Supremely Gay Arguments

Gay marriage was argued before the Supreme Court last week

Gay rights are advancing on three fronts in our society:  Church, State, and each human heart. 

The Church

I don't understand churches striking homosexual acts from the canon of sins, but why not?  The same churches give the AOK to people shacking up and they have no problem with serial marriages, divorces and remarriages.  So, like the other teachings they've dropped, they must be jumping on the gay bandwagon out of attempted trendiness, and in a twisted way, fairness.

I don't know what else explains it;  we've experienced no earth-shaking new revelation or important archeological or theological discovery that would warrant changing a 2,000 year old New Testament teaching.  But this is America, where we copiously invent and reinvent religions.
 
So, like Pope Francis, I shrug my shoulders.  In a secular Democratic Republic, who am I to question religious freedom?

The State

Argumentation before the Supreme court is shot through with fuzzy but important concepts like respect, respectability, acceptance, normal, and validation.  And all in the pursuit of equality before the law.

A majority of Americans (including me) agree that gay couples should enjoy all the same legal rights as heteros:  Work-related benefits, inheritance, etc.  That can be accomplished by government without redefining a millenia-old institution that cuts across all cultures.

What gay marriage advocates seek from the state is not just equality before the law, but a bundle of new laws to bludgeon the unenlightened and the dangerously religous.  A redefinition of marriage from the Supreme Court will not change hearts.  If anything, battle lines will harden, and the next battleground will be churches.

The Human Heart

This battle has been won.  Even those opposed to gay marriage and who think homosexuality is a sin overwhelmingly express the opinion that gay couples should enjoy the same benefits before the law as heteros.  So why does the gay lobby keep pushing and demand we call it marriage?

Because it's not about equality before the law.  It's about using the law to force everyone to march in the gay parade.  All in the name of stamping out hatred, of course, but it is a sloppy broad brush wielded by dogma-driven propagandists to say that opposing gay marriage is hatred.

Try going into a HuffPo comment forum and stating you oppose gay marriage because of your Christian beliefs, then tell me who the haters are.

The best any of us can expect from others is toleration. Live and let live.  We leave each other alone to conduct our own lives as we see fit. Anything above that is icing on the cake. To expect people to embrace and celebrate acts and lifestyles they do not condone is childish, and asking the state to enforce such unicorn worship is dangerous.

The Savage Approach

As a bonus, I'm including a full episode of The Savage Nation dedicated to this topic.  Those who believe Doc Savage to be a fire-breathing hater will be disappointed, and those unfamiliar with the show will be surprised at how many gay, lesbian and liberal listeners he has.

I only include this because it is blessedly free of angry boilerplate, trite blabbering and predictable talking points.  It is full of real people, almost all gays and lesbians, having a real discussion with sexual libertarian and cultural conservative Michael Savage about gay marriage.

Back on the Road Again: The Supremes

The Supremes overturned aggregate campaign finance limits Wednesday, freeing wealthy Americans to give to as many federal candidates as they want — though the justices left in place the cap on how much can be given to any one person.

“Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects,” the chief justice wrote. “If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades — despite the profound offense such spectacles cause — it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.”

Supreme Agony, Statist Ecstasy

I do not agree with Chief Justice John Roberts' decision.  It explodes government's taxation powers.  I side with the dissenting minority, so this is an explanation, not a justification.

Democrats are right. The Supreme Court is political. It's complex interrelationship with the other branches always has been, going all the way back to President Andrew Jackson’s famous quote defying a Supreme Court decision: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!”

The Supreme Court tore up FDR in the early days of his creating alphabet soup agencies. But the public began to perceive them as obstructionist in a time where the federal government needed latitude, so they softened their stance to guard their power. Later, President Roosevelt would overreach, threatening to pack the court. The public rejected that as well, and thus continued the political balancing act.

The result was a continued expansion of federal power that was begun at the start of the progressive era.

Chief Justice Roberts Saved the Day

In a feat of cowardly political and legal jujitsu, Chief Justice John Roberts made a political calculation, joining with the liberal justices to avoid a five alarm political firestorm in an election year. This kicks the issue back into the political arena where it belongs. Being on the winning side, he got to write the majority opinion and shape it, carving the precedent as narrowly as possible.

He allowed Obamacare to stand while simultaneously checking an expansion of federal power under the commerce clause.

Roberts apparently found the two other likely outcomes too earth-shattering

Striking it down completely could have set a precedent that government does not have the power to tax us in this way, setting the stage for the destruction of Social Security and Medicare, which are funded by mandatory taxation.

Small government conservatives like me thrill at the prospect, but suddenly shattering a model that tens of millions depend on is not the smart way to do something, and such radical remedies are not conservative.

Commerce Clause expansion was the argument upon which opponents hung their opposition.  The other outcome he avoided was allowing government to claim it had this authority under the commerce clause. That would have been catastrophic, essentially declaring that there is nothing the federal government may not do if it posits an appropriate pretext.

He ingeniously rejected the notion that this was permissible under the commerce clause, thereby saving us from another expansion of this already gargantuan federal government permission slip. It was also a stroke of genius to declare this as falling under the federal government’s already-established taxation power.

This decision sets no precedent

Government already and still does have too much power, but this did not grant it any new ones. There is no precedent here, no new rights created.  What the ruling does do is egregiously expand government's taxation powers. The government can tax what it wants when it wants to, and that is the bucket the Chief Justice has dumped Obamacare into.

They won’t force you to eat your arugula or put solar panels on your roof, they will just tax you punitively if you don’t. Could we end up being taxed by the pound? Why not? This opens the way for Bloombergian taxation of all kind of stuff that’s bad for you: Fatty meats, cheesecake, ice cream…

But the power was already there. Has been for a hundred years, it is just metastasizing now.

Elections have consequences. The final vote on Obamacare will be this November.

Bonus Material:
Market-based Alternatives to Obamacare
Why Obamacare will fail: A Reading List
Why Obamacare is Doomed

Naked Tyranny

Is the 4th Amendment defunct?

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that jails may strip search detainees being put into the general prison population.

Progressive screamers, horrified at Obamacare's poor performance before the court a week earlier, seized upon the ruling to impugn the court that they anticipate will knock down Obamacare as well.

It's an interesting tactic, sure to win over those who don't think too hard, but in reality the two cases are unrelated, each decided on its merits.  The one common factor in both cases is government power, but progressives don't want to go there.

Noah Feldman examines the Supreme Court ruling:

As a result, instead of arguing about dignity, the justices disagreed about the practical question of whether invasive strip-searches are reasonably necessary to serve the interests of the jails and prisons. Kennedy’s majority opinion said that they were.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the strip-searches, however well-intentioned when first instituted, now function to humiliate people being put behind bars, sending the message that they are now essentially nonpersons, under the full control of the state.

Yet, it’s worth noting, not even Breyer argued that all strip-searches of people entering jail should be unconstitutional. There is a reason: Privacy, as we know it, is dying. The death is slow and gradual. But it is starting to look inevitable. Supreme Court justices, in general, and Kennedy in particular, rarely fight the trend of history. (Noah Feldman)

The linchpin to the Supreme Court decision was that law enforcement officers have a right to protect themselves and a duty to protect other detainees, and that trumps the rights of people introduced into a detention facility. That makes sense, but it doesn't get to the heart of the issue.

The Real Outrage

People are missing the true outrage here. A non-violent suspect was incarcerated for failure to pay a fine. With all the technology at our fingertips, we suffer under a medieval government. Proliferating policies and ever-expanding laws and police powers are making outlaws of us all, and we are increasingly being treated like hardened criminals by an arrogant, burgeoning police state. We are guilty until proven innocent.

Progressive fans of Big Government take note:

A government that can make you purchase health insurance can also strip you naked and make you squat and cough.

Are You Serious? The Federal Government Can Do Most Anything!

Liberals are just now waking up to the reality that Obamacare is hard to defend, because they haven't deigned to defend it until now.  The liberal argument for Obamacare has been based in "bandwagon/argumentum ad populum" and "appeal to authority," both logical fallacies.

Here's a common illogical example addressing government's power to regulate non-activity and make us eat broccoli:

Until this week, most scholars seemed to think this would be treated by the justices as a distinction without any special significance. “It’s a silly distinction,” Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor, told me this week. Opponents of the law “have gotten an enormous amount of mileage out of ‘inactivity,’ but that really has nothing to do with the regulation of commerce,” he said.

One hundred professors from many of the country’s major law schools signed a statement arguing that those seeking to overturn the law “seek to jettison nearly two centuries of settled constitutional law” and “there can be no serious doubt about the constitutionality” of the insurance mandate. 

One hundred professors! No serious doubt!  Imagine that! This is the kind of argumentation the left's advocacy is shot through with. No reasoning, just intellectually-flaccid statements that include such phrases as "everybody knows" and "experts agree." They won't even rebut serious challenges, imperiously discounting them out of hand.

Yes We Can!  ...Make them eat their broccoli...

When Justice Scalia asked the broccoli question, White House Solicitor Verrilli stumbled and fumbled, disappointing tearful progressives everywhere. Here's what a New York Times writer thought he should have said, and it sums up progressive thought in a nutshell:

But it seems to me that a succinct answer to Justice Scalia’s question is that the commerce clause would not limit Congress’s ability to regulate broccoli — if members of the House and Senate were crazy enough to pass legislation requiring all of us to eat green vegetables and if that were deemed a rational way to regulate commerce. The same could be said of health clubs.  (NY Times)

Progressivism is Fundamentally Un-American

There you go, folks. This is why progressives should never be trusted with power, and their century-old strongman ideology is fundamentally un-American.  In their world, unlike the founding fathers', a crazy congress could force us to eat our arugula, or march the fatties off to government boot camps, and that is the fatal flaw of progressivism: Trusting our overlords to not be crazy, stupid or greedy as they wield absolute power.  Yeah, that's a great plan!  Sarcasm aside, it is antithetical to the bedrock foundation of this republic, it ignores the entire arc of human history, and flies in the face of our understanding of human nature.

Note how the progressive author blithely dismisses individual liberty:

"To Depression-era farmers, it was no doubt an affront to individual freedom that the federal government had the power to tell them what crops not to plant." (NY Times)

Not buying insurance, or Filburn growing wheat for his own consumption in defiance of government quotas, is fair game for progressives because it affects overall commerce. But everything is connected, so what on earth does not affect overall commerce? That is how markets work. Under the progressives' capacious understanding of the commerce clause, there is no human activity under the sun that the federal government could not regulate.

An old or severely disabled person deciding to not die and instead electing an expensive medical procedure would fit into the same category. A progressive government, using its own twisted logic, would regulate that too, regulating the person right out of existence.  I'll spare you the historical precedents...

"the federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country." -- Democrat Congressman Pete Stark

Please go read Ilya Shapiro's excellent article slicing and dicing the hapless left, We were Serious the whole Time