Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Love is Love. Until it’s Not… Part 2

by Annie | Leave a comment

Matt Walsh at The Blaze is quickly becoming a favorite writer. He lays down logical progressions with scorching sarcasm. He’s done it again here on the topic of “marriage” as it is now defined, which is to say, not at all. As I wrote in my previous post, the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Obergefell was a Hallmark card without a limiting principle and it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that there would be spectacular backfires in its wake, and here we are again.

Enjoy.

If All Love Is Equal, This Incestuous Mother And Son Couple Should Be Celebrated

Matt Walsh is a blogger, writer, speaker, and professional truth sayer.

mother-son-620x313.

Another dispatch from Sodom. The Daily Mail reports on the controversial romance of a New Mexico couple who reconnected after many years apart and fell instantly in love upon meeting again. It would be like something right out of a fairy tale, if not for the fact that the two lovebirds are related. Not just related, but mother and son.

If you’re currently in a place where it would be inconvenient to suddenly start projectile vomiting all over the walls, I’d advise you to refrain from clicking the link I provided. The story is dark, twisted, and stomach-churning. It’s not necessary, nor medically recommended, that you read all the sordid details yourself.

In an act of heroic self-sacrifice, I already endured the whole article so that I could give you a summary. It goes like this: The mother, Monica Mares, gave up her son, Caleb Peterson, for adoption when she was 19 and he was a baby. Their paths crossed again some 20 years later, and soon after that fateful reunion they decided to strike up a sexual relationship. Incest is still illegal in all 50 states, so one or both of them may wind up in prison for several months. They’ve now taken their plight public in hopes of rallying the most progressive and fearless members of our tolerant society to their defense.

They make a strangely familiar case. They say they are in love. They say their love is just as loving as anyone else’s love. They say they aren’t hurting anybody. They say they’re consenting adults. They say this is none of the government’s business.

They even have the requisite sciency-sounding name for their lifestyle choice. They claim they’re experiencing “GSA,” which stands for “genetic sexual attraction.” As everyone knows, any fetish is automatically legitimate if it can be turned into an acronym. And there’s another name, too, because just one creepy euphemism isn’t sufficient anymore. Incestuous couples are members of the “consanguinamorous” community. There are many consanguinamorous folks who want to have sex with their brother/sister/mother/father/uncle/etc., and, as the reasoning goes, if a lot of people wish to do a certain thing then that thing must be OK, even natural.

Gee, where have we heard these rationales before?

The article kindly provides a reminder to anyone who needs it. An incest activist (yes, those exist now) by the name of Cristina Shy is interviewed about the Mares case. Shy is in a relationship with her half-brother, and, ironically, does not seem very shy about it. She now spends her time campaigning to see that her particular brand of deviancy is normalized and accepted in the mainstream. Shy may be severely deranged both mentally and spiritually, but she does make a pretty salient point here:

‘Our whole community is watching this case and looking for updates. It needs to be brought to the attention of everybody in the country and people need to start thinking differently. It was the same with gay people just a few years ago and now they can get married they are accepted. Well why not consanguinamorous people like us? We are all adults. We are not pedophiles, there’s no domestic issue. We are in love, we want to be together but we are related. That shouldn’t be a deciding factor.’

It’s consensual, it’s not hurting anyone, and we’re in love. If that was good enough for gay “marriage,” why isn’t it good enough for a brother and sister or mother and son? On what possible basis can we exclude poor Monica and Caleb if, on the strength of these very same arguments, we have declared gay “marriage” an immutable human right endowed upon creation by God Himself?

It certainly seems that these justifications apply to both in equal measure. Let’s go through and test them out:

1. It’s consensual.

Nobody denies that two adult men can indeed consent to “marry” each other, but can we deny it in the case of Monica and Caleb? He’s 19, she’s 36. They have agency over their own bodies. Their reunion happened when the son was a legal adult. That means they both made their own choices, God help them. Nobody was forced into anything. There was consent, without question.

When applying this logic consistently, it becomes immediately apparent that consent is not enough to morally or even legally justify something on its own. Our culture says that as long as two people want to do something, then it must be OK. But we see that just because a mutual agreement has been reached does not, in and of itself, mean that whatever was agreed upon is good or ought to be legal.

If mere consent were enough, then the three sickos arrested a few years ago for digging up a corpse to fulfill their necrophiliac fantasies ought to be given a presidential pardon. Sure, their victim didn’t consent, but she wasn’t alive. All of the living participants consented, yet the act was still illegal. Why? Well, we can come up with some peripheral reasons — you can’t trespass at a cemetery, for instance — but the real reason, beyond any other, is that it’s just plain wrong. Morally wrong. And despite all of the half-baked protests against “legislating morality,” almost everyone still agrees that in some cases a thing ought to be illegal primarily because it’s immoral. That’s what it means to be human beings living in a civilized society.

This is the main reason why incest between adults is illegal: it’s wrong. Debased. Animalistic. Revolting. Even the most libertarian minded person in the country probably isn’t too upset about laws against incest. And whatever practical reason they offer for their objection, the real reason, even if they won’t say it, is that they find it perverse. And sometimes that’s enough. Or it used to be.

2. It’s not hurting anyone.

Yes, incestuous couples have a much higher risk of conceiving babies with birth defects, but contraception and abortion are also legal. Moreover, our laws say that an unborn child is not a child while it’s still in the womb. It’s precisely in this stage of development that the non-child child, if he were conceived and allowed to live, would develop. Whatever harm done to a person would therefore occur at a point when the person isn’t a person. So that argument goes out the window.

Besides, gay sexual relationships between men are physically harmful and are much more likely to lead to any number of diseases, not to mention the psychological effects manifested in sky high rates of depression, suicide, and drug abuse. If that doesn’t count as “hurting anyone,” then surely incestuous relationships cannot be said to qualify, either.

It could be argued — accurately, in my view — that aside from the birth defects, legalized incest would hurt society by fundamentally perverting the institution of the family. Yes, people who harbor incestuous fantasies may act on them regardless of the law, but it would be incredibly damaging for the State to officially declare, “OK, the relationship between son and mother, brother and sister, uncle and niece, is now a legitimate forum for sexual exploration. Also, you can get married. It’s all good! Nothing matters!”

That sort of declaration would (further) undermine and subvert the family, which would indeed be quite harmful. But again, we’ve been told that it doesn’t matter if something harms society or the family. All that matters is how the people directly involved in the act feel about it. If that’s the logic, then Monica and Caleb are good to go.

3. Love is love.

This is really the whole crux of the thing. It’s the reason why the Supreme Court decided to pretend that a right to gay “marriage” was embedded mysteriously into the Constitution. Love is love. Two people have right to love each other. All love is equal. All love is the same. Nobody’s love is better than anyone else’s, and so forth.

As the love struck Caleb put it: “This is about whether I have the right to love someone. And I sure as hell have the right to love Monica. You can’t tell people who to love or who not to love.” Just replace “Monica” with “Maurice” or “Michael,” and the left would consider his argument bulletproof. If we must accept and legitimize all love, how can we possibly deny young Caleb? He does love his mother, that much is clear. Too clear, really.

Now, I happen to believe that they’re expressing their love in a severely disordered way, and that their particular brand of love should not be turned into a legal institution, nor should it be considered a good enough reason to allow the institution of marriage to include mothers and sons. Yes, they love each other, and nobody has ever said that a mother should not be allowed to love her son, or that a man should not be allowed to love another man, but some of us have said that those kinds of love should not be expressed through sexual intercourse and they cannot be fortified by the covenant of marriage. The maternal love from mother to son is beautiful and good, just not when it’s turned into a fetish. That has been the logic, anyway, but it’s no longer available. We’ve been informed that love is love is love is love is love. If that’s all it takes for Adam and Steve to get married, why not Monica and Caleb?

If you accept the progressive premise in the former case, you cannot suddenly abandon it in the latter. It makes no sense. You’re being intellectually dishonest, and you know it.

Of course, these are not the only rationales offered for gay “marriage.” There are others:

I was born this way.
I can’t choose who I love.
It’s [current year]!
I have a right to be happy.
I should have the same right as people who do not share my proclivity.
This kind of sexuality exists in the animal kingdom.
Don’t be narrow minded.
Stop judging.
Stop imposing your religious beliefs on me.
And so on.

Under each argument, right down the line, without exception, Monica and Caleb qualify. As do folks in the bestiality and pedophile and polygamist communities. A slippery slope? No, there is no slope. It’s a straight plunge into the abyss. ”Traditional marriage” was a separate and distinct thing, and could be justified using arguments that don’t apply to anything but itself. It existed on hard ground and was built on a solid foundation with walls and a roof and everything else. Once you tear all of that down and dig out the ground from underneath it, the descent into utter madness and depravity is inevitable, sudden, and unstoppable.

Progressives spent decades calling the slippery slope argument against gay “marriage” a fallacy, so they are now reluctant to admit that everything conservatives said in that regard was plainly true, and will soon come to fruition. But they’ll be less bashful about it as time goes on. In fact, some have already grabbed the dynamite and tried to blow open the floodgates.

Slate ran an article not long ago calling for the legalization of polygamy. A college professor from New York released a book recently, offering a “philosophical analysis” of adult-child sex. This is another in a long line of progressive attempts to not-so-subtly normalize pedophilia. Time Magazine posted an editorial several years ago asking whether incest should be legal. And, always on the forefront of liberal lunacy, Canada was told by their Supreme Court a couple of months ago that bestiality is permissible, so long as there is “no penetration” involved. Sadly, as far as I’m aware, nobody has come to the defense of our necrophiliac friends yet, but I’m sure they’ll have their time in the sun soon enough (although I suppose they’d prefer to operate at night).

This is why conservatives, what few still exist, cannot afford to compromise or give up ground. When you forfeit the truth to appease the mob, you will never get it back. If you relent and concede that the truth does not matter in one case, how can you expect to suddenly assert its authority in another?

It may be too late to win the gay “marriage” argument now — at least for a while — but we cannot give up making the argument, however fruitless it may seem. If we do, then we will not have it available to us when the left comes knocking with pleas for polygamy, pedophilia, incest, and whatever other twisted horror they can conjure in their heads. It’s clear that once they argued for one perversion, they really argued for them all. And so we must argue against them all, or else we have not really argued against any.

###end

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No Corp. 1st Amend? Fine. Then NONE Apply.

by Annie | Leave a comment

Well, who didn’t see this coming, huh? Via the September 19th Los Angeles Times:

High Court May Take Up Religious Challenge to Birth Control Coverage

“The Obama administration set the stage Thursday for another Supreme Court showdown on the president’s healthcare law, this time to decide whether for-profit companies can be forced to provide full contraceptive coverage for their employees despite religious objections from their owners.

The administration’s lawyers asked the justices to take up the issue this fall to decide whether these corporations can claim a religious exemption to this part of the healthcare law.  U.S. Solicitor Gen. Donald Verrilli Jr. called the issue one of ‘exceptional importance’ that needs to be resolved soon.  Dozens of employers across the country have sued to challenge the so-called contraceptive mandate in the new law… (which) says this insurance must pay for standard contraceptives, including the ‘morning after’ pill.

But some employers object on religious grounds. They went to court, arguing that they cannot be compelled by the government to subsidize birth control or abortions. Their legal claims rested on the 1st Amendment’s protection for the ‘free exercise of religion’ and on a federal law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 measure meant to strengthen religious liberty.  The challengers include the Green family from Oklahoma, who own and operate Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a chain of more than 500 arts and crafts stores that employs more than 13,000 full-time workers… The cases have raised two large issues: Is a for-profit corporation a ‘person’ protected under religious freedom laws? And can a corporation have religious beliefs?

The Greens argue that because they are people, and they own the chain of stores, their religious beliefs deserve protection.  The administration’s lawyers argued, however, that it would be ‘unprecedented’ for a court to extend religious exemptions to corporations. No court has ‘accepted a claim that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act enables a for-profit corporate employer to exempt itself from generally applicable employment regulations,’ Verrilli said… Lawyers for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (said)…  ‘The United States government is taking the remarkable position that private individuals lose their religious freedom when they make a living,’ said Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the group, which also represents Hobby Lobby Stores. ‘We’re confident that the Supreme Court will reject the government’s extreme position and hold that religious liberty is for everyone — including people who run a business.'”

This is extraordinary and welcome.  I’m no lawyer but it’s hard for me to see how you can be a “cafeteria” constitutional republic;  because the root of the government’s argument is: the constitution doesn’t apply to corporations.  Now, they want that to mean the the 1st amendment specifically.  Okay.  Then if the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to corporations, does that mean Muslims don’t have to do business with homosexuals if they don’t want to?  Because if the right to religious freedom does not exist in a corporation, then so does it’s abuse.  If the federal government can dictate which parts of the constitution do or do not apply to corporations, what about slavery?  Hell, if one amendment doesn’t apply, then NONE of the amendments apply, right?  You can’t pick and choose this way, and I pray the majority sees it that way.

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SCOTUS on DOMA

by Annie | Leave a comment

UPDATE 3/26 @10:53am ~ Came across this study on what marriage/divorce/child-bearing looks like after 10 years of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands.  Being the first nation to do it, they are the closest thing we have to a real-life lab on this matter. Result?  It ain’t good if you’re a “marriage equality” advocate.  And by the way:  If you use that term (“marriage equality”) around me I’ll clock you one.  It’s silly & annoying.
Below is a brilliantly delineated path forward from The Wall Street Journal for the Supreme Court to navigate the rocky shoals of the same-sex marriage arguments it will hear next week.  It’s kinda dense reading for the non-lawyer (like me!) to fully apprehend, but take your time, and really try to digest the nuance of each argument.  It’s worth it.

Now, parenthetically, for what it’s worth, and for those who care and are unfamiliar with my views on the matter, they are this: Civil unions between one human being and one other human being of the same sex, who are unrelated, is fine & dandy with me. If you are lucky enough to find someone to love you through a lifetime, it seems to you should fall down on your knees and thank the Higher Power of your choice that someone is willing to enter into such a magnificent covenant with you – just don’t call it “marriage” – because it’s not.  You are absolutely entitled to have all of the legal responsibilities and benefits of  marriage – as a matter of law – but in terms of a societal or cultural imprimatur, or stamp of approval, no.  Call it something else.  

Understand:  I will not give you the stink-eye, shun, or otherwise refuse to associate with you.  My children have friends who have married same-sex parents whom I regard with very high esteem and extremely warm affection.  They are welcome in my home, at my table, and I am glad to have their embrace whenever I see them.  Further, I trust them absolutely with the care of my children at their homes.  They are lovely, lovely, people.

But it’s not a marriage they have.  It’s something else.

So, that’s where I stand, for what it’s worth.

And below, via WSJ, is the best argument I’ve seen yet for the path forward.  It’s brilliant.  It preserves legal, constitutional integrity while passing no moral judgement whatsoever on same sex unions, all while preserving the individual liberty to live and let live.  That’s a pretty neat trick.

Here’s where you could change my mind – sort of:  If someday, all 50 states decide that same-sex unions are lawful – literally, having voted them into law – then, and only then, should the Supreme Court step off the balance beam – but I would still withhold labeling them “marriage” for purposes of federal law.  The “label” question, it seems to me, should be left to society; via secular and religious consensus.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Michael McConnell: The Constitution and Same-Sex Marriage

By MICHAEL MCCONNELL

For most Americans, the Supreme Court cases being heard on Tuesday and Wednesday next week are about same-sex marriage. But the cases—Hollingsworth v. Perry (the Proposition 8 case from California) and U.S. v. Windsor (the Defense of Marriage Act case)—also are a test of the nation’s democratic and decentralized constitutional structure. These cases thus are not just about marriage. They are about how we reach decisions regarding matters of deep moral significance in our federal republic.
We learned from Roe v. Wade that the Supreme Court endangers its own legitimacy and exacerbates social conflict when it seeks to resolve moral-legal questions on which the country is deeply divided without a strong basis in the text of the Constitution. The court sometimes intervenes when the legislatures of the 50 states are approaching a consensus. When it jumps into a live political controversy, the justices look like they are acting like legislators.
The system today, without the Supreme Court’s intervention, is working as it should. Representatives of the people are deliberating. “We the People” are thinking. So far, nine states have extended marriage to same-sex couples; many others have chosen to explicitly endorse traditional marriage. Those choices distress advocates on either side of the matter when their wishes have been disappointed.
But when all of us have an equal right to be heard on an issue, and to participate through our representatives in making the decision, it is easier to accept the outcome than when unelected judges make moral pronouncements from the bench. Change that comes through the political process has greater democratic legitimacy.
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Corbis

Moreover, in states where same-sex marriage has been made legal, legislatures have taken care to provide generous protections for people and institutions—especially churches—that conscientiously disagree. This is good for civic harmony and for achieving a long-term position of mutual respect. A judicial decision likely would not include these protections.
The two cases that will be argued next week seem to endanger this process. If the justices hold that California’s Proposition 8, which provides that “only marriage between a woman and a man is valid or recognized,” is unconstitutional, this will end the deliberations and impose a single national definition of marriage on us all. The court cannot reach this outcome without branding the views of the other side as either “irrational,” if it employs the lower, rational-basis level of judicial scrutiny, or “bigoted” and hateful, which would justify heightened judicial scrutiny. That is not the path to national reconciliation, and it does not show respect to the diverse views on this divisive issue.
But if the justices hold that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage, this also imposes an answer of a sort. It would reflect the Supreme Court’s considered judgment that in the eyes of the Constitution, same-sex relationships may be treated as morally different from (and inferior to) heterosexual relationships. Such a decision would set a precedent for the foreseeable future. It would embolden opponents of same-sex marriage and deprive proponents of one of their most potent moral claims in the political process—that the denial of marriage rights offends American values of equality.
Even though the stage seems set for a momentous ruling by the court, the litigation actually offers the justices a golden opportunity to resolve these cases without setting a precedent either way, and to reaffirm the ideal of democratic, decentralized decision-making.
In Hollingsworth, the Proposition 8 case, the state of California has declined to defend the state’s own law. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a group of private citizens, proponents of the proposition, to step in and defend the law in court. Former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, who served under President Clinton, has filed a friend of the court brief arguing persuasively that these intervenors do not have standing to sue (meaning they have no legal stake in the issue, but only political interest). He has precedent on his side. More than 25 years ago, in Diamond v. Charles, the court held that a pro-life doctor did not have standing to defend an antiabortion law in court when the state attorney general refused to do so. The same lack of standing is true here.
If Mr. Dellinger is right (and I think he is), the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to decide the Proposition 8 case, and neither did the Ninth Circuit. The court should vacate the decision striking down Proposition 8, leaving in place the original district-court order that prompted the case by allowing two same-sex couples to marry, but deprivingHollingsworth of precedential effect.
In Windsor, the Defense of Marriage Act case, the government also declines to defend its law, but the U.S. Solicitor General, unlike the California attorney general, filed a notice of appeal and a petition for review, and the government is continuing to enforce the law. That preserves the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to decide the constitutionality of DOMA.
But the court need not base its decision in Windsor on the merits of the same-sex marriage question. The leading argument against DOMA all along has been that the federal government lacks authority under the Constitution to create and enforce a definition of marriage different from that of the state in which a couple resides. It is hard to think of an issue more clearly reserved to state law under constitutional tradition than the definition of marriage.
The court has held that “regulation of domestic relations” has “long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States” (Sosna v. Iowa, 1975). In the past, the court has recognized a “domestic relations exception” to federal judicial power. Although the legal question is close, the court could take the same path in Windsor—holding that DOMA improperly intrudes on the reserved powers of the states.
If the court dismisses the Proposition 8 case on standing grounds and strikes DOMA down on federalism grounds, the combined effect would be to reaffirm America’s democratic, decentralized decision-making process without imposing an answer—one way or the other—to the same-sex marriage question.
By taking such a path, the court would be spared from imposing a single nationwide definition of marriage as a matter of constitutional law, and from having to rule, for all time, that there is or is not a constitutional right to same-sex marriage—a momentous step that some justices might be reluctant to take. It would leave the issue to the states, at least for the time being. This course might appeal to centrist justices like Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts and Stephen Breyer—and perhaps could even command a unanimous court, which would have a welcome calming influence on the nation’s culture wars.
Considerations of these sorts have long been part of the virtue of judicial modesty, too often undervalued by partisans on both sides. In this instance, modesty requires no more than that the justices follow the technicalities of the law.

Mr. McConnell, a former federal judge, is a law professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at the Stanford Law School, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

A version of this article appeared March 22, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Constitution and Same-Sex Marriage.

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“The” Chickens Roosted!

by Annie | Leave a comment

Politico opined:

“President Barack Obama made a big gamble last January when he issued four recess appointments during a three-day break between meetings of the Senate — and with the court ruling Friday broadly undercutting his ability to make such appointments, he may have lost even bigger.”

That’s an understatement!

This ruling was the bitch-slap of all bitch-slaps. Not only did the court rule that Obama’s unprecedented pro-forma recess-not-recess appointments violate the Constitution, they went back and *gasp* read not only *gasp* the Constitution, but *double-gasp* The Federalist Papers! They ruled that not only were the intrasession pro-forma appointments unconstitutional, they ruled that all intrasession appointments are unconstitutional!  Intersession won the day and all because of one little word: “the”. (You can read more about “the” here.)

The White House, The New York Times, and all the usual suspects are in spasms, naturally.  The N.L.R.B., amazingly, and with the White House’s blessing, is blowing it off and continuing their work. And once again, the left is dusting off “Bush did it first!” like that matters. They hate the guy except when his bad behavior justifies theirs. Kindergarten!  Bush, and, in fact, a dozen Presidents have made intrasession appointments. For decades. But no President had ever made a pro-forma appointment. That was uniquely brazen (In addition to the brazen pro-forma part, these appointments hadn’t even been submitted for Senate review. They’d been sitting there. Obama didn’t even go through the motions of starting the Senate review process. Didn’t lift a finger. Didn’t even give the Senate a chance to say no: just blew right past ’em. It’s breath-taking.) But that’s not even the point. The point is, through a dozen Presidents, nobody ever called them on it.

Until yesterday.

Lefties (bless their hearts 🙂 ) will never  learn that just because it’s been done before and gotten away with doesn’t make it right!  Especially when the Constitution is the rule!

Of course, the bonus is, it was Harry Reid who birthed the pro-forma strategy to stop Bush from making “recess” appointments.  Harry & his evil minions got their chickens plucked but good with this one.

The ruling is a work of art, truly, for lovers of originalist interpretation.  You can read it below or here.

Noel Canning v. NLRB by

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