Posted on 10/23/2022 6:37:39 AM PDT by Jacquerie
Standing over and looking down at the remains of the US Constitution, retired Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy recently admitted in an interview why he provided the fifth vote in Obergefell v. Hodges. “It seemed to me just wrong that under the Constitution, over 100,000 adopted children of gay parents could not have their parents married. I just thought this was wrong.” Well, there you have it. Kennedy admitted an open secret; he let his passions rule his reason and in so doing imposed radical change on an unwilling society.
Obergefell was a judicial charade and fraud. It had nothing to do with established Constitutional or judicial standards; it had everything to do with progressing the living and breathing Constitution. Fabricating social justice rights is the essence of progressivism and the Scotus’ habit of pulling rights out of thin air isn’t new.
Like individuals, institutions are also creatures of habit. Scotus began, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the unconstitutional habit of defining rights. In his concurring opinion, Justice Goldberg cited the 9th Amendment as the basis for invalidating Connecticut’s prohibition on chemical, commercially available birth control.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Black rejected reliance on unwritten fundamental rights as an illegitimate pretext for unrestrained judicial discretion. He found no such “awesome powers over lawmaking.” The Ninth Amendment was “enacted to protect state powers against federal invasion”, and not as “a weapon of federal power to prevent state legislatures from passing laws they consider appropriate to govern local affairs.”
Griswold let loose an avalanche of court-derived rights from abortion, long hair for schoolboys, pole dancing for erotic dancers, water quality standards for municipalities, and eventually marriage for homosexuals.2 While 14th Amendment abuse in recent years supplanted erroneous Ninth Amendment justification, Griswold and its right to marital privacy, penumbras & emanations are still the law of the land. Horrible Scotus decisions rarely go away.
It wasn’t always this way, in which a panel of unaccountable lawyers assumed sovereign powers and set society’s boundaries. Quite the contrary, our wonderful governing system as designed was Lockean in approach and application. Scotus’ assumption as owner and gate-keeper of all rights is a regressive throwback to the 17th century when absolute monarchs, the Stuart line, claimed possession of all English rights.
The great 17th century Rights of Englishmen were pried, often through great violence, from the Stuart kings.3 Through it all, the English kings remained sovereign. As such, they were the repository of all power. The Rights of Englishmen are gifts from the king.
From development of the Biblical truth that “all men are created equal,” and the denial of the Rights of Englishmen to England’s North American colonies, colonists slowly determined over the 18th Century that THEY, in society, were actually the sovereign owners of government. As such, We the People are the fount of rights civil, positive and political that do not violate God’s Natural Law.4 The Ninth Amendment says so.
Subject to the limitations of God’s Law, the Natural Law, the people and their civil society remain sovereign. They, and they alone, are the grantors of powers to government and civil rights to protect themselves.
Because society loans only certain powers to government, and the rest are retained, the national government itself has no claim whatsoever to new and independent rights or powers. The Ninth Amendment is not whimsical. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights its protections have a substantive end; they identify “the rights that the Constitution’s system of enumerated powers, indirect voting and separation of powers is designed to protect.”
The inclusion of the Ninth Amendment was, in part, an attempt to be certain that rights protected by state law were not supplanted by federal law simply because they were not enumerated. There is no genuine theoretical obstacle to their judicial enforcement by Scotus.5 In a federal republic contradicting laws among the states should be common. So what if California and Massachusetts promote homosexual marriage while other states prohibit the practice?
As opposed to fanciful and often incoherent Scotus’ opinions, state laws and constitutions are typically grounded in reality. To make its decisions, the judiciary needs judicial standards. Society does not. The establishment of judicial standards or metrics from which to make their decisions must start with rights declared by society, not by Scotus itself.
Article V related ping!
When the people of CA amended their Constitution in 2008 to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the Scotus was duty bound under the 9th Amendment, not to destroy it, but rather to defend the measure as a right retained by the people.
Not exactly.
Both A4:S2:C1 and the 9th Amendment are in reference to the body of laws, Privileges and Immunities or right, as they were known at the time that the language was Ratified. The 9th speaks of rights retained, not which may be retained.
The requirement that government honor marriage between a man and a woman, and here I’m referring to marriage under the then extent English Common Law and not in reference to requiring state issued licenses which came later in the States, is derived from the P&I of that character.
Now, while it may take effort to show what ARE our P&I it is actually very easy to show what are not P&I, for anything that was illegal among any of the several States when these were Ratified cannot be considered a right retained by the people when they were Ratified ... thus there was not, is not, nor can there ever be a constitutional right to engage in homosexual behavior ... for example.
This is the essential problem. A person is chosen to be a Supreme Court justice who is a soulless, unchurched, unprincipled, ignorant, unread, agnostic (because too lazy to become an educated atheist and commit to any belief in anything).
Not that Kennedy is solely to blame.
None of these legalized gay marriage laws should have ever seen the light of day. Craven unprincipled legislators should never have drafted them.
It's probably way too much to expect our pols to pass moral laws, but could they at least NOT pass laws that cross the abomination line?
“A person is chosen to be a Supreme Court justice who is a soulless, unchurched, unprincipled, ignorant, unread, agnostic (because too lazy to become an educated atheist and commit to any belief in anything)”
That surely describes the newest member of the Supreme Court.
What makes this worse is that the Supreme Court could have achieved the same outcome with less damage to the constitutional structure simply by using the full fait ha and credit clause.
Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution: “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.”
IOW, they could have achieved the outcome they wanted simply by saying that if a couple is married in California or Massachusetts, for example, the state in which they reside must recognize that. Instead, they used a broad brush and invalidated all laws against gay marriage.
Full faith and credit does not prevent one state from passing laws that contradict those in another state.
It refers to judicial proceedings. An entirely different topic under full faith and credit.
It also refers to things like driver’s licenses. If you have a New York driver’s license, it’s valid in any other state you drive through. Documents like that are required to be accepted by all states once issued validly by a single state.
The same applies to marriage. If you’re married in Virginia, say, Maryland or New York or California or Pennsylvania cannot say well, you may be married in Virginia, but we refuse to recognize you as married here. Under that standard, they could have accomplished the same goal through the full faith and credit clause.
"It seemed to me just wrong that under the Constitution, over 100,000 adopted children and many yet to be adopted could be the victims of two biological males, one or both of which pretend to be or actually believe they are a female."
The only reason that marriage between a man and a woman is not defined in the Constitution is because the writers could never conceive that this country would ever define it as anything else...
Marriage is an institution created by God, not man...
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