[detbuch]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

And that's your right - you have the right to decide whether or not to say 'no'. The baker has teh same right.

Jim, knowing your Catholic views and your sympathy for those in need, let me make the scenario a bit more difficult. Would you as a Christian hospital have the right to say no to a gay person who was admitted with a life threatening injury which needed immediate attention? Would you as a heterosexual bank manager have the right to deny loans or deposits to gay people? As a strictly constitutional matter, I would say yes, you have those rights. What say you?

It's easy to demonize this man Eben. Try something harder...try telling me why the Bill Of Rights, and the freedom of religion contained therein, doesn't apply to him.

I don't know what specific demands the baker's form of Christianity practices, but in general, from my experience, most Christian sects don't prohibit the selling of cakes to homosexuals. The baker being Christian, for me, doesn't matter constitutionally in this issue. If he were not Christian his constitutional right to own and distribute his property would be the same as it would if he was Christian. Again, I don't know the specifics of his particular brand of Christianity, but it doesn't seem to me that this is a question of practicing religion.

We don't get to selectively decide who is protected by the Bill Of Rights, depending upon the ideological agenda that's popular at that moment.

But we have gone very far down the road as a society whose government and its judicial system does exactly that. Perhaps we have gone so far that many of us are seeing the disparity between the original Constitution and the current living breathing one. I think that's good, if not too little too late. And when even those who support "the Constitution" against judicial activism are willing to bend it a little to satisfy their own conscience or sense of fairness, as in restricting the second amendment to own firearms to what they consider a "sensible" level, then the cracks and fissures are there to grow and expand to other areas of that founding structure.

And let me remind you that personally, I support gay marriage. But more than that, I support our constitution, and I don't like it when judges ignore sections of it that they don't happen to like. If we give judges that power, then maybe someday, someone will decide that the constitution doesn't apply to you. I wouldn't like that any more than I like this.

If this judge wants to be a gay rights activist, that's a noble thing, but he cannot do it when he's sitting on the bench. The concept of 'justice' demands that he put his personal agenda aside when he's wearing that robe. His only agenda is supposed to be the law.

The judge in this case made a telling and instructive admission when he said that at first blush it would seem that the baker had a perfect right to refuse to sell his wares to anyone he wished . . . but on second consideration it was necessary to understand and correct the harm that would do to society. How he was even able to arrive at such a reason for judgment is based on how the court system has been transformed from merely adjudicating the law to judging by agenda. I had said in a previous thread that I didn't know of any progressive principles. But I had forgotten one of the very first--Woodrow Wilsons assertion that the Constitution was not to be seen, as the Founders did, as a "Newtonian" document--a mechanistic structure--but to be "interpreted" as a Darwinian one. It was, in the progressive view, an organic living thing, as was the government it instituted. The Constitution was not to be a rigid mechanically functioning structure to serve the people at the people's behest as any machine would do, rather it and the government which functioned through it were living things, subject to living evolution and self-fulfillment. A wholly different way of "interpreting" the Constitution was necessary in view of its transition from an immutable code to an organic living system of societal governance.

Government and its judges were not to be bound by mere structures of law, but would perform and judge as if by a living entity with its own ideas of necessity, efficiency, and justice. For that is what a healthy and rational living thing does. Of course, the reality is that only ACTUALLY living things, real people, would be the functionaries that operated this new system. So, in actuality, it was not some self-evolving "living" entity called government, but a small coterie of actual people deciding for the entire population what was law and what was not.

Judges developed new ways of interpreting the law. Interpretation was no longer about what the words in the Constitution, as written, meant, nor any longer only to decide if the law was actually within an enumerated power granted by the Constitution--rather, judges were to be free of such narrow limitations and allowed into a vaster sphere of interpretation based on utilitarian and equitable social justice, as well as other forms of "higher ideals," none of which stemmed from powers granted in the Constitution. Concepts of jurisprudence were concocted out of thin air such as government having "a compelling interest" outside the confines of prescribed constitutional limitations, or whether there was any, even the slightest theoretical, rational basis for legislation regardless of whether or not there was an actual constitutional basis for it.

Of course, a machine, as the progressives viewed the founders version of their Constitution, can have no "interests" much less any "compelling" ones. Such an entity does not have self-willed human attributes. Such a Constitution can only "compel" the government, as a guide or blueprint, to operate and legislate only within its enumerated boundaries. A progressive "living" governmental structure, on the other hand, is not restricted to things that refuse to give it life. A living thing must be free to meet new challenges in new ways, to grow beyond infantile restrictions and expand to a mature strength that gives it the power to more efficiently govern an evolving society. And so another principle the progressives derived from this living status of government was that this living thing must have the power to create its own bounds. That is, this living government must be unimpeded to function as it sees fit for the efficient and socially justified administration of law. That is, the government was to be basically unlimited in its power to govern.

And so the judge, in this baker vs. gays case can blithely go from the "first blush" of original constitutional property rights to the progressive socially justified distribution of the baker's property per force of a compelling government interest in protecting society from "harm". The irony that such a judgment is elicited from the "interpretation" of a document which was written to protect society from being harmed by government, goes unnoticed. It is, in fact, applauded by our ruling elites in academia, in the media, and in our branches of government. Some might say this is the new road to serfdom. Others would say, c'mon, that's extreme--couldn't happen. But one of the founding principles of the American Revolution, of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Constitution, was the individual right to possess property and dispose of it as one wishes. And one of the most important functions of the government that was originally founded is the protection of those property rights. Under the progressive model, however, those property rights are an obstacle to efficient and equitable governance. There is a burgeoning progressive philosophy that property is a public right not a private one. The government holds it in a sort of escrow for the people and distributes it through regulation and taxation to individuals to husband for the good of the community. Private property, essentially becomes public. And, in the final analysis, the baker has no right to withhold property from the gay couple.