Liberal Lunatic of the Day ~ Judge Karlton

Liberal Lunacy ^ | 9/16/2005 | Beckwith

[Beckwith]

Judge Lawrence K. Karlton is the Senior District Court Judge, for the U. S. District Court, Eastern District of California.  He was nominated by Jimmy Carter.  Judge Karlton is an activist federal judge.  He routinely rules against corporations and federal and state agencies and for radical environmentalists and secularists.

On September 10th, Judge Karlton ruled that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional.  He ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God and is unconstitutional."

The case was brought by Michael Newdow, a pain-in-the-ass atheist who had previously sued to challenge the use of the phrase.

Judge Karlton, based his opinion on a fiction.  Karlton said he was bound by precedent to find that recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the words “one nation under God” violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.  The precedent Karlton cited was the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court’s 2002 decision in the Newdow case.  The precedent doesn't exist.

In 2004, the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit.  It determined that since Newdow didn’t have custody of his daughter, he lacked standing to sue in her behalf – a technicality, but one that negated the appeals court ruling.

Earlier this year, on August 10, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Virginia case that the Pledge was constitutional.  The San Francisco ruling will be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and if the Pledge is ruled unconstitutional there, the Supreme Court will likely take the case and this time address the merits.

Judge Karlton is one of those federal judges, who have steadily redefined the words “establishment of religion.”  The Founding Fathers wrote those words to prevent the establishment of a government sponsored religion. The kind that caused many of them to flee Europe.  They did not write those words to mean no recognition of a Creator in the public square. 

The Founders were religious men. Their vision of America didn't exclude a nondenominational school prayer, a moment of silence in the classroom, a public display of religious symbols, an invocation at graduation and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

If Judge Karlton's ruling stands, it would also be an impermissibly coercive religious act for students to read the words, “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” from our Declaration of Independence and students would not be able to recite Lincoln's stirring words, “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” from the Gettysburg Address.

John Adams affirmed, “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people” and James Madison, the author of the First Amendment stated, “Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.”

George Washington observed, “I am sure that never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a Divine interposition in their affairs, than those of the United States.”  While Thomas Jefferson warned of the activist judge, saying “The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Jefferson was describing Judge Lawrence K. Karlton.

[Beckwith]

Note:  I found this story in Pravda and I couldn't help but notice the irony.  For 70-plus years, the Soviet Union outlawed all religion and forced atheism on its people until the wall fell.  Now the people of the former Soviet Union can worship openly.

But here, Judge Lawrence Karlton and his ilk are turning the United States into the old Soviet Union where anything spiritual in the public square is prohibited by law.