Posted on 03/24/2013 9:16:37 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When the Supreme Court hears a pair of cases on same-sex marriage on Tuesday and Wednesday, the justices will be working in the shadow of a 40-year-old decision on another subject entirely: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion.
Judges, lawyers and scholars have drawn varying lessons from that decision, with some saying that it was needlessly rash and created a culture war.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal and a champion of women’s rights, has long harbored doubts about the ruling.
“It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far, too fast,” she said last year at Columbia Law School.
Briefs from opponents of same-sex marriage, including one from 17 states, are studded with references to the aftermath of the abortion decision and to Justice Ginsburg’s critiques of it. They say the lesson from the Roe decision is that states should be allowed to work out delicate matters like abortion and same-sex marriage for themselves.....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
These ruling usually have unintended consequences, generally negative ones.
In that case politicians can decide when and when not to act to support the laws voted in by those who put them in office.
Roe v wade should have been left to the states and so should gay marriage.
Unintended consequences? Try ripping the country apart and causing many to doubt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the constitution. If wholesale abortion is a “constitutional right”,then how could many in good conscience take an oath “to uphold and defend”?
Ping.
I do not trust the USSC anymore!
Who could respect an institution that made the unspeakable killing of forty million human lives possible? If abortion is a “constitutional right” how can decent people of conscience take an oath to uphold and defend the constitution? The Supreme court has corroded the country. Look what has happened since 1973.
That’s not the shadow they should be worrying about...
Roe v wade should have been left to the states and so should gay marriage.
Your right~~would make it easier to decide what state I want to go to after leaving California!!
>> Roe v wade should have been left to the states and so should gay marriage.
Abortion should be ruled murder at the federal level, and any legislation that forces citizens to support and service homosexual behavior should be thrown out as unconstitutional.
” HELLO... I’m here from the givernment and I’m here to OBFUSCATE..”
/snide...
You keep it at the federal you guarantee lobbyists keep it an issue for decades to come (as with roe.v wade).
You turn it over to the states as should so many social issues be turned over and citizens at the grassroots start making more moral decisions.
The proposition is not a referendum law, it's an amendment to the California State Constitution.
It was done that way to overrule the appelate court decision that overturned the original California referendum preventing queers "marrying" each other. Retro nomenclature and references intentional...
So the question really at issue is whether the SCOTUS has the jurisdiction to overturn an element of a State Constitution.
It's unprecedented to imagine that it does. The States are sovereign, and if the federal union doesn't like the State Constitution, it's a matter for Congress to debate, not the SCOTUS, because that was the body that accepted the State application for inclusion in the Union.
Courts don't have the right to re-write the founding documents of either the Union or the States of the Union.
To put it in clearer terms, do the Courts have the right to declare the Constitution Un-Constitutional?
I can think of nothing more absurd.
I do not remember which court started the practice, but Scotus has increasingly “incorporated” the US Bill of Rights and applied it to the States. It is a sh!tty subterfuge, because the sovereign people of CA approved prop 8 just as conventions of others ratified the US Constitution.
Thank the 17th Amendment. Since States could no longer defend themselves it effectively repealed the Ninth and Tenth. Once a dispassionate umpire, Scotus is part of the same ruling class as Congress and the Prez. Aside from calling a Constitutional Convention, there isn't a thing the States can do about it.
Please tell me you don't think states in 1973 should have had the right to decide whether to kill unborn babies. I'm sure you understand Free Republic's longstanding ban on supporting abortion.
That is a very different question from saying in 2013 that states should be allowed on a state-by-state basis to criminalize abortion.
The first, in a 1973 context, is to ignore the Constitution's equal protection clause, under the 14th Amendment, that “no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The second is to make a pragmatic political decision that reducing the number of murders is the best we can do at present.
Long term, we need to make baby murder illegal nationwide, but there is a long history of different states having different penalties for different types of murders. In principle there's not a constitutional problem if one state wants to execute abortionists and another state just wants to imprison them for life, but failing to punish murderers is bad public policy. It would be entirely legitimate if a predominantly traditional Roman Catholic state wanted to avoid imposing the death penalty for such offenses, based on current Roman Catholic teachings about the death penalty, while a predominantly evangelical Protestant state might be much more willing to put people to death for murder.
With regard to whether homosexual marriage can be left up to the states, we also have the problem of the contracts clause. Article I:10 of the Constitution says that "No State shall... pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts." Legally speaking, a marriage is a contract. We have more than a century of legal precedents with federalizing questions such as polygamous marriage, interracial marriage, and no-fault divorce. Based on that history, it is very questionable whether, once one state has legalized homosexual marriage, we can avoid federalizing the question.
“I do not trust the USSC anymore!”
I second that. I have prayed to God that His will be done on this (that is really all we can truly pray for).
Should the woman who presents herself for an abortion be tried as an accessory to murder?
The USSC will allow this. The only thing that keeps sodomite marriage from becoming a reality aside from God’s directive is His Natural Law and thousands of years of common sense.
There is nothing in man’s Law itself that would prohibit this.
This is a spiritual issue and it will be dealt with by man’s judgment.
I don’t wish to think about what violating this Spritual Principle will mean to the US. Look to Europe to see what scoffing at what is a true spiritual law brings upon the people.
The true goal is not “equality.” The goal is to force relgions to abandon their dogma. If religions can be forced under law to change this, well that is the end of any authority and they have won.
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