Cross case. We do need to reform them, it's just a question of how.
A word can change all it wants, but we are talking about the intent.
And about whether you favor that intent. Again, my point is precisely that the argument is not about the meanings of words. If you want to defend the moral principle that the government can prohibit private consensual conduct of which you disapprove, then you should say so (which is what you're doing) instead of pretending the argument is about 'definitions'.
We don't extend marriage privileges because people have relationships. We extend them because some relationships are biologically, morally, and economically likely to produce healthy, well-adjusted children; these children are our very future, and it is they who will maintain our nation's vitality.
After my grandmother died, my grandfather remarried at the age of 90, to an 87-year-old woman. Are you seriously suggesting that 'we' extended them 'marriage privileges' because 'we' thought they were 'likely' to produce children?
Are you suggesting that mutually infertile opposite-sex couples aren't really married or aren't deserving of 'marriage privileges'?
Making Christian citizens agree to support the redefinition of marriage (by demanding their stamp of approval in the form of marriage licenses) could bring down the Republic.
Civil marriage doesn't confer the blessing of any citizen, Christian or otherwise. On the other hand, limiting the legal definition of marriage to what Christians approve (if that's what you're defending) sure looks like a First Amendment problem to me.
We've begun to think about this upside down; the courts are making too many things a right now.
Turn this around. 'We've begun to think about this upside down; the courts are stripping the government of too many powers.' Still like it?
The problem isn't 'too many' rights; it's not enough actual rights and too many pseudo-rights that confer the power to infringe actual rights.
I think that's a better way to characterize your disagreement with me over the legal recognition of same-sex marriage: you think such a recognition would 'force' people to give their approval to something they regard as immoral (in violation of their rights), and I disagree because I don't think any such consent is involved.
Before artificial insemination, test-tube babies, and cloning, the set of humans who can reproduce only included pairs of unique males individually combined with unique females. The strict set that could reliably bear children is "usually" between 16 and 45. Because true intent was private, neither church nor state would ever ask what they planned to do with bearing children. Because marriage was traditionally for life, the old age of the couples was never a consideration.
This is about life. It's not a game. This is either God's hand in the process of bringing life into the world, or it's evolution in progress. The state has no business getting in the way of either; it doesn't matter how you see the cosmos, human children are the intent of state-licensed marriages.
On the other hand, limiting the legal definition of marriage to what Christians approve (if that's what you're defending) sure looks like a First Amendment problem to me.
It's OK to question the Christian aspect, but science is science. Without reproduction, the state ceases to exist. The ironic thing is that most same-sex "partners" are likely to believe in evolution. There is no evolutionary benefit to the species for supporting "friends" pairing up away from their potential mating partners and knitting sox together. Darwin would be amused to hear that some species was paying rewards to its couples not to reproduce.
Without reproduction, the state ceases to exist.
Yes, without any reproduction. But it's not necessary that every married couple reproduce. I'd also argue that the existence of married couples without children (whether same-sex or opposite-sex) itself contributes to the societal stability necessary to raise the next generation.
Later -- I'm out of here for a while.
What about age limits? What about family history tests for consanguinity? How about blood tests for diseases that could endanger a fetus? Certainly there is state approval.
Let's be clear: I'm not talking about any state limits on friendships. I'm not obstructing permission to gain power of attorney. I'm simply saying marriage is marriage, and one can't redefine the English language without due cause. Call it whatever you like, but don't tax me for it, don't tie up my magistrates with it, and certainly don't tell my children that the state approves.
What about age limits? What about family history tests for consanguinity? How about blood tests for diseases that could endanger a fetus? Certainly there is state approval.
Age limits have to do with the issue of consent, not with the form of the marriage. Consanguinity is too complicated to dispose of in a single post; suffice it to say that it's not (only) a matter or moral approval or disapproval of one's choice of spouse (or the gender thereof). Neither is disease control.
To be clear here, when I say there's no issue of approval involved, I mean that the decision of two people to get married does not involve any securing of societal approval for their personal choice of spouse or mate or of any behavior within their marriage than can properly be characterized as strictly private.
And now I really am gone. So long and thanks for the chat.
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