Posted on 06/08/2015 8:40:08 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It seems surreal a single unelected lifetime judge could decide that the nation’s supreme law requires its unwilling states to derail human history’s central social institution. The bad news is that’s likely to happen this month. The good news is that unwilling states can sidestep it.
The lifetime judge is Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy. The supreme law is the U.S. Constitution. The unwilling states are Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The social institution is heterosexual marriage. The case is Obergefell v. Hodges. The issue is whether the U.S. Constitution compels unwilling states to license homosexual marriages. And Justice Kennedy – the balance of power between the Court’s four conservative and four liberal judges – will swing that issue’s decision one way or the other.
Of course, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t even mention marriage. It does, however, expressly limit the federal government’s powers, and its founding principle reserves all remaining powers exclusively to the states and their people. How then has it eventuated that the sole determinant still standing between the unwilling states and homosexual marriage is a single Supreme Court justice?
The constitutional deus ex machina is the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Lower courts have already used that clause to impose homosexual marriage on 25 unwilling states (only 12 states have voluntarily adopted the federal handwriting on the judicial wall).
But how could a clause in a Reconstruction-era amendment – designed to prevent the postbellum South from abridging the newly acquired equality of its emancipated blacks – have 147 years later become the horse upon which homosexual marriage rides into the supreme law of the land? Are not race and sexual activity different? Is heterosexual marriage tantamount to homosexual slavery?
Like the Constitution itself, the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t mention marriage.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
*ping*
I’d be happy with this.
Show me a rational state law or regulation and I will find a way the 14th amendment finds it to abridge some aggrived party’s equal rights.
Marriages will always be either legal or not legal, and nothing can change that.
If someone doesn’t care if their marriage complies with government law, then they don’t need to comply, they don’t today, they didn’t 50 years ago.
If you don’t want to comply with marriage law, then don’t, whether you are a Catholic, or a Muslim, or a Mormon polygamist, or an atheist, or a Methodist Minister.
None of that will save marriage.
Is it that "Common Law" Stuff, A "Common Law Marraige"?
HTF did that get started and why?
It is exactly what the radical left and homonazi’s want.
Government got involved in marriage because of tax issues. Prior to the US Civil War government was never involved in marriage outside of courts dealing with the occasional divorce.
But then came income taxes and estate taxes and suddenly having marriages regulated and recorded by the state was important in order to maximize tax revenues.
I’d be just fine with government getting out of regulating marriage because it would be a step towards liberty.
Any time government power and regulation is reversed is a victory for liberty and I’ll take what I can get!
Shalom!
Why?
Should the government get out of the "murder business" and stop prosecution killers?
Should the government get out of the "reproduction business" and stop issuing birth certificates?
Should the government get out of the "death business" and stop issuing death certificates?
Who are the objects of the rights? People. How do people get here? Heterosexual unions. How many people got here from the time the Constitution was written until today via a homosexual union? Zero.
Heterosexual unions are special and the constitution would be irrelevant without them. Homosexuality is just a means of org..m.
See my post #7.
This is why "social engineering" gets messy. The Founding Fathers would have been appalled that we engage in any form of "social engineering" like financial rewards for being married. But alas we are there now and I doubt we can untangle the mess without a total overhaul of the system and I fear for that to come about there will be a catastrophic collapse of the whole shebang first.
Only, government doesn’t “regulate” marriage.
Please explain how it does.
Why does a marriage need to be certified by the government?
Republican self-government has an existential interest in marriage. None of the stated purposes of the supreme law of the land, our Constitution, can be fulfilled without the necessary attributes of this fundamental, God-created, God-instituted, God-defined, one man-one woman institution.
Can you get a legal marriage certificate to marry your mother or your neighbor's 8 year old daughter or your dog?
Government regulates marriage all over the place! You need a marriage license from government if you want to be legally married. Prenuptial agreements have to be notarized by government-approved notaries and then record with government recording offices. Taxes are assessed according to marital status. And etc.
The Defense of Marriage Act is a clear form of government regulation of marriage.
Polygamy is still a prosecutable offense in all fifty states.
And etc.
IIRC, common law marriages began when there was no one around to preform a ceremony. Hence it became easier for a couple to move in together and say they were married. Then formalize it the next time a preacher and/or a Justice of the Peace waltzes into town.
My church certified my marriage. Government needs to stay out of it.
The government needs to enforce contracts where people want to be protected from each other. Let people, hetero-, homo-, poly-, whatever, have whatever binding contracts they want with each other.
The governments get involved with all kinds of taxation and regulatory clauses related to “married” people. Strike them. If necessary, let them apply to “civil union contracts”, but let each government decide which taxes and regulations they want to apply to which types of unions. For example, some are only appropriate when children are involved as part of the “union”.
BUT for God’s sake, the only use for the word “Marriage” is the Judeo-Christian one. Never ever let them take away the word and the holy meaning of it. That is what this is all about.
Lots of couples live together without benefit of marriage. Go for it. Just know that it may cost you in income taxes, in estate taxes, in property rights, in social security benefits. But, hey, if you're fine with only being married in the eyes of your church, skip the government stuff.
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