WE STAND A MUCH BETTER CHANCE PROTECTING LIFE IF WE ADOPT A FEDERALIST STRATEGY.
I don't feel like listing my bona fides here on FR yet again on the pro-life issue. I will just say I have been as big an activist on this issue as -I would be willing to bet money- anyone here. I do NOT understand the unreasoning kamikazee mentality of evangelicals, who had rather have one hundred per cent of ZERO, than 80 per cent of 90 per cent, with the goal of changing the state constitutions to restrict abortion state by state. Did you know that this was one of the reasons for Harry's abortion? New York state was about to restrict abortion yet again. You can read about it in the book Aborting America by NARAL founder (and now pro-life) Bernard Nathanson, a self professed "secular humanist."
On the issue of marriage, the issue is similiar. Rather than insist on bringing the issue under federal jurisdiction, we should be insisting that states are sovereign in the issue. EVERY SINGLE PLACE where the issue has gone to a state (not to a court), we have won, and won handily. Why in God's name you people would want to reverse that and amend the constitution (which you will NEVER accomplish, btw) is beyond me. Stick to the venues already provided for you in a GREAT legal document. Demand that the courts do the same. That is the path to get what you want, as well as the path that will insure other liberties that neither you, nor the founding fathers, envisioned assaults upon.
The founders did not write the issue of abortion into the constitution because the issue of murder is, AND SHOULD BE, left to the states.
You are speaking of criminal prosecution. I am speaking of protection of rights. Indeed, your life is protected ultimately by the Constitution, not by any state law.
Anywhere you go in the US, no one may legally take your life without due process of law. Even the states do not have the ability to trump that one, and kill you without just cause/due process.
Now being Pro-Life, you recognize that life is life. If no state can sanction your death without just cause/due process, then how can it be that any state has the right to sanction an unborn baby's death? Your position bears no justice, and makes no sense.
Issues of murder rightly belong to the states....., and that is where abortion was until the USSC hijacked the issue in 1973. It needs to go back to the states.
It was the state's purview to prosecute abortion as a matter of criminal law. It is my position, and rightly by the Constitution, that the states overstepped their authority in authorizing abortion as a matter of law. That offends the solemn duty of the Constitution to protect our rights, one of which, being particularly enumerated from our very founding, being Life. This issue could not be any clearer.
WE STAND A MUCH BETTER CHANCE PROTECTING LIFE IF WE ADOPT A FEDERALIST STRATEGY.
That is a premise, and a promise that is twenty-seven years old. It has borne no fruit.
I do NOT understand the unreasoning kamikazee mentality of evangelicals, who had rather have one hundred per cent of ZERO, than 80 per cent of 90 per cent
Actually, it is the libertarian in me that demands the Constitution be properly served- As it turns out, it serves the purpose of Life as well it should, when seen in the light of the God-fearing men who wrote it.
On the issue of marriage, the issue is similiar. Rather than insist on bringing the issue under federal jurisdiction, we should be insisting that states are sovereign in the issue.
The problem with "Marriage" is quite a different thing. My argument with you here is the Constitutional law of reciprocity between the states. If one state must honor the contracts made in another state, they effectively become an interstate issue. Therefore, marriages made in one state are effectively forced upon all the other states.
Even though states are legislating marriage laws to protect themselves, it does not protect them from marriages made in liberal gay accommodating states. A gay couple need only go to a state that allows gay marriages, return to their conservative state, and the conservative state MUST honor the marriage. So for all intents and purposes, Gays can be married anywhere in the USA for the cost of a week's time and a couple bus tickets to Massachusetts.
So here particularly, your solution simply does not work. Once back in their conservative state, our now married gay activist couple has a size 12 foot in the legal door to every sort of accommodation because once present, it can be argued that marriage is marriage, after all, and off we go... The rest is academic.
So there only seems to be two solutions. To define marriage federally as a matter of interstate necessity, or to relieve the states of their obligation to each other in the matter of honoring gay marriages, as Thompson recommended.
Personally, I believe the latter to be so blatant an act of discrimination that it would be worse than an outright ban, and would be overturned almost immediately.
Secondly, in regard to the latter, I am uncomfortable with the possibility of unintended consequences. What other contracts might be made to suffer by the formation of this precedent? This is really the thing that bothers me most about this approach, and it bothers me greatly.
It is for all of the above that I choose the former as the only way to resolve the issue. I might add that it is not the best way. The best way would have been for the liberal states to have foregone their perilous path and to have refrained from creating the crisis in the first place, as is always the case. It is not we who are doing the imposing here.