I am in favor of gay marriage. I don't believe being gay is any more a choice than being black, so I feel they have the same rights.

But I hate the way this was decided. The constitution is a list of enumerated powers, any anything not in the list, is to be decided by the states, by elected officials who are answerable to us. I don't like judicial activism, where judges who aren't elected, and therefore not answerable to us, think the constitution is whatever they interpret it to be.

When SCOTUS does this, sometimes it results in more freedom. Sometimes it results in savage tyranny, as in the Dred Scott decision. For a more recent example, read Kelo v New London, where homeowners in CT had their homes seized by eminent domain. And NOT so the town could build a school or road, but so the town could sell the land to a private developer who would get rich by building mcmansions. Stupifying.

The only way to prevent this, is to collectively state that the Constitution has absolute meaning and standards. If it gets outdated, there are mechanisms to amend it. But if the document only means what 9 non-elected folks interpret it to mean, then it means exactly nothing.

Freedom is not oppressing someone. Freedom is being free to do what YOU BELIEVEis right. Freedom is not oppressing someone else with your beliefs.
That's my thoughts on freedom :)
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

Sorry. Im sporting a mild beer buzz.

My point is that the scotus voted to ensure personal freedoms. Up next... Marijuana legalization on a national level.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

I know lots of gay people and I'm happy for them and humanity as a whole. I wouldn't expect people to judge me because I prefer to drink beer over wine, what business is that of anyone's but mine. What's the difference?

Sorry. Im sporting a mild beer buzz.

My point is that the scotus voted to ensure personal freedoms. Up next... Marijuana legalization on a national level.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

No it didn't ensure personal freedoms. Gays were already free to "marry."

Justice Kennedy, writing on behalf of the court, said 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."

The "oldest institution" Kennedy refers to was defined as being between men and women, not between same sexes. But he thinks (or more properly he FEELS) as a judge, he has the authority to change the definition. That is how rule of law is destroyed and transformed into rule by personal opinion. And that is the simplest definition of tyranny, not an assurance of freedom.

A judge's role is to apply the law, not to redefine words in order to make the law fit his personal preference. When it is left to a judge, or a government in general, to treat the laws as tinker toys to be disassembled and reformed into constructions of their own making without assent of the governed and against the legal compact which bind judges and government, that does not ensure personal freedom. It puts that freedom in danger. That such a tinker toy construction makes you feel good blinds you to the precedent set forth which can later impose another construction which will outrage you and make you feel less than free.

And beyond his tinkering with definitions, he errs by the typical ploy of progressive jurisprudence. He "interprets" something into the Constitution which is not there . The notion of "equal dignity in the eyes of the law." Neither the Constitution nor the Declaration speak of legal dignity. I think it was Justice Brennan who inserted dignity as some inalienable right. He omitted the unalienable right to property and slipped in its place the "right" to dignity in, I believe, an essay on constitutional jurisprudence or something of the sort.

Dignity is a rather useless word in applications of the law. Just about every instance of a violation of someone else's dignity is also a violation of something else which is more tangible or definable as a "right." And when it isn't, it is usually a violation of one's dignity resulting from one's own actions. But it is useful as a something which sounds or feels like some inherent right in and of itself which must not be violated by others. Ergo it becomes a useful word or tool for fuzzy progressive judicial tinkering.

Further, it is moronic to say that someone, gay or otherwise, is "condemned to live in loneliness" if he/she is not married. And it is beyond idiotic for a Supreme Court Justice to not only create rather than interpret law, but to create law which ameliorates or prohibits loneliness.

Lastly, your thoughts on freedom, as in previous discussions on gay rights and wedding cakes, are one-sided. You say:

"Freedom is not oppressing someone. Freedom is being free to do what YOU BELIEVEis right. Freedom is not oppressing someone else with your beliefs.
That's my thoughts on freedom."

If gays marry as a government prescribed and sanctioned right rather than as an act of mere personal preference, doesn't that bring in the eventual hassles of requiring others who oppose, or would rather not participate in gay marriage, to do so, such as the cakes and photos, etc.? And would that not, contrary to your thoughts on freedom, deny their right to be free to do what they believe is right?

I know lots of gay people and I'm happy for them and humanity as a whole. I wouldn't expect people to judge me because I prefer to drink beer over wine, what business is that of anyone's but mine. What's the difference?

"what business is that of anyone's but mine"

Here's the thing. At the present time, the militant gay activists do make it other people's business. Ask the Christian bakers who get sued because they have the temerity to be asked to be left alone to practice their religion.

If the gay activists would show a fraction of the tolerance that they are demanding from everyone else, that might go a long way to smooth things over. But this isn't about "live and let live", it's about "do as I say or face the consequences".

"It was an incredible experience to hear a Supreme Court justice talk about how my marriage, my relationship, how John and I matter. How we deserve respect and dignity and I started to feel a lot more like a full, equal American at that moment.” - Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case on gay marriage, who is evidently under the impression that his dignity comes from the state and that respect is not earned but rather is the result of judicial fiat.

You already had dignity, sir, because you are a human being created by God, and anyone who truly knows that God already had respect for you and didn't need a bitterly divided 5-4 Supreme Court decision to tell us to respect you.

Sheesh.

Freedom is not oppressing someone. Freedom is being free to do what YOU BELIEVEis right. Freedom is not oppressing someone else with your beliefs.
That's my thoughts on freedom :)
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

Freedom is being free to SAY and DO what you want, not to believe what you want. You are not FREE if you can think something but will be arrested if you SAY that something. You are not FREE if you cannot DO what you want provided it doens not infringe on the rights of others.

Freedom is not something you give others, you either legislate (true) freedom (the right to vote, emancipation as examples) or fight to give it to others (liberating Europe) or protect it from being taken away (police / military).

Legislating piles of rules / laws / decrees is not legislating Freedom. At best it is energizing bureaucracy, at worst hampering Freedom.

Freedom is not the default state of affairs ANYWHERE. Freedom is the heavy rock at the top of the hill that others intentionally or unintentionally undercut to fall back down the hill.

Most Americans have never SEEN the absence of Freedom. It is a very scary thing when you can't see Freedom.

Sorry. Im sporting a mild beer buzz.

My point is that the scotus voted to ensure personal freedoms. Up next... Marijuana legalization on a national level.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
A someone that knows many people - including some dear to me - chemically ruined by marijuana - I hope not.

That which isn't specificly allowed is forbidden.

What part of inalienable rights endowed by the Creator..... doesn't the ruling class understand.
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Overthrow the Judicial Dictatorship

By Cliff Kincaid June 27, 2015 6:55 am

Commentators have missed the real significance of Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the gay marriage case. He calls the decision a judicial “Putsch,” an attempt to overthrow a form of government—ours. His dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, was written “to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.”

His comment about the Court using the kind of reasoning we find in a fortune cookie is a funny line. But there is much of the Scalia dissent that is not funny and which serves as a warning to the American people about what the Court has done to us.

Scalia understands the power and meaning of words and he chose the word “putsch” for a specific purpose. One definition of the term means “a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government…” Another definition is “a plotted revolt or attempt to overthrow a government, especially one that depends upon suddenness and speed.”

Hence, Scalia is saying this was not only a blatant power grab and the creation of a “right” that does not exist, but a decision that depends on public ignorance about what is really taking place. It is our system of checks and balances and self-rule that has been undermined, he says.

In that sense, he is warning us that we need to understand the real significance of this decision, and go beyond all the commentators talking about “marriage equality” and “equal rights” for homosexuals. In effect, he is saying that the decision is really not about gay rights, but about the future of our constitutional republic, and the ability of the people to govern themselves rather than be governed by an elite panel making up laws and rights as they go.

Scalia’s dissent cannot be understood by listening to summaries made by commentators who probably didn’t read it. Although I may be accused of exaggerating the import of his dissent, my conclusion is that he is calling for nothing less than the American people to understand that a judicial dictatorship has emerged in this country and that its power must be addressed, checked, and overruled.

The implication of his dissent is that we, the American people, have to neutralize this panel, perhaps by removing the offenders from the court, and put in place a group of thinkers who are answerable to the Constitution and the people whose rights the Court is supposed to protect.

He says the majority on the court undermined the main principle of the American Revolution—“the freedom to govern themselves”—by sabotaging the right of the people to decide these matters. The Court destroyed the definition of marriage as one man and one woman “in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law.” In other words, the Court acted unlawfully and unconstitutionally.

Scalia called the decision “a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government.”

Justice Scalia goes on, however, to attempt to explain why this is happening. He basically says, in so many words, that the majority of the Court is un-American, completely out of touch with American traditions and the views of ordinary Americans. He rips the Federal Judiciary as “hardly a cross-section of America,” people from elite law schools, with not a single person from middle-America, and not a single evangelical Christian or even a Protestant of any denomination. He calls the Court, on which he serves, a “highly unrepresentative panel of nine,” that has engaged in “social transformation” of the United States.

More than that, after examining the elite views and backgrounds of the “notorious nine,” he declares that while the American Revolution was a rejection of “taxation without representation,” we have in the gay marriage case, “social transformation without representation.”

One cannot help but think that Scalia wants readers to recall Obama’s promise of the “fundamental transformation” of America, except that in this case Obama has been assisted by five judges who did not represent, or even care about, the views of America as a whole.

While Scalia zeroed in on his colleagues on the Court, we can easily apply his analysis to the unelected members of the liberal media who pretend to offer the American people an objective and sensible interpretation of the decision.

On CNN, for example, anchor Brooke Baldwin “moderated” a discussion between lesbian liberal Sally Kohn and liberal pro-gay “Republican” Margaret Hoover. The only issue was when the Republican Party would accept gay rights and sell out conservative Christians. Baldwin herself is a member, or at least a supporter, of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Conservatives watching Fox News and hoping for a pro-traditional values perspective are likely to be seriously disappointed as well. The new Fox star, Megyn Kelly, is getting rave reviews from the liberals for defending homosexual and transgender rights. A special report by Peter LaBarbera examines how Fox has been almost as biased on this issue as other media, calling the channel “unfair, unbalanced and afraid.” The word “afraid” describes the general failure to challenge the homosexual movement, into which Fox News has been pouring a significant amount of money for many years. Indeed, some “conservatives” have gone way over to the other side, with Greg Gutfeld, another rising Fox star, insisting that gay marriage is a conservative concept.

The Scalia dissent demonstrates why the fight for traditional values cannot and must not stop. That fight must continue because our form of democratic self-government is in grave jeopardy, and has in fact suffered a major blow. A federal constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage is one obvious course of action. But that won’t solve the basic problem of an emerging judicial dictatorship willing to redefine historical institutions, make up rights, and defy common sense.

The court’s reputation for “clear thinking and sober analysis” is in danger because of this terribly misguided decision, Scalia writes. In other words, the Court is drunk with power and cannot see or think straight.

The same can be said about the major media, which cover this decision as just another controversial ruling that people will disagree on.

In fact, as the Scalia dissent notes, this decision will live in infamy. It is as if a Pearl Harbor-type attack has been achieved on America’s moral fabric and constitutional foundations.

In this context, Scalia talks about the Court overreaching its authority and moving “one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.” In my view, this is an open invitation for responsible elected officials to take power away from this Court and return it to the people.

But how will the Republican Party respond? Some big money players are demanding the white flag of surrender, so the GOP can “move on.” This is what the British “Conservative” Party has done, and we see the consequences there, as Christians are now being arrested by police or fired from their jobs for expressing views in favor of traditional values and traditional marriage.

Scalia’s discussion of “social transformation” of the United States without the voluntary input or approval of the people captures the essence of the coup that has been carried out. This process now has to be explained in terms that most people understand. It is, in fact, the phenomenon of cultural Marxism, an insidious process explained so forcefully in Professor Paul Kengor’s new book, Takedown.

As Kengor notes, gay marriage is only the beginning of this cultural transformation. By redefining the historical institution, the Court has opened the door to multiple wives, group marriages, sibling marriages, fathers and stepfathers marrying daughters and stepdaughters, and uncles marrying nieces.

A country that descends to the bottom of the barrel morally and culturally will not be able to defend itself against its foreign adversaries and enemies. Indeed, we have the evidence all around us that, as the culture has degenerated, our ability to defend ourselves has simultaneously been weakened. The recent Pentagon gay pride event featured a male General introducing his husband, as a transgender Pentagon civilian employee looked on.

The next step, from the point of view of those objecting to this fundamental transformation of America, has to be to find those elected leaders willing to act. The presidential campaign of 2016 is an opportunity to find out who understands the crisis and whether they have a way out.

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Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

May as well have at it.
Country is re=writing the history books, now they want to re=write human nature.
How long till it's legal to marry your pet dog :screwy:

G Will had some interesting comments re: King v. Burwell which apply broadly....we are watching our Constitution our system of government and the foundation of our Nation being destroyed "fundamental transformation"....and many are celebrating this as progress....you never miss it till it's gone



.......... judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences. We are, says William R. Maurer of the Institute for Justice, becoming “a country in which all the branches of government work in tandem to achieve policy outcomes, instead of checking one another to protect individual rights. Besides violating the separation of powers, this approach raises serious issues about whether litigants before the courts are receiving the process that is due to them under the Constitution. The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism’s central objective, the overthrow of the Constitution’s architecture. The separation of powers impedes progressivism by preventing government from wielding uninhibited power. Such power would result if its branches behaved as partners in harness rather than as wary, balancing rivals maintaining constitutional equipoise. Roberts says “we must respect the role of the legislature” but “a fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.” However, he goes beyond “understanding” the plan; he adopts a legislator’s role in order to rescue the legislature’s plan from the consequences of the legislature’s dubious decisions. By blurring, to the point of erasure, constitutional boundaries, he damages all institutions, not least his court. — George Will

May as well have at it.
Country is re=writing the history books, now they want to re=write human nature.
How long till it's legal to marry your pet dog :screwy:

I suspect polygamy will be next...after all, who would deny a happy loving throuple, quople the opportunity to wed ? with all of the various gender designations(58+) that one can assign oneself these days it's probably going to require a few partners to satisfy how one may be feeling regarding their sexual orientation on a given day.... and it will certainly take several working adults in a family unit to survive the Obama economy's new normal....win-win...the more the merrier

John Roberts: Worst chief justice ever?

By Daily Inter Lake, The (Kalispell, MT) June 29, 2015 11:55 am

I'm giving the chief justice of the United States the benefit of the doubt by including a question mark in my headline. There have certainly been bad chief justices before, and bad decisions rendered by probably all of them, but it is hard to imagine a more self-serving, self-important tool of political correctness than John Roberts.

On Thursday, John Roberts released the majority opinion in King v. Burwell, upholding the federal government's assertion that when Congress, or more particularly the Democrats in Congress, wrote that tax credits in the Affordable Care Act were intended only for citizens who used health-insurance exchanges "established by the state," they didn't mean it. In fact, according to Roberts, they meant the opposite.

Actually, Roberts doesn't care what they meant because in his majority opinion he more or less confesses that what is important is not the law, but the outcome.

Thus, at the beginning of his opinion, he writes, "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act grew out of a long history of failed health-insurance reform." Clearly, what we have here is an essay written to justify health-insurance reform. The history of health-insurance reform is completely irrelevant to the matter before the court, which was simply, WHAT IS A STATE?

One thing is certain: The federal government is not a state, and more particularly, the secretary of health and human services -- who established the federal exchange -- is not a state. But the Supreme Court said they are.

As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a scathing rebuke of Roberts:

"Under all the usual rules of interpretation... the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved."

In reading the majority opinion, it is obvious that Roberts believes that the Affordable Care Act SHOULD work, so he crafted his opinion in order to guarantee that it COULD work, regardless of the facts. He tips his hand repeatedly, as in the concluding paragraph when he writes, "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." It doesn't matter to Roberts that Congress through its own negligence wrote the law poorly. Like President Obama, Justice Roberts has a pen and a phone, and he used his pen to edit the mistakes of Congress and red-line the liberty of American citizens. From this day forward, liberty is whatever Justice Roberts says it is.

If he and his liberal allies did not intend to WRITE a new law in order to RIGHT the error done by Congress, then they could have simply done what was obvious -- rule that Congress through incompetence, hastiness, or guile had written the law in such a way that it had certain inevitable consequences -- consequences which could only be rectified by Congress in its role as the sole law-making branch of the U.S. government. If Congress meant to say that the tax credits were for everyone enrolled in the program, it should have said so in the first place, but even if it made a mistake it certainly had the ability to correct it today if that were its wish. The Supreme Court should have said so.

But instead Roberts "intuited" that Congress actually meant to give the tax credit to everyone even though it had failed to say so in plain language, and in fact had said the opposite.

Unfortunately for Roberts' legacy, the intent of Congress was made plain not just by the legislation itself but also by its prime architect Jonathan Gruber, who in January 2012 explicitly described how Obamacare's tax credits were intended only for citizens who used state-established health-insurance exchanges, not for customers of the federal exchange.

Here is Gruber's analysis, recorded on video at the time:

"I think what's important to remember politically about this is, if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits," Gruber said. "But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you're essentially saying to your citizens, you're going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country."

Gruber made it clear that this language was included intentionally in order to encourage the states to set up their own exchanges by depriving a benefit from them if they did not!

"I hope," he said, "that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges, and that they'll do it."

In other words, the Affordable Care Act was intentionally structured as it was in order to pressure states into creating health-care exchanges. There's no way around that, nor is there any way around acknowledging that the Roberts' ruling now gets states off the hook. Even states that created exchanges originally will now see no need to keep them and their vast bureaucracies, but will likely turn the duty back over to the federal government to expand its death-grip control and authority over every aspect of our lives.

Mind you, I never expected the Supreme Court to rule correctly on the matter of what a state is. If U.S. courts operated on principles of logic and common sense, this case would never even have gotten to the Supreme Court.

According to Chief Justice Roberts, a state is whatever he says it is, which makes him the lead antagonist in the real-life sequel to George Orwell's dystopian nightmare, "1984."

Do you remember O'Brien, the amoral defender of the state in that novel, who holds up four fingers and asks Winston how many he sees? Winston responds truthfully that O'Brien is holding up four fingers.

"And if the Party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?"

"Four."

The word ended in a gasp of pain.

That's how it played out in "1984," where Winston is tortured until he accepts the fake reality that the government has constructed, but now it is not the Party that creates reality out of nothing; it is the Supreme Court.

Just imagine this same scene with Roberts playing O'Brien, and the question not about how many fingers he is holding up, but what constitutes a state.

"What is a state, Winston?" Justice Roberts asks.

"A state is one of the 50 sovereign units of the country known as the United States."

"And if the Supreme Court says that a state is not a state?"

"It is still a state."

The word ended in a gasp of pain.

"What if the Supreme Court says that the federal government is a state?

"It is not a state."

More pain. More intense. Eventually you give up and repeat what you are told.

"How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?"

That's easy. As many as the Party says.

Justice Scalia got it right when he said that Obamacare has a new name now -- SCOTUS Care, the honorary stepchild of the dishonorable Supreme Court of the United States.

Welcome to "1984."

___

(c)2015 the Daily Inter Lake (Kalispell, Mont.)

Visit the Daily Inter Lake (Kalispell, Mont.) at www.dailyinterlake.com

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