* Are you religious? Be afraid. The Court’s opinion shows the justices know their holding has grave implications for the free exercise of religion, but the paragraph in the opinion that purports to reassure does not. Pointedly, it mentions only the freedom to dissent and debate on matters of religion and morality, not the freedom to act on one views. In the wake of this decision, family businesses, non-profits and perhaps even religious congregations will be sued under state and federal civil rights laws. This opinion implies the Court will do nothing to relieve them.
War on polite American society; war on families declared by an out of control and evil Supreme Court.
Ping
This court decision is troubling on other levels too.
1. The states have always handled marriage and family law. Now there is a strong federal component with the Supreme Court having imposed their view of what marriage should be.
2. The Supreme Court, and other courts before this time, took it upon themselves to change the definition of a legal term, as well as the dictionary definition of a word. In order to achieve their goal, they had to change the definition of marriage.
3. The fact that citizens of 32 states, separately from each other, decided to go through the process to amend their constitutions to define marriage meant nothing to the five liberals on the Court.
4. The fact that a handful of states had changed the definition of marriage through the political legislative process was noted by the court, but the fact that most states had reached the opposite conclusion of how marriage should be defined was meaningless to the liberals on the court.
5. Only two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that since some states allowed homosexual marriage, the federal government must likewise do so. Under principles of federalism, the court decided that the states were the ultimate arbiters of how marriage should be defined. But with this ruling, they completely reversed their own reasoning and did not care how states defined marriage. Instead deciding to impose their own definition of marriage.
Arguing about the leaps behind the Obamacare and gay "marriage" rulings is like arguing about which of the 20 largest individual blue whales is the biggest without some means of direct measurement. A whole lot of whoppers went into reading "exchange established by the state" to mean "any exchange, whether or not established by the state". A whole lot of whoppers went into redefining "marriage" to carry a definition that it never held in the history of the world from 5000 BC to 2000 AD, finding that right in a Constitution that never mentions marriage, and stretching FedGov powers so far beyond the Enumerated Powers to cover something that has been an exclusively state responsibility until this week.
Still, my personal vote for most radical act of tyranny is the implication that an invented right never mentioned in the Constitution can take precedence over an enumerated, God-given right. Narrowing free exercise to mere dissent and debate is a shockingly evil and lawless infringement on our God-given rights. If I'm a juror in such a case, nothing a victim of the gay mafia does in response to a demand for wedding services will lead to a guilty vote. The free exercise of religion is as absolute as the right to keep and bear arms. Any thug who infringes on the first of those rights fully deserves an encounter with the second of those rights, or any lesser response.
I’m a lot more worried about its ruling for Obamacare. That ruling affects far more people.
Oh I don’t know.
Dred Scott, Roe V. Wade, NFIB V. Sebelius (Obamacare 2012), all pretty radical and unsupported by the Constitution. Various decisions upholding FDR’s marxist programs were bad as well.
Roe led to you know, deaths, so.....
Bump to that - really good article. Super for the layman, and adds some angles that amplify just how LAWLESS the decision is.