The Vetting: Obama Teaches Constitutional Law -- Part I

Breitbart ^ | 3/15/12 | Ben Shapiro

[Nachum]

Let’s take a trip via the wayback machine to the hallowed classrooms of the University of Chicago Law School. The year is 1996, and a young lecturer named Barack Obama is teaching constitutional law to a group of students. His first final exam question is about whether homosexuals can be barred from receiving state health care coverage for their infertility treatments.

The question deals with a hypothetical lesbian couple that wants to have a baby. Their state prevents health providers from providing infertility treatments for unwed couples; the couple’s state-provided healthcare therefore refuses them coverage for such procedures

Obama then presented an analysis of this question. That’s the way it works on law school constitutional law exams: you spot the issues, then offer an analysis of them. They never come down on one side or another. But they can give you important clues as to the way the student (or in this case, the lecturer) thinks.

Instead of wading through the legal thicket presented by any law school exam, let’s analyze Lecturer Obama’s main take. He makes the following points:

“The fundamental right at stake … goes well beyond issues of bodily integrity, but instead involves the broader principle that the government cannot be in the business of deciding who should bear children and who should not – at least without offering up some pretty compelling reasons for doing so.” Obama even compares a state law banning infertility treatment for unwed couples to active sterilization.

In a particularly noteworthy comment, Obama writes: “the connection between restricting infertility services to married couples and ‘preserving the integrity of marriage’ is so tenuous that it cannot be considered a narrowly tailored means of serving that interest.” This is arguable at best –

[philman_36]

Man, did the Mormons shoor themselve sin the foot!
I'm confused. Do Mormons have leaky boats, have fallen arches that need support or have foot fetishes?

Just kidding!

[alancarp]

The stupidity of Big Government Intervention in action:

"The question deals with a hypothetical lesbian couple that wants to have a baby. Their state prevents health providers from providing infertility treatments for unwed couples; the couple’s state-provided healthcare therefore refuses them coverage for such procedures.

I know this is preaching to the choir, here, but I wanna rant anyway:

1. There should be no place for 'state-provided healthcare'.
2. Infertility treatments are not "healthcare" even if there is such a thing called 'state-provided healthcare'.
3. Elective care such as Infertility Treatments should never be covered even if you don't believe in either #1 or #2. It is highly expensive and has limited success rates. It also tends to have complications (as in multiple births, just for one small example).
4. If you can't afford an Infertility Treatment, then how on earth can you afford a child???
5. So if the state is doing both #1 and #2, and you end up with a child, now the state also has to support you supporting the child. Is this enough nonsense for you yet, you public policy makers??
6. And finally: if you don't have 'state-provided healthcare' and don't do infertility treatments, then you don't have to worry about the homosexual complications, now, do you? You also probably don't spend nearly as much money in your state budget, and can lower the state taxes, and then everybody can afford to do want they want to do on their own!!

< /end rant... cleansing breath >

[philman_36]

Should have waited a hundred years, rite?
I believe their religious ceremonies happen more frequently than centennially.

Just kidding!

[dennisw]

“And how are homo marriages consummated?”

Anally.

[MrB]

It’s actually based on a core tenet, a base assumption of leftist ideology.

If a person does not have the means to exercise a “right”, then that “right” is effectively being denied to him. And based on another core assumption/tenet, the government as the guarantor of rights is then responsible for making the means available to him to exercise that right.

Understanding the liberal ideology doesn’t make me sympathize with it in the least, but it keeps the keyboard prints off my forehead.

[MrB]

Once a year?

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

I mean, what does the law say about consumation now? Is the inability to consummate a marriage, between a man and a woman, still grounds for a civil annulment?

What the hell difference does it make for homos?

It’s insane and sickening. Here In MA, marriage licences are made out to “Person A” and “Person.”

[opentalk]

Thanks, Now this 2001 radio Obama interview makes more sense

..If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. ..

[bluecat6]

From the Racism and the Law:

“10) Reparations — Given the perceived failures of the
traditional civil rights agenda in bringing about racial equality in the US, a number of black commentators argue that a program of reparations is the only legitimate means of making up for threehundred plus years of slavery. More recently, some white commentators have also supported a variant of the reparations concept — for example, the government financing a Community Reinvestment funds that would be controlled by the black community and render affirmative action obsolete. Do such proposals have any realistic chance of working their way through the political system? Would there be any legal impediments to such a broadly-conceived reparations policy?”

[liberalh8ter]

Radicalism trumps common sense. It isn't important to people like Obama whether something makes sense or if their position is completely hypocritical. The important thing here is that we need to “change” the order of the universe, an order that was dictated by old white men who had the audacity to compose a governing document that when followed, severely restricts the legislative shackles that people like Obama and Ayers feel should be placed on us unenlightened serfs.

[Karliner]

This from a late term abortion voter.

[dennisw]

hahhhaha...good one!

[RobbyS]

Irony is that his worldview was on display back in 2008, but many people thought that Wright was merely a convenient tool rather than a mentor. From the latest expose, we know that his Harvard mentor, soft spoken though he was, not a ranter, was like Obama himself, a very angry man.

[MrB]

I was wondering if that one fell flat...

[dennisw]

actuarialily./.... it took me a few minutes to get your dry dry joke