Free Republic

Gay blades, weary of the indulgent life of easy gratification, want the courts to guarantee their right to marry. Stuffy straights demand that politicians legislate their partner's sexual intentions. The times, they are indeed a-changin'. The Supreme Court delays making gay marriage legal in every state, and its passive-aggressive approach enables a man to marry a man, and a woman to marry a woman in 30 states, and rising. Gays have succeeded in getting the state out of their bedrooms and into the maze of matrimony. Liaisons between men and women are more complicated. In California, which in the past...

Do the states have the right to outlaw same-sex marriage? Not long ago the question would have been seen as absurd. For every state regarded homosexual acts as crimes. Moreover, the laws prohibiting same-sex marriage had all been enacted democratically, by statewide referenda, like Proposition 8 in California, or by Congress or elected state legislatures. But today rogue judges and justices, appointed for life, answerable to no one, instruct a once-democratic republic on what laws we may and may not enact. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to stop federal judges from overturning laws banning same-sex marriage. We are now...

Three points need to be made about Monday's decision by the Supreme Court not to decide whether the equal protection clause of the Constitution grants people of the same sex the right to marry. Point 1: While the court's liberal wing probably wanted to accept cases banning same-sex marriage in five states that have been overturned by three different federal appeals courts in recent months, the conservative majority, along with swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, apparently wished to see states resolve the issue. Perhaps they sought to avoid another Roe vs. Wade in which a previous court overturned all state abortion...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says its doctrine on marriage will remain unchanged despite Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively legalized gay marriage in five states, including Utah, and opened the door for legalization in six more. “As far as the civil law is concerned, the courts have spoken,” the church said in a statement reacting to the Supreme Court’s decision. “Church leaders will continue to encourage our people to be persons of good will toward all, rejecting persecution of any kind based on race, ethnicity, religious belief or nonbelief, and differences in sexual orientation.” In...

“Putting the paddles on the chest of a divisive issue with absolutely no hope of the outcome he promises is a hallmark of Ted Cruz,” says GOP consultant Rick Wilson acidly, the memory of last year’s doomed “defund” effort firmly in mind. Okay, but the fine print on what Cruz wants to do is interesting. Typically when social conservatives start talking up amendments aimed at gay marriage, they’re thinking of a substantive change — namely, a new law of the land that says marriage involves one man and one woman and no other combination. Once that’s in the Constitution,...

WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today issued the following statement regarding the Supreme Court’s decision to reject requests from five States to review state laws that prohibit same-sex marriage. “The Supreme Court’s decision to let rulings by lower court judges stand that redefine marriage is both tragic and indefensible,” said Sen. Cruz. “By refusing to rule if the States can define marriage, the Supreme Court is abdicating its duty to uphold the Constitution. The fact that the Supreme Court Justices, without providing any explanation whatsoever, have permitted lower courts to strike down so many state marriage laws...

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for legal same-sex marriages in five more states. The court refused to hear cases from the states -- Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Indiana -- seeking to keep their same-sex marriage bans in place. Couples in some of those states began applying for marriage licenses just hours after the Supreme Court's decision. CNN affiliate WVEC in Norfolk, Virginia, captured a same-sex couple who rushed to fill out their marriage license documents. Officials in Virginia began issuing same-sex marriage licenses at 1 p.m. Monday. Tony London and Tim Bostic, two plaintiffs in Norfolk,...

Add 11 more states to the list where same-sex marriage is legal. Gay marriage supporters have had a lot to cheer over the past two years thanks to a series of landmark rulings that have paved the way for marriage equality in an ever-increasing number of states. But on Monday morning (October 6), it was something the Supreme court didn’t do that will make same-sex marriage the law in the majority of the country. At the start of the new Supreme Court term, the justices announced that they had rejected appeals from five states that were seeking to prohibit same-sex...

he Supreme Court has turned away appeals from five states seeking to prohibit same-sex marriages, paving the way for an immediate expansion of gay and lesbian unions. The justices on Monday did not comment in rejecting appeals from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. The court's order immediately ends delays on marriage in those states. Couples in six other states should be able to get married in short order. That would make same-sex marriage legal in 30 states and the District of Columbia. But the justices have left unresolved for now the question of same-sex marriage nationwide.

Joshua Matz didn’t bother waiting to write about the Supreme Court until he went to work there. He teamed with a renowned Harvard law professor to finish a book about the court before he started his year as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy. Unlike Matz, Christopher Michel is not listed as an author of the book he worked on years before his clerkship with Chief Justice John Roberts. But former President George W. Bush offered warm praise for onetime presidential speechwriter Michel as his collaborator on his memoir, "Decision Points." Bush said in the book’s acknowledgements that Michel’s...

Don't give America to the hard left liberal progressive commie bastard democrats because you can't find purity in the Republican Party A listener to my Constitution Radio with Douglas V. Gibbs program on KCAA AM1050, and regular reader of Political Pistachio, emails me often to challenge what he considers to be my oath to the Republican Party. I have no oath to the GOP. My oath is to God, and my political ideology is that of a Classical Centrist, which is someone that, without compromise, supports the original intent of the United States Constitution. I wish, I have told Nathan,...

Those who really want to win an election should make it a practice to listen to the demands of the people who will be voting. The opinions of voters regarding what to do about the tens of thousands of illegal alien children who have slithered into our country isn’t hard to discern. Nevertheless, we have come to expect that our wishes will be pushed aside in deference to those of the Chamber of Commerce. We don’t want illegal aliens to be allow to stay in our country. We don’t want amnesty granted to these people. We want them kicked out....

This will certainly go down as one of the last minute, whistle beating acts of the Supreme Court. Very nearly on the eve of the recently extended – and highly contentious – early voting period in Ohio, the Supreme Court has delivered a 5-4 decision overturning a lower court’s ruling and forcing the state to file a new petition if they want the case heard. SCOTUSblog has the details. With just sixteen hours before polling stations were to open in Ohio, the Supreme Court on Monday afternoon blocked voters from beginning tomorrow to cast their ballots in this year’s general...

After 5 1/2 bumpy years of controversial service, the besieged but bolstered attorney general, Eric Holder, resigned. But is this close friend and confidant of President Barack Obama's really stepping down for some benign reason at a critical time for our country, or is there a sinister and strategic plan behind it all? First, it's far more than a coincidence that the United States' chief lawyer is leaving office with more unanswered questions about crucial life-and-death national dilemmas than any previous attorney general. Though most have been accused of sitting on issues, none has been so assailed as Holder for...

The top lawyer arguing a case to overturn Obamacare subsidies believes he can succeed at crippling the law even if it's upheld in every district and appellate court. A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit invalidated the federal exchange subsidies in June. The full court subsequently vacated the ruling and announced it'll re-hear the case, called Halbig v. Burwell. The conservative opponents have a tough battle because the en banc ruling will feature 8 Democratic-appointed judges — four of whom were appointed by President Obama himself — and 5 Republican-appointed judges. Michael Carvin, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, has appealed...

See, this is how a master scares his audience. When an amateur like me tries to do it, it tends to devolve into lame “Romney 2016? trolling. As if Romney isn’t, relatively speaking, the most appealing RINO in the field. (Seriously, would you prefer Jeb Bush or Chris Christie?) That said, I am and will forever remain proud of how effective my many “Huckabee 2016?” posts have been in getting readers to pee their pants. Rush may be a master but I’m at least semi-pro. After you perform your six years of government service, you then retire to the private...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, having decided for some inexplicable reason to do a long interview with a fashion magazine (maybe it is her celebrated collection of lace collars), reaffirmed the most important things we know about her: her partisanship, her elevation of politics over law, and her desire to see as many poor children killed as is feasibly possible. Speaking about such modest restrictions on abortion as have been enacted over the past several years, Justice Ginsburg lamented that “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women.” Then she added: “It makes no sense as a national policy...

There is evidence Burr unsuccessfully attempted to get the British to join in his scheme. In late 1806 after an extended stay at the home of his friend, Andrew Jackson, Burr gathered a small army in preparation for an invasion of New Orleans. When it became clear that their “secret” plan was no longer secret, one of Burr’s partners turned on him in February 1807. Burr was indicted for treason and eventually put on trial for one of the highest crimes against our nation. With the sort of political dirty trick that would become a Democrat hallmark, Burr was acquitted...

Long after the pro-union monopoly National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was adopted in 1935, even strong supporters of this statute rejected the appropriateness of attempting anything analogous in federal, state, or local government. For example, in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who just two years earlier had publicly endorsed and signed the NLRA, wrote a letter to a government union official explaining it is “impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or bind the employer” in dealings with “Government employee organizations” because “the employer is the whole people . . . .” In the late 1950s and early 1960s, politicians...

When a federal appeals court ruled last month that a seemingly arcane wording flaw in the Affordable Care Act should invalidate a central part of the law, many of those who drafted the statute five years ago reacted with shock and anger.. In 2009, they had spent months piecing together a compromise that sought to create a national system of subsidized insurance — but one run by the states. Now, they fear their work could be undone by what some call a "drafting error" and others portray as a political miscalculation. The judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for...