Supreme Court rules for gay marriage

Reuters ^ | 6/26/2015 | Staff

[HomerBohn]

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to marry in a historic triumph for gay rights.

-snip-

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing on behalf of the court, said that the hope of gay people intending to marry "is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

[Charles Henrickson]

Today five “justices” (sic) of the Supreme Court, contrary to nature, reason, and moral law, and in violation of the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution they are sworn to uphold, trampled on the rights of states to have laws against homosexual “marriage” (sick). May their names live in infamy: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Anthony Kennedy, and Sonia Sotomayor.

Of course, I and millions of other Americans will never recognize the legitimacy of their evil and unconstitutional ruling. And as an ordained minister, I will never conduct a homosexual wedding, regardless of the consequences. “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

What I will do is to work to defeat any political candidate who approves of this constitutional and moral abomination. And I will support a presidential candidate who will appoint true justices, in hopes that they will overturn this monstrous decision—along with a similar unconstitutional ruling, i.e., Roe v. Wade (1973), which likewise trampled on the rights of states to have laws against abortion.

[Willie From Austin]

Russia and Russian Christianity endured and survived three quarters of a century of Soviet atheism and vicious anti-Christianity and actually emerged with a lot of dross burned away in the fires of persecution. We are, on our historical trajectory, where Russia was a century ago. From another angle, we are now living not in a post-Christian society but a pre-Christian society, considering the moral, ethical and cultural norms that are ascending to dominance with lightening speed. The model for survival will be found in the experience and life of the Church in the first 3 centuries of the Christian era. It is a pagan society that is all around us and will, eventually, collapse under the weight of its godlessness, arrogance, sensuality and delusion. We who are alive today may not live to see the end, but, surely, it will come, as it has for all societies that chose rebellion against Nature and Nature’s God. In the mean time, the task is to fortify and preserve a haven of Christian truth and love, solidify our mutual love and support for each other.

[generally]

Best quote of the week.

[generally]

No can do. I took my flag down when SCOTUS upheld the first 0vomitcare decision.

If a conservative is elected in 2016, I may put up my flag again. Till then it’s no flag or the Gadsden flag.

[Tainan]

Maybe I'll marry my cat.
5.56mm

[FlyingEagle]

The ruling marks a satanic victory over life, family, and freedom.

I will never ever accord any homosexual relationship the sanctity of God given sacrament of marriage.

Our nation and people will suffer mightily for this choice.

In the 20th Century, it never seemed as though life as we know it could cease to exist on this planet. Now it is gone.

We are living some kind of satan’s nightmare of secret laws, homosexual marriages and military, baby murdering by the millions, open gang warfare in the streets, family and history destruction, government by decree, and no freedom to voice any opinion about any of the moral insurrection surrounding us.

We are going from decline to decadence to destruction.

Western Civilization is over. Whatever is going on now needs to start a new book. And none of it has anything to do with politics. What is happening on wide scale is the manifestation of evil. God please help us.

[BillyBoy]

The Roberts Court seems to be becoming The Burger Court 2.0. During Warren Burger's tenure as Chief, he had been selected by Nixon because he had a reputation as a good conservative, and he was an abled administrator and public face of SCOTUS. However, rather than reverse all the liberal activist decisions that had occurred in the past (as Nixon hoped would happen once the court had a majority GOP judges), the court quietly let them stand and then began passing new "landmark" leftist victories like Roe v. Wade. Burger, while usually conservative, was no ideological strong-arm like his predecessor had been. The four liberal justices on the court stood firm and they were often able to sway at least 1 or 2 mushy conservatives to switch sides on key cases. Blackmun started off as fairly conservative, then went to the dark side during Roe v. Wade and never returned.

Roberts court seems very much headed in this direction during Obama's presidency. Only 2 of the conservatives (Scalia and Thomas) are unflappable, Alito usually joins them 90% of the time but lacks the same punch. Roberts and Kennedy are "conservative" on paper (Roberts moreso than Kennedy) but can be persuaded to turn traitor on "landmark" cases, resulting in 5-4 or 6-3 wins for liberals that set all kinds of horrible "precedents". The four liberals on the court (laughably portrayed by the mainstream media as "slightly left of center") give carte blanche to leftist causes in this country and usually stand together and share concurring opinions on every important case that has grave ramifications. We seem to have reached the high water mark for our side during the Rehnquist court. That was a majority conservative court that actually acted like it most of the time. It wasn't even much further right than the Roberts court, and its own share of plenty of 5-4 decisions. Ironically the court membership was 7 GOP - 2 RAT, but thanks to two horrible RINOs (Souter and Stevens), it might as well been 5 GOP - 4 RAT. Plus, prior to Darth Bader Ginsburg, Renquist/Scalia/Thomas/Kennedy/O'Connor could sway Democrat Byron White to their side on key cases.

The thought of Burger Court 2.0 is quite alarming for America. Burger Court 1.0. did an enormous amount of damage in the 70s while being a "conservative majority, strict constructionist" court on paper.

[GOPsterinMA]

I started a new opus yesterday. One of its highlights is my strategy in dealing with this (and pretty much any) deplorable situation:

Ignore it publicly.

Why is that a good tact to take? Because these brain damaged and genetically flawed lifeforms thrive off of attention whoring. Deprive them of that and what are they left with? GRID? Meth? Fabulous pastels?

I was out in BOS with the GF last night. One pub that we go to s few times a year had a chalk board with “Love Wins” written on it outside their door. Did I freak out? Nope. I pointed to the sign, the GF understood that me pointing to said sign meant “I’m never giving this poofery a penny ever again.”, and we went to a new place, that wasn’t openly pandering at least, we otherwise wouldn’t have gone to.

Take the high road, at least openly. Plan “other” moves privately.

Ignoring “them “ (or any other POS/bad situation) is powerful; it limits the “power” “they” think “they” can assert.

Also:

Thanks to wave after wave of assaults over the past 5 decades*, marriage as a whole is a dying institution. Most people who are teenagers and young adults today aren’t going to get married. This whole thing is just a propaganda ploy to further destroy American and Judeo-Christian societies.

*Again, showing the tenacity and focus of the left. Meanwhile, the right mostly sleeps and waits for “Matlock” to “come on”. That’s why the left wins, people.

[Chauncey Uppercrust]

seems to be the consensus

[HomerBohn]

God will help us if we ever decide to wring the necks of these chickens.

[HomerBohn]

And I am with God and with you.

[HomerBohn]

Amen.

[lonestar]

It’s what you “know” that isn’t so...

[Impy]

I thinking of not using Google any more because of their pro-fag messages on their homepage.

Blow me, Google.

[Impy]

Are you saying the redistricting case (what’s it called?) is the only one left and Ginsburg would have been given another opinion to write by now if she wasn’t writing that one?

[AuH2ORepublican]

To believe that the Rehnquist Court was more conservative (or less liberal) than the Roberts Court, one would have to judge Roberts to be more liberal than O’Connor, which is risible. As disappointing (or traitorous—choose your adjective) as Roberts has been in the two Obamacare cases and the California SSM case, O’Connor was far, far wiorse, clearly more liberal than Kennedy (who is *much* more liberal than Roberts).

George W. Bush’s two SCOTUS appointments (Roberts and Alito, the latter of whom has been outstanding, with fewer unfortunate votes than Scalia or Thomas over the past few years) have been, as a whole, far better and much more conservative than were George H.W. Bush’s two appointments (the excellent Thomas and the execrable ultraliberal Souter) or Ronald Reagan’s three appointments (the outstanding Scalia, untrustworthy moderate Kennedy and liberal-to-moderate O’Connor. George W. Bush’s lower-court appointments also have proven to be excellent, better than his father’s and up there with President Reagan’s. George W. Bush had many flaws, but his record regarding judges was very good (even though he did, as you noted, luck into nominating him instead of the enigmatic lackey Harriet Miers).

[GOPsterinMA]

There you go! Yes!

[AuH2ORepublican]

There are three cases whose opinions have not been released, one from the February sitting (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission), one from the March sitting (Utility Air, the EPA case) and one from the April sitting (Glossip, the lethal-injection case). http://www.scotusblog.com/statistics/ As you can see a little lower at the linked page, for the sittings in which all opinions are out, each Justice has written one Opinion of the Court (when there were at least nine cases, of course) and no Justice has written more than two opinions per sitting. That’s by design, so that theworkload is divided equitably. (It is also why liberal Justices with very little seniority are assigned many of the 9-0 and 8-1 cases.)

Because none of the majority opinions from the March sitting that have been released so far have been authored by Scalia, we know with 99% certainty that he wrote the Opinion of the Court for Utility Air. Could someone else have written it? Sure, if after the hearing there were five or more Justices—one of whom was Scalia—in favor of overturning the EPA rules, and Robets assigned Scalia (or, if Roberts was in the majority, Scalia assigned to himself) the opinion, but then one of two things happened: (i) enough Justices switched to uphold the regulations and Scalia’s majority opinion became a dissent or (ii) a majority still believes that the EPA rules should be struck down, but not enough Justices agree with the reasoning in Scalia’s opinion and thus Scalia’s opinion becomes a concurrence in the judgment (and a different opinion becomes the majority or plurality opinion). Tha first scenario is what occurred during the 2013 Obamacare case, where Roberts switched fairly late in the process; the second is what analysts believe (and I agree with them) happened in Keery v. Din in the February sitting, where Kennedy had been selected to write the Opinion of the Court for a 5-4 majority but only one other Justice signed on to hiis opinion, and then Scalia’s opinion, with two other Justices signing on, became the judgment of the Court.

Which brings us to the February sitting. There were 9 cases in the sitting, and 8 decisions have been announced, with each of Roberts, Thomas, Breyer, Alito, Sotomayor and Kagan being the authors of one majority opinion and Scalia being the author of two judgments of the Court (one of which was the plurality opinion in Kerry v. Din). Given that almost certainly each Justice was assigned initially the majority opinion for one case, and that two Justices (Kennedy and Ginsburg) have not authored any majority opinions for the cases during such sitting, all the evidence points to Kennedy initially having been assigned Kerry v. Din but having lost his majority (albeit not losing the judgment) and Ginsburg initialy being assigned the opinion in Arzona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. Given Ginsburg knee-jerk liberalism and distespect for the Constitution’s text, I am fairly certain that she favors interlreting “legislature” as meaning “any authority authorized by the state” iwhen such term is used in the Constitution’s Elections Clause. If I am correct, then there were at least 5 Justices willing to allow the AZ Redistricting Commission to draw congressional district lines despite it not having been created by the state legislature. And, unless someone changed his (or her—HA!) mind since February or March (whenever tbe post-sitting conference was held), the AZ Legislature will lose its appeal. This really pisses me off.

As for the lethal-injection case, there are several Justices that haven’t authored opinions from the April sitting (Ginsburg, Alito, Sotomayor and Kagan), but I think tbat Alito wrote the opinion because I don’t think that tbere are five votes in SCOTUS to strike down the use of lethal injections in executions.

[BillyBoy]

>> To believe that the Rehnquist Court was more conservative (or less liberal) than the Roberts Court, one would have to judge Roberts to be more liberal than O’Connor, which is risible <<

I believe Roberts is to the right of O'Connor, and for that matter, Warren Burger was to the right of her as well. O'Connor was a pretty partisan lifelong Republican, but she veered leftward on numerous important issues. As I noted, freepers should be more disappointed with Reagan giving us O'Connor than giving us Kennedy.

Again, its not a matter of the judges individual idealogy (agree that Alito, Thomas, and Scalia are individually more conservative than Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Kennedy), but a leadership issue.

Rehnquist was a powerful conservative advocate and was able to sway the rest of the justices in a way that Roberts and Burger are not. Reagan saw this and was wise to elevate Rehnquist from Associate to Chief. It works the same way under liberal CJ's. The court got a ton of "landmark" liberal ruilings under Earl Warren because he was a forceful liberal advocate who was able to sway other justices (both Democrats and Republicans) to his POV, and have the decisions written in way that reflected his agenda. On other hand, Harlan F. Stone, a FDR appointee as CJ (and a former associate justice appointed by Coolidge... bad decision on Cal's part) was liberal as well, but wasn't nearly as effective as CJ, and his court left little mark on U.S. history.

[BillyBoy]

Interestingly enough, Bush could have moved the court to the right simply by sticking his original plan -- having Roberts replace O'Connor as associate justice. After Rehnquist's death, Bush could have elevated Thomas to CJ. Roberts would have certainly been more conservative than O'Connor, and Thomas would have continued Rehnquist's unshakeable conservative leadership. Of course, knowing what we know now, Roberts would be out of the question after his Obamacare decisions.

I'm surprised we don't choose Justices the way we choose Presidents -- elevate STATE supreme court justices with great track records on constitional questions instead of elevating career federal judges who live in the beltway.

The fact a judge claims their "judicial philosophy" is "originalism" or whatever, has proven to be effectively useless. Most of the Burger court Republicans inventing new "rights" out of thin air were supposedly "strict constructionsts" when they were placed on the court.