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Posts tagged ‘Supreme Court’

Reports: Kavanaugh Has Found 1982 Calendar, Detailed Entries Help Clear His Name

Reported By Benjamin Arie | September 23, 2018 at

5:26pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/kavanaugh-1982-calendar-entries/

The last-minute attempt to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as the next Supreme Court justice has just hit a serious snag. Facing damaging but almost completely unsubstantiated claims that he acted improperly with a girl back when he was a teenager, the conservative nominee has dug into his personal archives to defend himself.

Up until now, the vague accusations made by Christine Blasey Ford had only resulted in a “he said, she said” stalemate. Liberals insisted that Blasey Ford’s story of a bad encounter at a drunken party be believed, while conservatives have pointed out that the nearly 40-year-old claim is impossible to verify.

Finally, Kavanaugh has presented tangible evidence that the accusation doesn’t hold up.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the judge has found old calendars from the period when the unproven groping allegedly took place — and they appear to support his claim that the incident didn’t happen.

“Kavanaugh has calendars from the summer of 1982 that he plans to hand over to the Senate Judiciary Committee that do not show a party consistent with the description of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford,” explained The Times.

“The calendar pages from June, July and August 1982, which were examined by The New York Times, show that Judge Kavanaugh was out of town much of the summer at the beach or away with his parents,” the newspaper continued.

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“When he was at home, the calendars list his basketball games, movie outings, football workouts and college interviews. A few parties are mentioned but include names of friends other than those identified by Dr. Blasey.”

Here is perhaps the biggest nail in the coffin for Blasey Ford’s already-flimsy story: The calendar contains entries for parties, but none of the names included in those entries match the names Blasey Ford listed.

That any names were included in his calendar entries for parties shows Kavanaugh was remarkably thorough about recording his social schedule.

That fact is yet another point in favor of Kavanaugh and against his accuser. The woman behind the claim has admitted that she can recall almost nothing specific about the incident, including its location, time, or other people involved.

The few names brought up by Blasey Ford have refuted her story and indicated that they don’t remember a party with both her and Kavanaugh.

“Mr. (Mike) Judge has told the Judiciary Committee that he remembered no such incident and had never seen Judge Kavanaugh behave in such a way,” explained The Times, referring to one alleged witness of the drunken party.

“The only other two people identified as being in the house at the time, but not the bedroom, have also said in recent days that they did not recall the incident. Patrick J. Smyth said he did not remember such a party or see any improper conduct by Judge Kavanaugh.”

“Leland Keyser, a former classmate of Dr. Blasey’s at Holton-Arms, said she did not know Judge Kavanugh or remember being at a party with him,” stated the newspaper.

Accusations of this type are of course serious, and conducting due diligence is part of the vetting process for anyone nominated for a powerful position. There comes a point, however, when weak and impossible to prove allegations need to be put to rest. Blasey Ford may genuinely believe that something like the incident she described did happen; she may be telling the truth about a teenage trauma affecting her for decades, too.

The problem is that there is zero evidence it was Brett Kavanaugh who did what she claims, and no way short of a time machine to prove her accusations.

By all accounts, Kavanaugh has been a responsible and thoughtful family man and legal scholar for the entirety of his adult life — and that record needs to stand far above one person’s increasingly shaky claim.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly claimed that Judge Kavanaugh’s 1982 calendar does not contain any names identified in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim against Kavanaugh. The calendar does reference Mike Judge, a friend of Kavanaugh and, according to Blasey Ford, a witness to the alleged assault. Judge’s name, however, is not mentioned in reference to any parties, while other names are — none of which have been identified by Blasey Ford. We apologize for the mistake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Benjamin Arie

Contributor, Commentary

Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.

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FBI Throws Cold Water on Feinstein’s Kavanaugh Scandal Claim

Reported By Randy DeSoto | September 14, 2018 at 11:16am

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/fbi-throws-cold-water-feinsteins-kavanaugh-scandal-claim/

The FBI reportedly has no plans to investigate the possible sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh stemming from his high school days in the early 1980s, which is believed to be contained in a letter Sen. Dianne Feinstein passed on to the bureau, according to The Washington Post.

“I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further,” the California Democrat said in a statement released Thursday.

“I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities,” she continued.

A woman first approached Democrat lawmakers in July, shortly after Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Donald Trump, reported Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer with The New Yorker.

In the letter, the woman alleged that during an encounter at a party while she and Kavanaugh were in high school, he held her down and attempted to force himself on her.

“She claimed in the letter that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking, turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests, and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand. She was able to free herself,” according to The New Yorker.

Kavanaugh, 53, graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1983.

The judge responded in a statement on Friday, saying, “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time.”

Kavanaugh’s classmate told The New Yorker of the woman’s allegation, “I have no recollection of that.”

The woman declined to be interviewed by the paper.

Feinstein refused to share the contents of the letter — which was reportedly first given to her by Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoo of California — with fellow members of the Judiciary Committee.

“A source familiar with the committee’s activities said that Feinstein’s staff initially conveyed to other Democratic members’ offices that the incident was too distant in the past to merit public discussion, and that Feinstein had ‘taken care of it,’” according to The New Yorker.

Seung Min Kim with The Washington Post reported the “FBI does not now plan to launch a criminal investigation of the Kavanaugh matter; instead the bureau passed the material to the White House as an update to Kavanaugh’s background check.”

White House spokeswoman Kerri Kupec called the letter a “smear” attempt, intended to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation, according to The Post.

“Throughout his confirmation process, Judge Kavanaugh has had 65 meetings with senators — including with Senator Feinstein — sat through over 30 hours of testimony, addressed over 2,000 questions in a public setting and additional questions in a confidential session,” Kupec said. “Not until the eve of his confirmation has Sen. Feinstein or anyone raised the specter of new ‘information’ about him.”

Kupec also noted that the FBI has “thoroughly and repeatedly vetted” the judge through his 25 years of public service, including 12 years on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and prior to that serving as an attorney and White House staff secretary in the George W. Bush White House.

Judiciary Committee member Sen. John Cornyn responded with apparent skepticism about Feinstein’s letter.

“Let me get this straight: this is statement about secret letter regarding a secret matter and an unidentified person. Right,” the Texas Republican tweeted Thursday.

Cornyn told CNN that the move “smacks of desperation to me.”

George Hartmann, a spokesman for Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, said the senator is aware of Feinstein’s referral.

“At this time, he has not seen the letter in question, and is respecting the request for confidentiality,” Hartmann said. “There’s no plan to change the committee’s consideration of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination.”

A committee vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination is slated for Thursday, Sept. 20, with a full Senate vote expected by the end of the month.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Randy DeSoto

Senior Staff Writer

Randy DeSoto is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”

@RandyDeSoto

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Appalachian Justice: Here’s How WV Handles an Out-of-Control Supreme Court

Reported By Ben Marquis | August 8, 2018 at 1:31pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/appalachian-justice-heres-how-wv-handles-an-out-of-control-supreme-court/

The issue of corruption among elected officials is one that enrages many American citizens as far too often it seems that the “powers that be” are willing to let suspected corrupt officials slide or slink away quietly without ever being held accountable to the people. However, in at least one instance it appears that won’t be the case. The four sitting justices on West Virginia’s state Supreme Court are collectively facing 14 counts of impeachment for alleged corrupt activities, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

The 14 articles of impeachment against the justices were approved on Tuesday by the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee and include such charges as corruption, neglect of duty and “unnecessary and lavish” spending of taxpayer money, among other allegations.

The articles of impeachment will soon be submitted to the House for a vote, and if they obtain a majority will then proceed to the Senate. If two-thirds of the senators approve the impeachment articles, a trial will commence that would require another two-thirds majority for conviction, at which point the justices would be removed from the bench and barred from ever seeking public office in the state again.

“It’s a sad day, and it certainly isn’t a cause for celebration,” Judiciary Chairman John Shott said Tuesday, according to the Gazette-Mail.

The four justices charged under the articles of impeachment, which stem from violations of the impeachable offenses listed in Section 9, Article 4 of the West Virginia Constitution, include

Chief Justice Margaret Workman (four counts)
Justices Robin Davis (four counts),
Allen Loughry (eight counts)
Beth Walker (two counts).

All four justices face charges of “unnecessary and lavish” spending of taxpayer money to renovate their offices. They’re also accused of failing to develop and maintain court policies with regard to the use of state resources.

Davis, Loughry and Workman also face a charge of signing documents that authorized pay for senior status judges in excess of what was allowed by law. Loughry faces additional charges that include allegedly using a state vehicle for personal travel, using state-owned computers and furniture in his home and using taxpayer money to have artwork, documents and personal photos framed.

Former Justice Menis Ketchum, who resigned from his seat on the bench last month, escaped being named in the articles of impeachment by virtue of his recent resignation, which removed him from the oversight of the Judiciary Committee. It is worth noting that Ketchum just pleaded guilty to one count of federal wire fraud. Loughry was also recently hit with a 23-count federal indictment that included 16 counts of mail fraud, three counts of making false statements to federal investigators, two counts of wire fraud and one count each of obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

On top of that, Loughry — who was suspended from the bench without pay on June 8 — has also been charged with 32 counts of violating state’s Code of Judicial Conduct by the West Virginia Judicial Investigation Commission for similar charges included in the articles of impeachment, as well as for lying to lawmakers, the media and the public about his alleged conduct.

Of course, there were several lawmakers who opposed the articles of impeachment, not necessarily because they believed the justices were innocent of the charges against them, but because taking out all of the sitting justices in one fell swoop would allow Republican Gov. Jim Justice to appoint their replacements, most likely for at least a two-year term, given the close proximity and limited time-frame between now and November’s elections.

Such was the argument put forward by Democrat Del. Mike Pushkin, who said he didn’t like the fact that all four justices were grouped together in the articles of impeachment, as well as by Democrat Del. Barbara Fleischauer, minority chairwoman of the committee, who likened the move to an attempted “coup” against an entire branch of the state government by Republicans.

“We said this to our committee when we started, this was a no-win situation,” Chairman Shott said of those accusations. “Especially in an election year, there’s going to be people who will spin it however it creates the most advantage to them. That’s just part of the process.”

While impeaching all of the sitting justices on the state’s Supreme Court at once does seem rather drastic — and certainly opens the door to partisan complaints — it nevertheless also appears to be the correct remedy in this case for holding apparently corrupt elected officials accountable for their actions. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few weeks and months.

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Planned Parenthood Dares Make Demands About Supreme Court Pick

Reported By Cillian Zeal | July 8, 2018 at 6:41am

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/planned-parenthood-dares-make-demands-about-supreme-court-pick/

Planned Parenthood isn’t particularly known for its close relationship with the Republican Party, something I think most Republicans are comfortable with. After all, they currently control both houses of Congress and the White House in spite of a constant fusillade of hyperbolic attacks from America’s foremost industrial abortion supplier.

So, given that the next Supreme Court nominee will be picked without any real input or interference from the Democrats (hey, thanks, Harry Reid!), the last group that probably should be giving diktats on the matter is Planned Parenthood.

At a Thursday news conference, Dawn Laguens — the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the new face of the organization after Cecile Richards left to spend more time with Mephistopheles — said that the president’s replacement for the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy needs to meet a “personal liberty standard” in order to be nominated.

If you’re not a watcher of Supreme Court nominations, let me note that there’s not actually a precedent for this standard. Planned Parenthood is just fabricating it, because why not? Surely the Trump administration will listen to a woman who, in an op-ed, openly admitted in February that “Planned Parenthood supporters and women across the country have been marching and organizing to resist Donald Trump’s vision for the world.”

“Clearly, saying ‘precedent’ alone can no longer be an acceptable answer or standard by which senators can accurately judge,” Laguens said at the news conference.

“That’s why today, Planned Parenthood and our colleagues at this press conference are calling for a higher standard. We are calling for a ‘personal liberty standard,’ that the Senate must only confirm a justice who affirmatively declares that they believe the Constitution protects individual liberty and the right of all people to make personal decisions about their bodies and their personal relationships, including the right to use contraception, the right to have an abortion, and the freedom to marry who you choose.”

Good luck with that, Ms. Laguens. Good luck with that.

The group also issued a news release about its “personal liberty standard,” which was equally untethered to any realistic assessment of the political realities in 2018.

According to the news release, “President Trump promised to appoint only biased justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade and strike down the Affordable Care Act. Trump has made it clear that the only justices he will put forward are nominees who would ‘automatically’ overturn Roe v. Wade, creating a world where abortion is illegal and health care is inaccessible.

“By demanding that all nominees affirm the personal liberty standard, the next Supreme Court justice will ensure that the right to safe, legal abortion is protected.

“During past Senate hearings, nominees have answered questions about Roe v. Wade by saying they will ‘respect precedent,’ but then went on to rule in ways that ignored precedent and would’ve eviscerated our fundamental rights had those justices been in the majority. With the balance of the court at stake, and with Trump making clear his ideological standard, simply referencing precedent or sidestepping questions on abortion and fundamental rights is no longer an option.”

So many things. First, obstructing whomever the president picks “is no longer an option” for the Democrats or their allies. We no longer have the filibuster on judicial nominees, which means that Judge Judy, if the Trump administration and the Republicans want her, is a shoo-in for the bench. (Please don’t take this as an actual suggestion, just an illustration of what the political realities of the moment are. I reiterate, please.)

As for Roe v. Wade, we don’t know whether justices will “respect precedent” because it hasn’t actually been challenged whole cloth with a state ban on abortions. The most recent precedent set by the court, the 5-3 decision on Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016, could indeed be overturned since it took place after Justice Scalia’s death and soon-to-be-former Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote. But that case only dealt with a law regarding the application of a state law involving admitting privileges for abortionists and surgical standards, not the right to an abortion.

That being said, Roe v. Wade is a terrible decision, one in a number of cases in which a liberal court used the Fourteenth Amendment as a utilitarian escape clause its framers never intended in order to essentially enact federally binding legislation from the bench. (If, for instance, the Fourteenth Amendment gave individuals a prima facie right to terminate a pregnancy, why did numerous state laws outlawing abortion exist at the time of its passage and for over a century afterwards?)

Nevertheless, there’s no indication conservative nominees won’t “respect precedent” if a challenge to Roe in toto appears before the Supreme Court, and even if it were overturned, this would merely return the decision to the states. (A federal law would be an impossibility at present, given that the filibuster still exists on pretty much everything that doesn’t involve budgetary reconciliation and/or a judicial nomination.)

As for the Affordable Care Act, let me first stop my eyes from rolling as if my extraocular muscles had suddenly become inoperative over the concept that a bill designed to force consumers to buy a product represents the apex of “personal liberty.” My vision being duly refocused, Planned Parenthood probably oughtn’t worry about this; King v. Burwell, the 2015 decision that upheld Obamacare as constitutional, was 6-3. Assuming Chief Justice John Roberts stands by his opinion and the court’s four liberals stay put for a while, the decision isn’t going anywhere.

Beyond all of that, I’m wondering why I’m actually dedicating this much thought to Ms. Laguens’ demands, given that her organization is in the same position to demand certain criteria of judicial nominees as I am, at least at the moment.

I have no doubt Planned Parenthood certainly can and will work to make that change. However, to quote the late film critic Roger Ebert in a different context, this is akin to “that mouse floating down the Chicago River on its back, signaling for the drawbridge to be raised.” Have fun with that bridge operator, Ms. Laguens, and thanks for the laughs.

By Cillian Zeal

Cillian Zeal is a conservative writer who is currently living abroad. He became a staunch right-winger at the age of three: While watching a clip of Ronald Reagan, he told his mother (to her great horror), “Mom, I’m a Republican.” Except for a brief, scarring and inexplicable late high-school dalliance with Ralph Nader and his ilk, he’s never looked back. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One, and football (of both American and world varieties). He is the proud owner of a very lazy West Highland white terrier and an extraordinary troublesome poodle mix of indeterminate provenance.

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Ann Coulter Letter for June 27, 2018: “Country Overboard! Women and Children Last!”

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Wednesday Jun 27,

2018 6:39 PM

URL of the original posting site: http://humanevents.com/2018/06/27/country-overboard-women-and-children-last/

I’m still ticked off at him for not building the wall, but THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, FOR POINTING OUT THAT MAXINE WATERS HAS A LOW I.Q.! And there’s more great news! Contrary to every single New York Times editorial and opinion piece on the president’s “Muslim ban,” this week, the Supreme Court upheld the ban.

Or, as a Times op-ed put it back on Jan. 27, 2017: “(T)he order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin. …” — “Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal,” by David J. Bier, immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

For your immigration news, New York Times, maybe stop thinking you’re getting “both sides” by going to open borders activists at the International Refugee Assistance Project and, for the opposing view, open borders activists at the Cato Institute.

Last week, in a column that does not misstate the facts and the law about immigration, I covered some typical asylum and refugee admissions to our country, including Beatrice Munyenyezi. She was the Rwandan who got into our country by claiming to be a victim of the genocide that killed nearly a million people, even though she had helped orchestrate it.

Munyenyezi wasn’t the only participant in the Rwandan genocide who’s gotten in as a victim and then been unmasked as a perpetrator. So far, nearly 400 Rwandans granted special refugee status have been convicted of lying on visa applications about their role in the genocide. Great job, U.S. refugee admissions officials!

Courts are dealing with so many genocidal Rwandans who came to America as “refugees” that just last Friday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of another one, Gervais “Ken” Ngombwa, who not only lied about his participation in the genocide, but also about his family relationships. (You can’t get anything past our State Department!)

Aside from our immigration authorities missing little things like the Rwandan genocide, what is the argument for taking in millions of people from backward cultures, hotbeds of real racism, pederasty, misogyny — as opposed to the “microaggressions” that are the bane of our culture?

It’s one thing to use quotas as a response to slavery and Jim Crow in our own country, but why do we have to have an immigration quota for “people who don’t live here, have never seen an indoor toilet, and rape little girls for sport”?

Liberals act as if they are striking a blow for feminism by importing desperate women from misogynistic cultures to America. But, even to the extent they’re telling the truth, the women aren’t always victims only. They’re often co-conspirators.

Remember the Baby Hope case? In 1991, a little girl’s unidentified body was found in an Igloo cooler alongside the Henry Hudson Parkway. Twenty-two years later, the New York City police finally solved the case: The perpetrator turned out to be Baby Hope’s illegal alien cousin from Mexico, who had raped and killed her when she was 4 years old.

And how had he escaped justice for 22 years? The girl’s mother and aunt, also illegals, helped orchestrate the cover-up. The aunt helped dispose of the body and the girl’s mother never said a peep, despite admitting that she suspected all along that the corpse in the cooler was her unreported, missing daughter.

Hmong girls in Minnesota are regularly gang raped by Hmong men, but the Hmong community — even the girls’ mothers — blame the rape victims, and the attacks go unreported. These aren’t cultures of strong women and criminal men. It’s more like criminal men and complicit women.

(One of the major articles reporting on the Hmong rape culture, helping diversify America, was Pam Louwagie and Dan Browning’s “Shamed Into Silence,” published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2005. It used to be here: startribune.com/local/11594631.html. The detailed story won first place for In Depth Reporting from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists, but it seems to have disappeared from the Tribune’s website. Welcome to the Soviet Union!)

In San Francisco, we had the young Indian sex slaves of pederast Lakireddy Bali Reddy testifying on his behalf. Once he was finally busted — not by our fantastic “democracy dies in darkness” mainstream media, but by a local high school newspaper — we found out his child rape victims thought they deserved it. They could not be coaxed to testify against him. Some took the stand on his behalf. They were all given asylum. We didn’t change them; they just moved here, without altering their belief in human slavery or the caste system one iota.

Americans are told we have to understand that it’s part of their native cultures.

Exactly! It’s their culture. We’re not rescuing anybody; we’re bringing in diseased cultures. The alleged refugees don’t float above and apart from their societies. Feminists may see the world as the Boy team versus the Girl team, but in reality, it’s the Civilized team versus the Primitive team. Virtually every woman outside of the First World lives in an abusive society. We can’t take them all in.

How did violent, backward, misogynistic cultures become our problem? Did we take a vote and agree to be the world’s charity ward?

Democrats who claim to be defenders of the weak, the marginal and vulnerable are happy to toss our safe, functioning country aside — as long as they can wreck America (and get their housework done at the same time!). The left’s central political philosophy is based on resentment toward historical America.

They’re just like the feminists willing to forgive Bill Clinton for rape. Well, you know, taking in the totality of his contributions …Today, it’s: Who cares what kind of society we become — provided America is no more.

Primitive people will not stop trying to come here until America is no different from Calcutta. Then, liberals’ work will be done. And there will be no charity ward left for anyone to flee to.

That’s how much liberals care about women and children.

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This Week’s Ann Coulter Letter: “I Have a Dream … About Gay Wedding Cakes”

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Thursday Jun 7, 2018 8:29 AM

URL of the original posting site: http://humanevents.com/2018/06/07/i-have-a-dream-about-gay-wedding-cakes/

The Supreme Court’s recent decision on whether a Christian baker can be forced to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage (no) arriving on the same day that Bill Clinton reared his syphilitic head on NBC’s “Today” reminded me how liberals always use black people as props.

Midway through the last century, bedrock legal principles about property rights and freedom of association were abrogated to deal with a specific, intractable problem: We could not get Democrats to stop discriminating against blacks.

So Republicans, with very little Democratic help, passed a slew of laws saying: No, even though you own that restaurant, you cannot discriminate against black customers. And no, even though we are a free people, you cannot refuse to associate with black people in your clubs, universities or sports teams.

This should have been a one-time exception to the law for one specific group of people based on an emergency.

But Democrats, never wild about freedom in the first place, saw “civil rights” as a great gig. Instead of civil rights being used to remedy historic injuries done to a specific group of people, they’d use “civil rights” as a false flag for all their pet projects.

Just six years after passage of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, Democrats in New York had dropped black people from the equation and moved onto legalized abortion. State senator Manfred Ohrenstein of Manhattan explained why killing the unborn was a “right”: “It was the end of the civil rights era, and we viewed [abortion] as a civil right.”

In the 1991 case Kreimer v. Morristown, a Carter-appointed federal district judge, H. Lee Sarokin, ruled that a public library’s discrimination against smelly, frightening homeless people violated the equal protection clause because it had a “disparate impact” on people who refuse to bathe compared to those who bathe regularly. Three years later, President Clinton promoted him to an appellate judgeship. (The judge, not the homeless person.)

In 2007, then-governor Eliot Spitzer vowed that “New York state will continue to be a beacon of civil rights” — when proposing a state law that would guarantee access to late-term abortions.

In June 2012, The New York Times chirpily reported “gay rights the fastest-moving civil rights movement in our nation’s history”!

These days, you could be forgiven for not realizing that civil rights ever had anything to do with black people. According to Equal Opportunity Employment Commission statistics, for a least a decade, 65 percent of all “civil rights” claims have had absolutely nothing to do with race discrimination.

The gay wedding cake caper is only the most recent example of our majestic “civil rights.”

Instead of basing favored treatment under the law on a history of brutal and widespread injustice in America, liberals thought it should also be based on other forms of suffering, such as: being a woman, being a Muslim, wanting an abortion, having been born in Mexico, being a smelly homeless person stinking up the public library and — according to Ruth Bader Ginsburg this week — being a gay couple who wants to force a Christian to bake a cake for your wedding.

It must make blacks feel great being compared to daft women, smelly homeless people and bossy gays harassing a Christian baker.

And apes!

Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer compares black people to apes, citing the black liberation movement as a model for the liberation of apes. We must “extend to other species,” Singer says, “the basic principle of equality” that we extend “to all members of our own species.”

This wasn’t an Ambien-induced Twitter rant by a comedian. Singer wrote it, calmly and deliberately, in a book on “ethics.”

Still, I believe the greatest insult black Americans have had to endure from liberals was when they called Bill Clinton the “first black president.”

I notice that he was not the first black president when Democrats were singing Fleetwood Mac at his inauguration, nor when he was appointing the first woman attorney general or passing welfare reform. Only after Clinton was caught in the most humiliating sex scandal in U.S. history did he suddenly become “the first black president.” (Which is not true, according to Monica Lewinsky’s description of Clinton’s private parts.)

During the House impeachment hearings, Rep. Maxine Waters ferociously defended Clinton, saying, “I am here in the name of my slave ancestors.” She said she had woken up in the middle of the night, “with flashes of the struggles of my African ancestors for justice.”

What this had to do with Clinton perjuring himself about molesting a chubby Jewish White House intern was anyone’s guess.

Always the master of subtlety, as soon as the Lewinsky scandal broke, Clinton promptly invited the Rev. Jesse Jackson to the White House to “pray” with him. Two months later, he took off on an 11-day, six-nation $43 million trip to — guess where? Africa!

Haven’t black people suffered enough without this horny hick piggybacking on their oppression?

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Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Christian Baker Who Refused To Bake Cake for Same-Sex Wedding

Reported By Jack Davis | June 4, 2018 at 8:19am

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-christian-baker-who-refused-to-bake-cake-for-same-sex-wedding/

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a Christian Colorado baker cannot be forced to make a cake for a same-sex marriage when the ceremony violates his religious principles.

Monday’s 7-2 decision reversed a Colorado court’s ruling against baker Jack Phillips, who in 2012 refused to bake a cake for gay couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins. The decision focused on the initial ruling against Phillips from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and left untouched the broader issue of whether professionals who oppose same-sex marriage can be compelled to provide goods and services for those ceremonies, USA Today reported.

“The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” the majority opinion said, noting the broader battle in which this case was one part. “These disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority decision, while Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression,” Kennedy wrote, according to The Hill.

“While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other member of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.”

The case presented “difficult questions as to the proper reconciliation of at least two principles. The first is the authority of a State and its governmental entities to protect the rights and dignity of gay persons who are, or wish to be, married but who face discrimination when they seek goods or services,” Kennedy wrote.

“The second is the right of all persons to exercise fundamental freedoms under the First Amendment,” he wrote.

Kennedy said Colorado failed that test.

“Whatever the confluence of speech and free exercise principles might be in some cases, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s consideration of this case was inconsistent with the State’s obligation of religious neutrality. The reason and motive for the baker’s refusal were based on his sincere religious beliefs and convictions,” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy noted that the case does represent a collision of rights, according to The Washington Post.

“The Court’s precedents make clear that the baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws,” he wrote. “Still, the delicate question of when the free exercise of his religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power needed to be determined in an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor in the balance the State sought to reach. That requirement, however, was not met here.”

Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan voted with the majority along with Justices Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts.

Phillips had lost every round of his lengthy legal fight until Monday. Phillips said the question was not about the customers but rather about violating his own principles.

“It’s not about turning away these customers, it’s about doing a cake for an event — a religious sacred event — that conflicts with my conscience,” he said, according to Fox News.

The Trump administration supported Phillips’ legal claims.

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Travel Ban Back in Place, SCOTUS Halts Lower Court Injunctions

Reported by Ian Mason | 4 Dec 2017 | Washington, DC

URL of the original posting site: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/04/travel-ban-back-place-scotus-halts-lower-court-injunction/?

SCOTUS | Bob Price/Breitbart Texas

President Donald Trump’s travel ban executive order is once again to largely go back into effect after the Supreme Court of the United States stayed two lower courts’ injunctions Monday.

The orders come in response to filings by the Department of Justice Friday, asking the Supreme Court to stay the preliminary injunctions in the two main travel ban cases, Hawaii v. Trump in the Ninth Circuit and International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump in the Fourth Circuit. These cases have been proceeding up and down the federal court system for months.

The district courts, especially that of Barack Obama-appointed District of Hawaii Judge Derrick Watson, have repeatedly ruled that the bans must be blocked from going into effect or must, in the interim, be interpreted in such a way as to have little effect on the list of mostly Muslim majority countries from which travel is prohibited under the orders.

The petitions in the two cases were made to Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts respectively. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor declined to sign on to the orders staying the Fourth and Ninth Circuits.

“This a substantial victory for the safety and security of the American people,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in statement after the orders were announced.

He continued:

We are pleased to have defended this order and heartened that a clear majority Supreme Court has allowed the President’s lawful proclamation protecting our country’s national security to go into full effect. The Constitution gives the President the responsibility and power to protect this country from all threats foreign and domestic, and this order remains vital to accomplishing those goals.

With the order, the third – permanent – version of the travel ban, promulgated in September after an interagency review of the dangers posed by the different countries included, will go back into effect while the case on the merits works its way through the court system. The Supreme Court had dismissed the earlier lawsuits based on the earlier, temporary versions of the ban because they had expired.

The government, represented by Solicitor General Noel Francisco, asked the justices to re-instate the ban based in part on the findings of the review, which provided new security-based justifications for the inclusion of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen and, he argues, turns the likelihood of success against the plaintiffs.

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This Trump Decision Is A Major Blow To The Administrative State

Reported by Kevin Daley | Supreme Court Reporter | 3:12 PM 11/30/2017

URL of the original posting site: http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/30/this-trump-decision-is-a-major-blow-to-the-administrative-state/?

FILE PHOTO: The seal of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission hangs on the wall at SEC headquarters in Washington, DC, U.S. on June 24, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

The Trump administration switched sides Wednesday in a case pending before the Supreme Court that could retroactively nullify tens of thousands of agency decisions.

The case, Lucia v. SEC, has major implications for the process by which federal agencies try or punish those in violation of laws or regulations.

The litigation concerns an agency’s decision to allow career bureaucrats to preside as the functional equivalent of judges during enforcement proceedings. These officials, called administrative law judges (ALJs), are hired by career bureaucrats. They are not appointed by the president, a court or an agency head, but they exercise significant authority on behalf of the U.S. government in official proceedings. ALJs can, among other things, issue subpoenas, make decisions about the credibility of witnesses or the admissibility of evidence, and issues provisional rulings that are generally upheld on final review — if a final review occurs at all.

The Constitution requires that the president, the courts, or the head of an executive department appoint all “inferior officers” of the United States.

A group of investment managers challenged the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) use of ALJs in an enforcement proceeding convened against them for alleged violations of securities law. The managers argue these proceedings are unlawful, because the ALJs are exactly the sort of “inferior officer” who must be appointed by the president, the court, or the head of an agency, since they exercise meaningful discretion on behalf of the federal government.

A lower federal court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, found in favor of the SEC. A three-judge panel found for the SEC, and the full court affirmed that decision on a five to five vote. The investment managers then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Obama Justice Department sided with the SEC in the dispute, but Trump’s new solicitor general, Noel Francisco, changed positions Wednesday, and backed the money managers.

“Upon further consideration, and in light of the implications for the exercise of executive power under Article II, the government is now of the view that such ALJs are officers because they exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,’” Francisco wrote in a new brief at the Supreme Court.

A Supreme Court ruling against the SEC could have important implications for similarly-situated officials in other agencies. ALJs often preside in actions brought by a whole host of federal agencies. A finding against the SEC would potentially jeopardize, and perhaps invalidate, the legal status of thousands of other agency proceedings.

The Justice Department generally represents federal agencies before the high court. Accordingly, the solicitor general asked the justices to appoint another lawyer to represent the SEC as the litigation continues.

The high court could decide to take the case as soon as January.

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Send tips to kevin@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Gay Couple Lawyers Up Against Christian Baker, Then Trump Steps in

Reported By V Saxena | on September 12, 2017 at 8:10am

URL of the original posting site: https://conservativetribune.com/gay-couple-lawyers-up/?

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A Christian baker from Colorado received an unexpected blessing from the administration of President Donald Trump last week when the Justice Department filed a brief on his behalf to the Supreme Court, which is slated to hear his religious liberty case upon returning to the bench next month.

For Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, the trouble started five years ago when he politely refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Although he only meant to protect his religious beliefs, he wound up triggering a chain reaction of undeserved backlash.

It included death threats from angry activists, character assassinations from the liberal media, a judgment of illegal discrimination from a Colorado civil rights commission and an affirmation of the commission’s ruling by a lower court.

The tide finally began to turn in Phillips’ favor in late June when the Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal and decide whether he actually discriminated against the gay couple when he refused to bake their cake over his religious objections.

And just on Thursday, he won yet another “huge” victory when Trump’s DOJ filed an amicus brief defending his decision five years earlier to not bake the gay couple’s wedding cake. In the brief, acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall specifically argued that allowing the lower court’s ruling against Phillips to stand would create a violation of the First Amendment “where public accommodations law compels someone to create expression for a particular person or entity and to participate, literally or figuratively, in a ceremony or other expressive event.”

“When Phillips designs and creates a custom wedding cake for a specific couple and a specific wedding, he plays an active role in enabling that ritual, and he associates himself with the celebratory message conveyed,” he added. “Forcing Phillips to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs invades his First Amendment rights.”

This is good. Very good, in fact.

And according to The Washington Times, the DOJ’s surprising decision to file a brief in Phillips’ case “raises the possibility that the government will also ask for time to argue in front of the justices when the case goes for oral argument.”

That would be even better.

During the administration of former President Barack Hussein Obama, a man who loved sitting idly by as Christians were persecuted, the DOJ said nothing about Phillips, instead choosing to allow him to suffer the indignity of being persecuted for his Christian beliefs. But with Trump in the White House, it appears those days are finally behind us. Thank God.

H/T Informed Folks

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Supreme Court to Review Case of a Baker Told He Must Bake Gay Wedding Cake

Reported by Ryan T. Anderson / @RyanTAnd / June 26, 2017 /

URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/26/supreme-court-review-case-baker-fined-not-baking-gay-wedding-cake/

A lower court ruling had forced Jack Phillips to choose between obeying the government and following his religious beliefs. (Photo: iStock Photos)

Today was a good day for religious freedom at the Supreme Court. In a 7-2 decision, the court upheld religious liberty by saying that a state cannot exclude a church from a public program just because it’s a church. That was the big case at the court.

In a less-noted move, the court also agreed to review (“granted cert” in the legal jargon) a case about religious liberty, free speech, and government coercion to support gay marriage. The case involves Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, and whether he must create wedding cakes for same-sex weddings, even if doing so violates his beliefs.

The case goes back to 2012, when a same-sex couple received a marriage license in Massachusetts and asked Phillips to bake a cake for a reception back home in Colorado, a state that in 2006 constitutionally defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

Phillips declined to create a wedding cake, citing his faith: “I don’t feel like I should participate in their wedding, and when I do a cake, I feel like I am participating in the ceremony or the event or the celebration that the cake is for,” he said.

The couple later obtained a wedding cake with rainbow-colored filling (illustrating the expressive nature of event cake-baking) from another bakery.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint against Masterpiece Cakeshop with the state, alleging violations of Colorado’s public accommodation law.

Administrative Law Judge Robert N. Spencer ruled against the bakery on Dec. 6, 2013, concluding that Phillips violated the law by declining service to the couple “because of their sexual orientation.”

Phillips objected to this characterization and responded that he would happily sell the couple his baked goods for any number of occasions, but creating a wedding cake would force him to express something that he does not believe, thereby violating his freedom to run his business in accordance with his faith.

Phillips is right. As Sherif Girgis and I explain in our new book from Oxford University Press, “Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination,” acting on the belief that marriage is the union of husband and wife does not in itself entail “discriminating” on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, part of the problem is that liberals are simply calling anything they disagree with “discrimination.”

This overbroad definition of “discrimination” is part of what creates the problems for the free exercise of religion and free speech. And here a pattern holds: Legally coercing professionals serves no serious need, but works serious harms.

Conservative wedding providers are few and dwindling due to market pressures—and most important, they don’t refuse to serve LGBT patrons. In case after case, bakers have had no problem designing cakes for gay customers for every other occasion. It’s just that an exceedingly small number can’t in good conscience use their talents to help celebrate same-sex weddings by baking a cake topped with two grooms or two brides—or, as in this case, with rainbow filling.

Coercing these cultural dissidents has vanishingly small effects on the supply of products for any given couple, but it impinges seriously on particular vendors’ freedoms of speech, conscience, and religion. If any harm remains in leaving these wedding professionals free, it is only the tension we all face in living with people who disagree with us on the most personal matters.

As Girgis and I explain in our new book, America is in a time of transition. The Supreme Court has redefined marriage, and beliefs about human sexuality are changing. Now, the Supreme Court has the chance to protect the right to dissent and the civil liberties of those who speak and act in accord with what Americans had always previously believed about marriage—that it is the union of husband and wife.

Such a ruling would help achieve civil peace amid disagreement. It would protect pluralism and the rights of all Americans, regardless of what faith they may practice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ryan T. Anderson/ @RyanTAnd

Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, where he researches and writes about marriage, bioethics, religious liberty and political philosophy. Anderson is the author of several books and his research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices in two separate cases. Read his Heritage research.

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Supreme Court won’t hear transgender bathroom case

Authored By Lydia Wheeler – 03/06/17 09:41 AM EST

URL of the original posting site: http://thehill.com/homenews/322457-supreme-court-wont-hear-transgender-bathroom-case

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a high-profile case on transgender rights, sending it back to the lower courts. The justices tossed out a ruling Monday that allowed Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy in Virginia, to use the bathroom he chooses, and ordered that a lower court reconsider the case in light of new guidance issued by the Trump administration last month.

The justices had planned to hear arguments later this month and both sides had pressed for the high court to weigh in amid a national debate over rights for the transgendered.

Grimm, born female, was barred from using the boy’s bathroom in 2014 after the Gloucester County School Board enacted a policy requiring all students to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender assigned at birth. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Grimm, who argued that the school board “impermissibly discriminated against him” in violation of Title IX anti-discrimination laws and his constitutional right to equal protection under the law. The court cited Obama administration guidance that transgender students should be allowed to use the bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity, claiming those rights were covered federal anti-discrimination laws addressing “sex.”But on Feb. 22, the Trump Justice Department and Education Department sent a letter to the lower court rescinding that Obama guidance.

The fight now returns to the lower court, where both sides vowed to press forward with their case.

“On remand to the lower courts, the Board looks forward to explaining why its commonsense restroom and locker room policy is legal under the Constitution and federal law,” the Gloucester County School Board said in a statement. LGBTQ advocates expressed disappointment in the justices’ decision.

“This announcement speaks volumes to the ways that President Trump’s actions are already having devastating consequences for transgender youth across the country,” said Freedom for All Americans Executive Director Matt McTighe, in a statement.

“All students, including transgender students, deserve to participate fully and succeed in school, and to feel safe and respected while doing so.”

At issue is whether Title IX’s anti-discrimination measures can force schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice. The Obama guidance said it did. The Trump administration in withdrawing that guidance said the Obama administration failed to “explain how the position is consistent with the express language of Title IX,” but didn’t make their own case for whether Title IX applies. Legal experts say it’s unclear what the Fourth Circuit will do.

“It could ask for more briefing, it could send it back to the district judge to rule on the merits and then let it come back up,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.

“It could also wait and see what DOJ and DOE [Department of Education] are planning on doing or it could just go forward and reach the merits under Title IX and try to discern the legislative intent from 1972.”

In a statement, Mark Phillis, a discrimination and harassment lawyer at Littler Mendelson P.C., said there are two cases pending before the Second Circuit and Seventh Circuit Courts in which the interpretation of “sex” is being considered in the employment context under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

“Since Title IX cases often look to cases decided under Title VII, these cases could have an impact on the way the this case may be decided,” he said.

Legal experts say that the issue could eventually end up back before the Supreme Court, with other cases also making their way through the courts.

“No question about it,” Tobias said. “It’s just a matter of which case is the right case.”

He said Grimm’s case was premature. “The district court never reached the merits,” he said. “I don’t know why they granted cert.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which brought the case forward on Grimm’s behalf, told the justices on March 1 that the Trump administration’s actions made it critical for the high court to quickly resolve the question of transgender students and bathrooms.

“[T]he Court will inevitably have to settle the question by clarifying the proper interpretation of Title IX,” the group said.

–This report was updated at 3:04 p.m.

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Legal Fight Rages to Save Voter ID Laws. Supreme Court weighs review of ruling that struck down North Carolina election integrity statute

Authored by Brendan Kirby | Updated 06 Feb 2017 at 9:23 AM

The Supreme Court could decide as early as Monday whether to review an appellate court decision striking down North Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls. The ruling by the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was something of an outlier in the ongoing war over voter ID laws, finding not just that the statute disproportionately impacted minorities but that lawmakers had acted intentionally to suppress minority voters.

“Although the new provisions target African-Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist,” U.S. Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote in an opinion signed by all three judges on the appeals panel. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”

If the high court decides not to hear the case, it will leave North Carolina without a photo ID law. If the justices do take the case and adopt the reasoning of the appeals court, it could jeopardize voter ID laws elsewhere — particularly in Southern states that previously had to get advance go-ahead from the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act to make even minor changes to voting rules.

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The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of North Carolina’s law, argues that the justices should lay down a clear marker that states are within their rights to require identification to ensure the integrity of elections.

“Voter ID works just about wherever it’s tried,” said Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the group.

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North Carolina passed the law in 2013. In addition to the ID requirement, it also eliminated same-day voter registration, scaled back early voting dates, prohibited voters from casting ballots in the wrong precinct, and eliminated straight-ticked voting, requiring voters to mark their choices in each race individually. It provided a free photo ID card for anyone who stated he could not obtain a driver’s license.

Even before the Supreme Court weighs in on the appeal, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper could try to short-circuit the law by withdrawing the appeal. He refused to defend the law in court when he was the attorney general.

“Gov. Cooper continues to oppose this law and believes we should make it easier, not harder, for people to exercise their right to vote,” gubernatorial spokeswoman Noelle Talley told WRAL-TV in Raleigh last week. “We’re currently reviewing this case inherited from the prior administration.” Attorney General Josh Stein, also a Democrat, issued a similar statement.

Even if both pull out, though, the Republican-controlled legislature could appoint its own attorney to pursue the appeal.

Meanwhile, it is possible the federal government might switch sides, as well. The Justice Department of former President Obama had been supporting the plaintiffs. But President Donald Trump’s administration might reach a different conclusion.

The Justice Department filed its brief in support of the plaintiffs one day before Trump’s inauguration — 11 days before the deadline. It is similar to an attempt by Obama’s outgoing administration to kill a lawsuit accusing the IRS of improperly targeting conservative nonprofit groups.

In its legal brief in the North Carolina case, the Public Interest Legal Foundation argues that the appeals court applied the wrong standard in evaluating the state’s law. The judges used a standard under the Voting Rights Act that placed the burden of proof on North Carolina and other states tainted by discriminatory practices in the past to show that electoral system changes were race-neutral. But the Supreme Court struck down that portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, holding that the formula for determining whether jurisdictions should be subject to so-called “preclearance” was outdated.

Watchdogs: Truth to Trump’s Voter Fraud Concerns Election integrity experts contend problem is real, but mechanisms don’t exist to measure scale

As a result, attorneys J. Christian Adams and Kaylan Phillips argue in their brief, the appeals court should have used the legal standard that applies to every other state under the Voting Rights Act. That would have put the burden on the plaintiffs to demonstrate discriminatory intent.

“That standard requires a far more robust showing than a statistical demonstration that a given minority might be less likely to be able to vote at a certain time, use a particular voting practice more often than non-minorities, or possess certain types of documentation at different rates,” the brief states.

Churchwell, the spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, predicted the issue will not go away, even if the justices pass on taking the case. Different courts have used different standards to evaluate voter ID laws, he said. What’s more, he added, issues like redistricting that must take place every 10 years also could be affected.

“If they don’t take this case, we will continue to have that split,” he said. “This is bigger than North Carolina. It’s bigger than voter ID … If this ruling takes hold, it’s going to cause a whole lot of problems in a few years when redistricting comes along.”

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Iran Wants More Pallets of Cash

August 9, 2016By the Common Constitutionalist

URL of the original posting site: http://commonconstitutionalist.com/current-events/iran-wants-more-pallets-of-cash/

I wonder if now that the Obama administration has paid the ransom “we owed” the Iranian regime, whether it will set a precedent for others to put their hands out and demand, or at least request funds from the U.S. treasury?

Heck, even before the precedent, the Israeli government asked the U.S. to bump up its annual military stipend from $3 billion to $5 billion. Those dirty, money-grubbing Jews – asking for an additional $2 billion. You might think that, but they are blaming the Obama administration for the fact that they must request it in the first place.

It seems the Middle East is poised to get a lot more dangerous thanks to the huge infusion of cash which was part of the US-Iran nuclear agreement. So thanks to Obama, Israel expects to have to spend a lot more on defense. They do have a point.

Now in, we’ll call the post-ransom period, another has come forward asking for cash. Our old buddy, “former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is asking President Obama to release nearly $2 billion in Iranian assets frozen in a New York bank account.”

The Hill reports that Mahmoud is back and may be considering another run for president next year.

I guess he plans to return to the election circuit as the conquering hero, with $1.75 billion in tow.

However, as you may recall – this is the same $1.75 billion that the supreme Court voted 6-2 to disperse over 1,000 victims of various terrorist atrocities perpetrated on Americans over the years, “including the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1996 attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Khobar towers…”

“Iran is appealing the case at the international Court of Justice.” Court of Justice. Sounds like a place where superheroes gather. Not quite – more like super-leftists.

pallets-of-cash-to-iran But Mahmoud isn’t content to leave it in the hands of the courts. He instead has penned an open letter to Obama.

After a full paragraph of praising Allah and Mohammed, he gets down to it, spending the next couple paragraphs buttering up Obama – telling him that basically nothing is his fault. Birds of a feather, I suppose, as Obama has said the same for years.

However, Mahmoud doesn’t mention Bush specifically as does Obama – just past administrations that have been responsible for “about 60 years of oppression and cruelty by different American governments against the Iranian nation…” extra bowl of stupid

He then cites the supreme Court case which he claims illegally seized Iranian assets. He asks for “his Excellency,” Obama to “quickly fix” the problem and “that not only the Iranian nations must be restored, and the seized property released and returned, but also the damages caused be fully compensated for.”

Iran-ATM-600-LI Wow – he sure knows the American legal system. If he loses his bid for the presidency, Mahmoud could no doubt become a slip and fall lawyer. And he also knows Obama, the leftist, as he plays to Obama’s legacy. “I passionately advise you not to let the historical affirmation and bitter incident be recorded under your name,” writes Mahmoud.

I don’t know whether Obama has the authority to release the funds the court has already allocated. Of course I also don’t think the court should have the authority, regardless of the good cause.

In my opinion, if Obama does “find” the authority, he would certainly get out the forklift again and load up the unmarked jet with more pallets of Euros. Anything for his pals in Iran.

Bright-Future-NRD-600 Never-Hillary-Egl-sm fight true battle In God We Trust freedom combo 2

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The Satanic Temple Is a Fraud

August 1, 2016 By the Common Constitutionalist

URL of the original posting site: http://commonconstitutionalist.com/current-events/these-satanic-temple-is-a-fraud/#more-31925

A group from Salem Massachusetts is fighting for the right to institute their own version of an afterschool program to elementary schools across the nation. The Satanic Temple’s cofounder Doug Mesner, who goes by the name Lucien Greaves, is attempting to introduce “Satan After School” (SAS) to “counterbalance Christian afterschool programs.”

And not just any Christian afterschool program. They are targeting schools which have allowed the Christian “Good News Club” in.

The Washington Post writes that what brought on the desire of the Satanic Temple to start an afterschool program was a 2001 supreme Court ruling. The ruling allowed for the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) to be included in afterschool programs as a matter of free speech rights.

As if we needed the supremes to tell us that. The Post says that the “CEF then went on a tear, and by 2011, it reported 3,560 Good News Clubs, putting them in more than 5% of the nation’s public elementary schools.”

More than 5%? Is that a lot, because it sure doesn’t sound like it. It sounds more like around 95% of the nation’s elementary schools have not invited in the CEF. But this matters not to Mr. Greaves and his Satan After School program. Anymore than 0% is too much for him.

Greaves did however add that, “We would like to thank the Liberty Counsel specifically for opening the doors to the After School 36BC6DF200000578-0-image-m-25_1469922732593 Satan Clubs through their dedication to religious liberty.”

Okay – now I have it. It’s not about free speech as much as it is about religious liberty. That’s interesting. They too, like the CEF, want to be included in afterschool programs for reasons of religious liberty – evidently. That is interesting, considering the Satanic Temple states that they really don’t worship anyone or anything. It’s all just an act.

Instead, the Satan After School program intends to include a healthy snack, literature lesson, creative learning activities, a science lesson and art. Is it me, or does this sound like what the kids are doing during a normal school day? What would they need the Satan After School program for?

In other words, the Satan After School program is a fraud, which Greaves is purposely perpetrating on schools and has nothing whatsoever to do with religious liberty.

Chalice Blyth, head of the Satanic Temple’s Utah chapter, said: “The Satanic Temple doesn’t espouse a belief in the existence of a supernatural being that other religions identify solemnly as Satan, or Lucifer, or Beelzebub. The Temple rejects all forms of supernaturalism and is committed to the view that scientific rationality provides the best measure of reality.”

That doesn’t sound at all what Satan would espouse. If I signed my kids up for the SAS program, I’d feel cheated. I thought we signed them up for some good old-fashioned Devil worship. I want my money back! The fact is, this group – at least their leaders, are just dopey atheists who, if pressed, would surely admit that they prefer religion not exist at all. In school – afterschool – anywhere.

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Seven Times Democrats Were Overtly Racist On Judges Before Trump

Authored by Casey Harper / 06/06/2016

URL of the original posting site: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/06/seven-times-democrats-were-overtly-racist-on-judges-before-trump/#ixzz4AvsJYh4L

Donald Trump has taken heavy fire for saying the judge presiding over his Trump University lawsuit is biased because of his Mexican heritage, but Democrats have a long history of invoking race on judicial issues.

Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in the case because of his Mexican heritage, calling him “a hater of Donald Trump.” In the case, former students of Trump University are suing Trump alleging the school, which was supposed to teach real estate, was a ripoff. Trump has firmly denied their allegations.

In an interview, CNN’s Jake Tapper repeatedly questioned Trump about invoking the judge’s race saying “is that not the definition of racism?”

“But I don’t care if you criticize him,” Tapper told Trump in the interview. “That’s fine. You can criticize every decision. What I’m saying is if you invoke his race as a reason why he can’t do his job …” The problem is, a judge’s race is often a major factor and is acknowledged as such by the media, especially in Supreme Court appointments.

The Daily Caller News Foundation has compiled a list of seven times liberals invoked a judge’s race.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor famously invoked her identity as a “wise Latina” who could outdo a white man. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in an October, 2001 speech that became a point of criticism for Republicans.
When Donald Trump released his list of potential Supreme Court nominees, the left was quick to point out they were all white. Think Progress published an article titled “Your Ultimate Guide To The 11 White People Donald Trump Will Consider For The Supreme Court,” which pointed out that “Only three are women. All are white.”
George Takei, Star Trek actor and gay rights activist, called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas a “clown in black face” after his vote against the recognition of same-sex marriage. “I mean, doesn’t he know that slaves were in chains?” Takei said. “That they were whipped on the back. If he saw the movie 12 Years a Slave, you know, they were raped.”
Liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson blasted Thomas for his stance against affirmative action. “I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge there are arguments against it,” Robinson wrote. “One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Anna Quindlen, a liberal writer for Newsweek, clearly invoked Thomas’ race in her criticism of him, saying “His judicial resume was mediocre; he was chosen because he was conservative and black, an affirmative-action hire by an administration that eschewed affirmative action.”
Liberal writers and activists Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote an article in the Seattle Times saying Thomas was unseemly as a “beneficiary of affirmative-action programs who climbs the ladder of success by attacking affirmative action.”
To defend itself from criticism over nominating a white Supreme Court Justice, the White House was quick to invoke race. In a post titled, “White House Defends Diversity Record In Judicial Appointments,” the New York Times points out that Josh Earnest was eager to tell reporters that Obama had appointed a Hispanic justice to the Supreme Court and therefore, had previously embraced diversity. The defense came after attacks from the left over nominee Merrick Garland, who is white.

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What Does ‘We the People’ Really Mean? A Constitutional Scholar Explains

Reported by Rob Bluey / @RobertBluey / May 12, 2016

URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2016/05/12/what-does-we-the-people-really-mean-a-constitutional-scholar-explains/

Do you know the difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic? Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett wants to clear up any confusion.

Barnett, director of Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, wrote the book “Our Republican Constitution” to explain what the founders really meant by “We the People” in the U.S. Constitution.

During a recent visit to The Heritage Foundation, we caught up with Barnett to talk about the book and why he’s pessimistic about the outlook of the U.S. Supreme Court following Antonin Scalia’s death and President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland.

“There’s a lot at stake with the next Supreme Court justice, but I can already tell you, I believe that fight has been lost,” Barnett said. “We have to decide how we’re going to survive under a court that is hostile to how we think.”

SEE INTERVIEW BELOW:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rob Bluey @RobertBluey

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Oregon Christian Bakers Wedding Cake Case Going to Court

by Breitbart News, 23 Feb 2016

URL of the original posting site: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/23/oregon-christian-bakers-wedding-cake-case

Today, First Liberty Institute announced that, along with one of the most famous lawyers in America, it is now representing Aaron and Melissa Klein, the Oregon bakers who owned Sweet Cakes by Melissa—the bakery destroyed by the Oregon government because its Christian owners declined to bake a wedding cake celebrating same-sex marriage—and intends to take the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2013, the Kleins were asked by a lesbian woman to bake a cake celebrating her marriage to another woman, even though same-sex marriage was not even legal in Oregon at the time.

The Kleins had many customers who are homosexual and were happy to sell them cakes and other baked goods, but do not make specialized cakes for same-sex weddings because they individualize each wedding cake to support and celebrate the marriage. The Kleins are Evangelical Christians who believe that marriage is only between a man and woman, and who run their business consistent with their faith as part of their Christian testimony and personal ministry to the community.

The Oregon government pursued the Kleins for two years. On July 2, 2015, Commissioner Brad Avakian, the head of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI), ordered the Kleins to pay $135,000 to the women as a penalty for what he called the “emotional damages” of offending the women by declining to bake the cake for their non-legal “wedding.”

BOLI also imposed a gag order on the Kleins, telling them that they cannot say that they would decline to bake a same-sex wedding cake in the future, because BOLI contends this would be a form of “advertisement” that the bakers intended to “discriminate” against people on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Kleins informed Oregon that they wanted to appeal this ruling because it violated their First Amendment right to free speech to require them to give a message endorsing same-sex marriage, as well as their right to free exercise of their religion to run their privately owned company consistent with their religious beliefs.

After the Kleins shared this information with BOLI, the government seized the money in the Kleins’ bank accounts. That was not nearly enough to satisfy the judgment. Thousands of Christians across the nation sent small gifts to assist the Kleins, who then handed that money to the government to be set aside in an escrow-type account so that their appeal could move forward. Big Gay Hate Machine

During this time First Liberty came to assist the Kleins, representing them entirely free of charge, and are taking the Kleins’ case to the Oregon Court of Appeals. The legal team will be led by Ambassador Boyden Gray, a former law clerk to the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who later became White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1992, and then served as the U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

“America is a great nation because we celebrate diversity of thought,” Ambassador Gray said in a statement to Breitbart News. “Our right to free expression and religious liberty are some of our most cherished American freedoms. We must safeguard these rights for every American—including Aaron and Melissa Klein.”

“The past three years have been devastating,” Melissa Klein adds in the statement. “Just because we couldn’t participate in an event that violates our religious beliefs, we lost our business. We were committed to serving everyone, regardless of their circumstances, at all other times.”

“The government should never force people to violate their conscience or celebrate causes they don’t believe in,” said Kelly Shackelford, president and chief executive officer of First Liberty Institute. “As the Kleins’ new appellate team, we are committed to fighting for their First Amendment freedoms of religious liberty and free expression.”

Legal briefs will be filed over the next several months, and the Oregon Court of Appeals is expected to hear oral arguments in the Kleins’ appeal in late 2016. The lawyers add that there is a significant chance that this case may finally end up before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Information on the case is available at FirstLiberty.org/Kleins.

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9 Zingers From the Sharp Mind of Justice Antonin Scalia

Posted by Ken McIntyre / @KenMac55 / February 13, 2016

URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/13/9-zingers-from-the-sharp-mind-of-justice-antonin-scalia

<!– Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a Heritage Foundation event in October 2015. (Photo: Jeff Malet for The Daily Signal) –>

“A law can be both economic folly and constitutional,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, pictured here at a Heritage Foundation event in October 2015, once said.

(Photo: Jeff Malet for The Daily Signal)

Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday during his 29th year on the Supreme Court, was known for a sharp wit as well as a brilliant legal mind, and he expressed both with his tongue as well as his pen.

Here is just a sample:

1. “What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?” (Remarks at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., 2005.)

2. “There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.” (Majority opinion, Arizona v. Hicks, 1987.)

3. “God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools … and he has not been disappointed. … If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.” (Speech at Living the Catholic Faith conference, 2012.)

4. “If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.” (Speech, Wilson Center, 2005.)

5. “The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.” (Remarks, Federalist Society’s 20th anniversary gala, 2002.)

6. “A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.” (Concurring opinion, CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp of America, 1987.)

7. “If we’re picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a ‘new’ Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.” (Speech, Wilson Center, 2005.)

8. “It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its members’ personal view of what would make a ‘more perfect Union’ (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a ‘more perfect world’) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.” (Dissent, United States v. Virginia, 1996.)

9. “Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.” (Commencement address, College of William and Mary, 1996.)

Lyndsey Fifield contributed to this report. It has been modified to substitute one quotation and specify the context for each.

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10 Things Obama Has Delayed Until After an Election

Authored by Rusty — February 16, 2016

URL of the original posting site: http://menrec.com/10-things-the-obama-has-delayed-action-until-after-an-election

With liberals trying to portray Republicans as only opposing a Supreme Court nomination by Obama because they’re racist, we thought it important to remind readers of the many, many times, that the President has delayed policies or votes for political purposes.

New York Times writer, Brent Staples, went so far as to equate Republican dissent to slavery:

It’s hardly racism, in fact, it’s political maneuvering. Maneuvering that President Obama himself has used extensively. Here are 10 instances where the President has tried to stall items until after an election year.

The following post first appeared at FreedomWorks in November of 2013:

10) Rangeling in Corrupt Politicians

In a clear demonstration that politics trumps ethics in today’s Democratic party, the ethics committee continually delayed the trials of Representatives Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters through to a lame duck session in November, 2010.

Politico reported that Waters had “been hit with three ethics violations related to actions she and her top aide, Mikael Moore, took in September and October 2008 on behalf of a minority-owned bank in which her husband owned stock

As for Rangel:

Rangel has been hit with 13 ethics charges, including allegations that he improperly solicited money from corporate officials and lobbyists for the Charles B. Rangel Public Policy Center in New York; failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars of income and assets on financial disclosure forms; maintained multiple rent-stabilized apartments in a luxury Harlem apartment building; and failed to pay income taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic.

Rangel’s trial was subsequently held on November 15th, and Waters’ was scheduled for the 29th. Rangel would be found guilty of 11 ethics violations, while Waters trial was further postponed for two years due to disarray in the committee. She would eventually be cleared due to insufficient evidence.

9) General Delay-Us

Reports surfaced shortly after the 2012 presidential election that the resignation of General David Petraeus was pushed until after Election Day at the request of the Obama administration. The general had begun an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell in 2011. Attorney General Eric Holder was aware that the FBI had discovered the affair, but Director of Intelligence James Clapper was not advised until November 6th. Petraeus would then resign three days later.

An FBI source explained, “The decision was made to delay the resignation apparently to avoid potential embarrassment to the president before the election.”

8) Bush’s Fault

Democrats, who controlled the Senate agenda in 2010, blamed Republicans for conspiring to derail plans to vote on an extension of the Bush tax cuts prior to the election.

Democrats had spent weeks claiming the issue would be a winner for them at the ballot box, then lacked the courage of their convictions in pulling the trigger on a vote before the deadline.

7) A New Date For The Mandate

In what the Hill called a “stunning announcement,” the White House announced that the employer mandate in Obamacare would be delayed by a year, placing it just after the 2014 midterm elections, and potentially disarming one aspect of the train wreck for the GOP in their quest to unseat vulnerable Democrats. The mandate requires businesses with 50 or more employees to provide those that are considered full-time workers with government approved health insurance plans, or risk paying a fine.

This amendment to Obamacare has been questioned for its legality, but making such a move also indicates just how detrimental the employer mandate is.

While conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh referred to the tactic as a way to “delay the suffering”, the mandate had already prompted numerous employers to respond by cutting thousands of jobs or hours for their employees as a cost-cutting measure.

6) Cuts Like a Knife

Recent estimates indicate that Obamacare raids Medicare to fund other aspects of the legislation – to the tune of $717 billion over 10 years, with $154 billion of that coming out of the Medicare Advantage program. Medicare Advantage provides money for private insurers to cover seniors.

Those cuts had to be covered up in a major way, in order to dupe seniors in the election.

In May of 2012, it was discovered that the administration had developed a ploy to spend $8.35 billion in taxpayer money to hide the effects of Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts until after the election. The Weekly Standard referred to it as the “Senior Swindle” and described it as a brazen “attempt to keep Obamacare’s effects from being demonstrated until it’s too late for voters to respond.”

5) Coal Country Crush

A month prior to his re-election bid, President Obama’s EPA, according to a report from Senator James Inhofe, “punted” on numerous regulations in an attempt to “earn votes” for a second term. A few days before election day, another report surfaced that the administration illegally failed to meet a deadline for releasing regulatory plans for the coming year. Why? Because letting voters in coal-reliant states know that their industry and economic livelihood were about to be crushed would not translate well at the ballot box.

On the eve of the election, we gave coal country a dire warning of what was to come:

Lurking quietly in the shadows, behind a wall of political rhetoric and campaign season hype, is a post-election surprise that could ring the death knell for the coal industry, killing massive amounts of jobs in states such as Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Reports are beginning to surface that the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to implement a slew of anti-coal regulations after the election, which will result in the elimination of nearly 900,000 jobs annually.

In June of 2012, a report from Clean Coal USA had indicated that jobs were already being decimated through the closing of 288 coal plants, which have directly noted the EPA as a factor in some manner.

In September, the EPA released a draft regulation that would hold the “coal industry to impossible standards”, potentially leading to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.

4) Pipeline to Nowhere

Three years. Approval by 10 federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Study upon study demonstrating the economic and energy independence benefits to our nation. Bi-partisan support.

Yet in 2011, the White House announced that they would delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election. The move was designed not only to placate environmentalists, but to also plant a small seed of hope that President Obama may at some point, after the election, put aside politics and pursue a project that would provide tens of thousands of jobs in a struggling economic recovery, hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day, and countless opportunities for revenue.

In the end however, more than five years since the controversy began, President Obama has shown his allegiance to environmental extremists, continuing to avoid commitment to a project that former President Bush described as a “no brainer.”

3) Enrollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’, Right Past Election Day

As mentioned above, the Obama Administration has, coincidentally I’m sure, pushed back the start of second-year enrollment in Obamacare by one month to November 15th, 2014.

Bloomberg explains:

The Obama administration plans to push back by a month the second-year start of enrollment in its health program to give insurers more time to adjust to growing pains in the U.S. law, a move that may stave off higher premiums before the 2014 congressional elections.

Moving enrollment out of election season will hide the price hikes and cancellations from voters until after they have had a chance to cast their ballot in the 2014 mid-term elections. An early Christmas present for vulnerable Democrats who are already seeing their re-election chances tanking.

2) So Long, Solyndra Employees

As midterm elections in 2010 were approaching, the poster child for the President’s green energy stimulus plan, Solyndra, had found itself in economic shambles. The stimulus was being touted as a tremendous job creator, but Solyndra, a major beneficiary of taxpayer funds, was poised to announce significant layoffs at their factory.

According to an e-mail from a Solyndra adviser however, the administration was “pushing ‘very hard’ to delay making the layoffs public until the day after the elections.”

Ultimately, the White House was successful in masking this story until voters had already cast their ballots, with the layoff announcement being made on November 3rd, one day after the midterms.

1) Mr. Flexibility

It was the hot mic heard ’round the world. In March of 2012, the President was caught discussing the contentious issue of missile defense with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, telling him he needed “space” from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that “After my election, I have more flexibility.”

The comment raised suspicions amongst Republicans who wondered if the President was referring to concessions in missile defense talks, and whether or not this “flexibility” would apply to other issues concerning a President who would no longer have to be concerned about the concerns of voters.

The incident led Doug Powers to translate the flexibility statement to “if you back off this year, you can have it your way after I’m re-elected.”

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LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report

Monday, February 15, 2016

For pro-life news updated throughout the day, visit LifeNews.com.

University Staffer Who Threatened to Rape Pro-Life Women Resigns, Refused to Apologize
The Purdue University staffer who allegedly threatened online to rape pro-life women handed in his resignation Monday after refusing to apologize for his comments. Jamie Newman quit Monday morning amid outrage from students, the local community and pro-lifers across the nation, according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/university-staffer-who-threatened-to-rape-pro-life-women-resigns-refused-to-apologize/

Ted Cruz: I Will Filibuster Any Supreme Court Nomination President Obama Makes
Following the death of pro-life Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will not take up a vote on a replacement for him until after the next president takes office. However, should a vote take place before then, Senator Ted Cruz promises to filibuster any nominee President Obama puts forward.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/ted-cruz-i-will-filibuster-any-supreme-court-nomination-president-obama-makes/

Donald Trump: I Was Joking When I Said I’d Put My Pro-Abortion Sister on the Supreme Court
Now that pro-life Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away, pro-life voters are scrutinizing each of the candidates in terms of how they will handle Supreme Court appointments. And when it comes to businessman Donald Trump, he has faced criticism in some quarters from pro-life voters who point to a past interview he gave about his sister, who is a pro-abortion attorney.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/donald-trump-i-was-joking-when-i-said-id-put-my-pro-abortion-sister-on-the-supreme-court/

Marco Rubio Has Always Voted Against Funding Planned Parenthood
In the craziness of a presidential campaign, sometimes rumors get started that, with the advent of social media, that take hold and appear to become gospel — even though they’re not true. One such Internet rumor is the false claim that pro-life Florida Senator Marco Rubio opposes de-funding Planned Parenthood.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/marco-rubio-has-always-voted-against-funding-planned-parenthood/

Supreme Court Expert Thinks Obama Will Pick Pro-Abortion Loretta Lynch to Replace Scalia
Justice Anton Scalia only passed away two days ago and already everyone and anyone has an idea on who they think President Barack Obama will pick to take his seat on the Supreme Court. One of the names being bandied about today by experts on the high court is pro-abortion Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/supreme-court-expert-thinks-obama-will-pick-pro-abortion-loretta-lynch-to-replace-scalia/

Liberals Celebrate Death of Pro-Life Justice Antonin Scalia: “He’s a Monster”
Abortion supporters wasted no time in expressing their joy at the news that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly last week. Scalia was found dead on Saturday morning at a Texas resort, LifeNews reported. Authorities say he died of natural causes. He was 79.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/liberals-celebrate-death-of-pro-life-justice-antonin-scalia-hes-a-monster/

Ted Cruz Ad Slams Donald Trump on Abortion and Supreme Court: “We Can’t Trust Him”
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is out today with a new campaign commercial slamming businessman Donald Trump, who is running as a pro-life candidate, on abortion. With Planned Parenthood funding and a future Supreme Court nomination battle in mind, Cruz says voters “can’t trust” Trump on those key pro-life issues.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/ted-cruz-ad-slams-donald-trump-on-abortion-and-supreme-court-we-cant-trust-him/

Jeb Bush “It’s Really Not Important to Me” if Senate Schedules Vote on Obama Supreme Court Pick
With the passing of pro-life Justice Antonin Scalia, political discussion has turned to his replacement. Thankfully, Justice Scalia was one of the minority of justices who disagree with Roe v. Wade and its 43 years of virtually unlimited abortions.

Click to Read at LifeNews.com: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/jeb-bush-its-really-not-important-to-me-if-senate-schedules-vote-on-obama-supreme-court-pick/

CNN Trashes John Kasich: Is Your Pro-Life Stance Worth Losing Over?
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/cnn-trashes-john-kasich-is-your-pro-life-stance-worth-losing-over/

Planned Parenthood Celebrates Black History Month While It Kills Black Babies in Abortions
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/planned-parenthood-celebrates-black-history-month-even-as-it-kills-black-babies-in-abortions/

40 Days for Life Prayer Campaign Saves 35 Babies From Abortion Already
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/40-days-for-life-prayer-campaign-saves-35-babies-from-abortion-already/

Couple Decides to Have Abortion Because They Didn’t Want to Raise Baby With Spina Bifida
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/couple-decides-to-have-abortion-because-they-didnt-want-to-raise-baby-with-spina-bifida/

He Kicked His Girlfriend’s Stomach So Hard After She Refused Abortion, He Killed Her Baby
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/he-kicked-his-girlfriends-stomach-so-hard-after-she-refused-abortion-he-killed-her-baby/

Pregnancy Center That Helps Women Takes Over Former Planned Parenthood Abortion Clinic
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/pregnancy-center-that-helps-women-takes-over-former-planned-parenthood-abortion-clinic/

Judge Refuses to Stop California Law Forcing Pregnancy Centers to Promote Abortion
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/judge-refuses-to-stop-california-law-forcing-pregnancy-centers-to-promote-abortion/

Hollywood Promotes The Idea It’s Better To Be Dead Than Disabled
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/15/hollywood-promotes-the-idea-its-better-to-be-dead-than-disabled/

Marco Rubio: “Life Begins at Conception and is Worthy of Protection”
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/14/marco-rubio-life-begins-at-conception-and-is-worthy-of-protection/

Ted Cruz: Judges Matter. Just One Supreme Court Judge Could Strike Down Every Pro-Life Law
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/14/ted-cruz-judges-matter-just-one-supreme-court-judge-could-strike-down-every-pro-life-law/

Donald Trump: “Planned Parenthood Does Wonderful Things, But Not When It Comes to Abortion”
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/02/14/donald-trump-planned-parenthood-does-wonderful-things-but-not-when-it-comes-to-abortion/

Daily Pro-Life News Report	Twice-Weekly Pro-Life News Report
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Edward Whelan: Scalia’s Passing Could Cost Americans Their Constitution

by Dan Riehl, 14 Feb 2016, Washington, DC

URL of the original posting site: http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/02/14/edward-whelan-scalias-passing-could-cost-america-the-constitution

President Barack Obama and his progressives can grab control of the nation’s constitution if he gets to appoint a Supreme Court replacement for Antonin Scalia, says Ed Whelan, a former law clerk for Scalia.

“If President Obama has another appointee to this Court, we’re going to have an entrenchment of the Left on constitutional issues for the next generations, or so and a great deal will be lost on a whole range of issues in a way that might not ever be recoverable,” he told Breitbart News Sunday host Alex Marlow, on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125.

Whelan, who is now President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and writes at National Review Online’s Bench Memos, joined Breitbart News Sunday to discuss Scalia’s recent passing from a heart attack at age 79, leaving the court with three conservatives, four liberals and one swing-vote.

Whelan wrote yesterday in Bench Memos that:

Senate Republicans would be grossly irresponsible to allow President Obama, in the last months of his presidency, to cement a liberal majority that will wreak havoc on the Constitution. Let the people decide in November who will select the next justice.

Whelan called Scalia a “gregarious, joyful person” who “loved vigorous argument and struggled to get cases right,” while noting his “wonderful laugh” and calling him “challenging and intimidating, a great mentor and great judge.”

Politically, Whelan said conservatives not only lost a great Justice, and are at risk of losing the Supreme Court and the Constitution given the timing of his passing.

Whelan praised Scalia, saying he “blazed a trail that many others have followed in, his textualist approach (which) is dominant now.” even though some Justices often veer from it to get the result they want.

He credited Scalia and also Judge Robert Bork for reviving “the Constitutionalist or originalist approach to the Constitution in the 1980s — that the words meant what they were understood to mean when they were adopted.”

Whelan said Scalia “transformed” the Court in terms of “how it generally approaches statutory and Constitutional issues” as a rival to living Constitutionalists.

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Los Angeles Makes It Illegal to Own a Gun That Works

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Tad Cronn

URL of the original posting site: http://godfatherpolitics.com/26058/los-angeles-makes-it-illegal-to-own-a-gun-that-works/#DgJaqcGKTMjxgB0g.99

The Los Angeles City Council — no collection of constitutional scholars they — on Tuesday unanimously adopted an ordinance that requires any privately owned handgun to be kept at home, either locked or dismantled so that it does not function. Councilman Paul Krekorian was behind the vote. Krekorian also recently pushed through an ordinance requiring all clips of more than 10-round capacity to be destroyed.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Krekorian as saying, “It’s unacceptable to live in a country where it’s more dangerous to be a preschooler than to be a police officer — and we can do something about that today.”

The Times neglected to mention what country Krekorian thinks he’s living in.

Cuz that’s definitely a country you wanna stay away from.

Perhaps I’m just not enlightened, but I’m a bit confused what exactly Krekorian imagines is going on in Los Angeles homes.

I’m getting flashes of scenes involving toddlers out strolling the neighborhood, caps on askew, gold chains hanging from their necks, the theme from “The Sopranos” playing over their iPhones, when some punk from a rival block rolls up on his trike, hauls out a nine and goes to town.

It’s like a scene out of the comic strip “Boondocks.”

Does Krekorian think that toddlers just spend all their time looking for Dad’s gun, then shooting their friends with it? Or is it that Krekorian foresees a day when the U.N. has banned meat animals and roving burger gangs hunt down the last meat available — little Timmy?

That Krekorian is afraid of guns is assumed, but you would probably be correct to suspect that what he’s really afraid of is the people who elected him to office being able to defend themselves not against criminals but the government.

And the L.A. City Council might have reason to fear that, having invited illegal aliens of all stripes to rest their weary heads within their sanctuary city limits. So, people who are by definition criminals, who often bring crime with them or engage in crime once they get here, are OK. But people wanting to defend themselves against crime, that’s bad.

Councilman Mitch Englander pitched in with Krekorian, saying, “This is less about gun control and simply more about controlling your gun. It’s really that simple.”

And then, to paraphrase the film “Idiocracy,” government will un-Nazi the world, forever.

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Over 30 magistrates REFUSE to perform same-sex weddings in North Carolina

Posted by The Right Scoop on Sep 4, 2015 at 4:55 PM in Politics

URL of the original posting site: http://therightscoop.com/over-30-magistrates-refuse-to-perform-same-sex-weddings/#ixzz3l63IRCWt

Thanks to the NC legislature and governor, these 30-some magistrates are protected in refusing to perform same-sex weddings from losing their job. Kentucky needs to learn quickly from North Carolina:

CBN NEWS – More than 30 magistrates in North Carolina have refused to perform weddings. But thanks to a new state law, they were able to do so legally.

Right after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in June, the state passed a law allowing officials to opt out of performing all marriages.

The law exempts court officials with a “sincerely held religious objection” and is designed for those opposing gay marriage.

The law’s original sponsor, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, said it’s probably preventing situations like the one in Kentucky.

“It’s keeping folks from having to choose between their job and their religious beliefs. I think that’s important,” he said.

Berger said so far the law hasn’t caused any problems.

“I think the law is working very well,” he said.

Only Utah has a similar law.

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How Kim Davis Can Be Released From Jail Without Agreeing to Violate Her Conscience

Posted by Roger Severino / September 04, 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2015/09/04/how-kim-davis-can-be-released-from-jail-without-agreeing-to-violate-her-conscience/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=saturday&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRohva3OZKXonjHpfsX74%2BokW6S2hYkz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTcNiMbvYDBceEJhqyQJxPr3NLtQN191pRhLiDA%3D%3D

This photo made available by the Carter County Detention Center shows Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who was jailed today after a judge found her in contempt of court for her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Five of her deputies agreed to comply with the law. (Photo: Carter County Detention Center/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

Commentary By Roger Severino

Rowan County, Ky., is a lesson for America in how not to resolve social conflict. The local head clerk is sitting in jail, and a judge has ordered her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in her absence. When the Supreme Court redefined marriage for the nation in an activist decision this June, it took the issue out of the democratic process and made it much harder for citizens to navigate our differences on this fundamental institution. Both sides of the debate knew the decision would have significant social effects. For civil servants like clerks who issue marriage licenses, the implications were also immediately personal.

Rowan County clerk Kim Davis could not, as a matter of religious conviction, issue same-sex marriage licenses. Davis’ further dilemma is the fact that her name is attached to every county marriage license, and she believes issuing them to same-sex couples would constitute precisely the kind of endorsement of same-sex unions her faith forbids. Because of that, her office stopped issuing all marriage licenses after the Supreme Court decision.

A lawsuit followed and a federal court on August 12 ordered her to issue licenses despite her faith-based objections. She did not comply with the order, and at a hearing Thursday the judge sent Davis to jail for contempt of court, even though the plaintiffs had specifically asked she be given fines instead of jail time. The judge ordered the deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses or also face contempt of court and five out of six said they would comply. Meanwhile, the judge has told Davis she will stay in jail because she will not comply with his orders.

This situation could have been avoided. This problem would not have even existed in Kentucky and many other parts of the country had the Supreme Court allowed states to deal with the marriage question democratically—with the give-and-take that naturally leads to compromises, the balancing of competing interests, and a diversity of solutions over time. Instead the Supreme Court redefined the institution for the entire country in one fell swoop but did not say how our constitutional guarantee of religious liberty would be reconciled with the new order of things.

Conflicts have been warned about for years, and all four dissenters to the Supreme Court’s marriage decision predicted dire consequences for religious freedom.

Given the inevitable challenges to this fundamental freedom, it is imperative that we seek solutions to navigate the complex road ahead. In this particular case, there are a number of potential ways forward so that same-sex couples can get licenses as required by the courts and Kim Davis can be released from jail without having to agree to resign or violate her conscience.

One help in finding the way forward is Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires the government to avoid substantially burdening religious expression absent a compelling government interest. There is no compelling government interest in keeping Kim Davis’s name on the licenses instead of the name of the deputy clerks who are willing to issue them. If it’s “just a little form”—as Davis’ critics would like to suggest—then change the form, not the beliefs.

There are a number of other possible accommodations that could be adopted by the legislature, courts, or executive agencies in the state. Davis is not interested in stopping all same-sex marriages in her county. She is only asking that she not be forced to participate in them in a way that violates her beliefs.

Opt-out systems like this work in many walks of life. In fact, we already have examples of such options being adopted in the marriage licensing context. For example, North Carolina allows objecting clerks to choose to not get involved with marriage licensing at all, and the state will guarantee that someone will take their place if needed. Hawaii has an online registration system for marriage licensing that gets rid of many of these concerns.

Whatever the method, people of good will want a solution that leads to better outcomes than the impasse in Rowan County this week. Reaching such a solution in Kentucky is still feasible—and desirable, to respect the legally protected interests of the plaintiffs and the religious conscience of Kim Davis.

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Federal judge orders Kentucky clerk and her staff to court

By CLAIRE GALOFARO

URL of the original posting site: http://news.yahoo.com/clerk-issue-gay-marriage-licenses-court-ruling-083217111.html

MOREHEAD, Ky. (AP) — A county clerk who invoked “God’s authority” as she defied the U.S. Supreme Court yet again on gay marriage Tuesday refused to resign after a federal judge summoned her to explain why she should not held in contempt.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis turned away several gay and lesbian couples who sought marriage licenses — some for a fifth time — even though the Supreme Court turned away her last-ditch appeal the night before. “To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision,” she said through her lawyers. “I was elected by the people to serve as the County Clerk. I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience,” her statement said.

For David Moore and David Ermold, it was their third rejection at the courthouse. Davis, facing the couples and a packed crowd of reporters and activists, told them to leave. “We’re not leaving until we have a license,” Ermold responded. “Then you’re going to have a long day,” Davis replied.

Davis then retreated into her inner office, where closed blinds sheltered her from the cameras and rival demonstrations outside.

“Praise the Lord!” her supporters shouted. “Stand your ground!”

Other activists yelled “Do your job!” They called Davis a bigot and said the government is not a theocracy. The sheriff moved everyone to the courthouse lawn, where each side tried to out-do the other with chanting, hymn-singing and sign-waving.

Davis stopped issuing all marriage licenses in June after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the nation.

Four couples — two gay, two straight — then sued to force her to fulfill her duties as an elected official despite her personal religious faith, or step aside. Other couples also sued. A federal order to issue the licenses was upheld in appellate court. Her lawyers with Liberty Counsel then asked the Supreme Court for what they called “asylum for her conscience.”

After the full court declined to intervene Monday night, removing any remaining legal ground for Davis’ position, the couples decided to try again, only to be turned away. For James Yates and Will Smith Jr., it was their fifth rejection. “It’s just too hard right now,” Yates said, choking back tears and holding hands with Smith as they rushed to their car.

Despite the delays, the couples’ lawyers asked the judge to punish her with fines, not jail.

Davis served as her mother’s deputy for 27 years before she was elected as a Democrat to succeed her in November. Davis’ own son is on the staff. As an elected official, Davis can’t be fired from her $80,000-a-year job. Impeachment would have to wait until the Legislature’s regular session next year, or a costly special session.

Davis refused to concede her religious freedom argument even after U.S. District Judge David Bunning ordered Davis and her six deputy clerks to appear at 11 a.m. on Thursday at the federal court in Ashland. Davis has said previously that four of her deputies share her beliefs, one was ambiguous and one did not have a problem with issuing licenses to same-sex couples.

Outside, activists lined up on either side of the courthouse entrance.

“At the end of the day, we have to stand before God, which has higher authority than the Supreme Court,” said Randy Smith, leading the group supporting Davis.

Ermold and Moore, together for 17 years, cried and swayed as they walked out to chants from the clerk’s supporters. “I feel sad, I feel devastated,” Ermold said. “I feel like I’ve been humiliated on such a national level, I can’t even comprehend it.”

The clerk’s husband, Joe Davis, came by to check on his wife. He said she has received death threats but remains committed to her faith and is “standing for God.” As for himself, he said he believes in the Second Amendment: “I’m an old redneck hillbilly, that’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t come knocking on my door.” He pointed to the gay rights protesters gathered on the courthouse lawn and said: “They want us to accept their beliefs and their ways. But they won’t accept our beliefs and our ways.”

___

Associated Press writer Adam Beam in Lexington, Kentucky, contributed.

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Ann Coulter Letter; “Fox News Anchored In Stupidity on 14th Amendment

Ann Coulter | Wednesday Aug 19, 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://humanevents.com/2015/08/19/fox-news-anchored-in-stupidity-on-14th-amendment/?utm_source=coulterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Fox News Anchored In Stupidity on 14th Amendment

Based on the hysterical flailing at Donald Trump — He’s a buffoon! He’s a clown! He calls people names! He’s too conservative! He’s not conservative enough! He won’t give details! His details won’t work! — I gather certain Republicans are determined to drive him from the race.

These same Republicans never object to other candidates who lack traditional presidential resumes — Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, to name a few. I’m beginning to suspect it’s all about Trump’s opposition to mass immigration from the Third World.

Amid the hysteria, Trump is the only one speaking clearly and logically, while his detractors keep making utter asses of themselves.

By my count — so far — Fiorina, Chris Christie, Rick Perry and the entire Fox News commentariat are unfamiliar with a period of the nation’s history known as “the Civil War.” They seem to believe that the post-Civil War amendments were designed to ensure that the children of illegal aliens would be citizens, “anchor babies,” who can then bring in the whole family. (You wouldn’t want to break up families, would you?)

As FNC’s Bill O’Reilly authoritatively informed Donald Trump on Tuesday night: “The 14th Amendment says if you’re born here, you’re an American!”

I cover anchor babies in about five pages of my book, Adios, America, but apparently Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the scholars on Fox News aren’t what we call “readers.”

Still, how could anyone — even a not-very-bright person — imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution? I know the country was exuberant after the war, but I really don’t think our plate was so clear that Americans were consumed with passing a constitutional amendment to make illegal aliens’ kids citizens.

Put differently: Give me a scenario — just one scenario — where guaranteeing the citizenship of children born to illegals would be important to Americans in 1868. You can make it up. It doesn’t have to be a true scenario. Any scenario!

You know what’s really bothering me? If someone comes into the country illegally and has a kid, that kid should be an American citizen!

Damn straight they should!

We’ve got to codify that.

YOU MEAN IT’S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION?

No, it isn’t, but that amendment will pass like wildfire!

It’s like being accused of robbing a homeless person. (1) I didn’t; (2) WHY WOULD I DO THAT?

“Luckily,” as FNC’s Shannon Bream put it Monday night, Fox had an “expert” to explain the details: Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox’s senior judicial analyst.

Napolitano at least got the century right. He mentioned the Civil War — and then went on to inform Bream that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to — I quote — “make certain that the former slaves and the native Americans would be recognized as American citizens no matter what kind of prejudice there might be against them.”

Huh. In 1884, 16 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, John Elk, who — as you may have surmised by his name — was an Indian, had to go to the Supreme Court to argue that he was an American citizen because he was born in the United States.

He lost. In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not grant Indians citizenship.

The “main object of the opening sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the court explained — and not for the first or last time — “was to settle the question, upon which there had been a difference of opinion throughout the country and in this court, as to the citizenship of free negroes and to put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black … should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”

American Indians were not made citizens until 1924. Lo those 56 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Indians were not American citizens, despite the considered opinion of Judge Napolitano.

Of course it’s easy for legal experts to miss the welter of rulings on Indian citizenship inasmuch as they obtained citizenship in a law perplexingly titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.”

Yeah, Trump’s the idiot. Or as Bream said to Napolitano after his completely insane analysis, “I feel smarter just having been in your presence.”

The only reason the 14th Amendment doesn’t just come out and say “black people” is that — despite our Constitution being the product of vicious racists, who were dedicated to promoting white privilege and keeping down the black man (Hat tip: Ta-Nehisi Coates) — the Constitution never, ever mentions race.

Nonetheless, until Fox News’ scholars weighed in, there was little confusion about the purpose of the 14th Amendment. It was to “correct” — as Jack Nicholson said in “The Shining” — the Democrats, who refused to acknowledge that they lost the Civil War and had to start treating black people like citizens.

On one hand, we have noted legal expert Bill O’Reilly haranguing Donald Trump: “YOU WANT ME TO QUOTE YOU THE AMENDMENT??? IF YOU’RE BORN HERE YOU’RE AN AMERICAN. PERIOD! PERIOD!” (No, Bill — there’s no period. More like: “comma,” to parents born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “and of the state wherein they reside.”)

But on the other hand, we have Justice John Marshall Harlan II, who despite not being a Fox News legal expert, was no slouch. He wrote in the 1967 case, Afroyim v. Rusk, that the sponsors of the 14th Amendment feared that:

“Unless citizenship were defined, freedmen might, under the reasoning of the Dred Scott decision, be excluded by the courts from the scope of the amendment. It was agreed that, since the ‘courts have stumbled on the subject,’ it would be prudent to remove the ‘doubt thrown over’ it. The clause would essentially overrule Dred Scott and place beyond question the freedmen’s right of citizenship because of birth.”

It is true that in a divided 1898 case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court granted citizenship to the children born to legal immigrants, with certain exceptions, such as for diplomats. But that decision was so obviously wrong, even the Yale Law Journal ridiculed it.

The majority opinion relied on feudal law regarding citizenship in a monarchy, rather than the Roman law pertaining to a republic — the illogic of which should be immediately apparent to American history buffs, who will recall an incident in our nation’s history known as “the American Revolution.”

Citizenship in a monarchy was all about geography — as it is in countries bristling with lords and vassals, which should not be confused with this country. Thus, under the majority’s logic in Wong Kim Ark, children born to American parents traveling in England would not be American citizens, but British subjects.

As ridiculous as it was to grant citizenship to the children born to legal immigrants under the 14th Amendment (which was about what again? That’s right: slaves freed by the Civil War), that’s a whole order of business different from allowing illegal aliens to sneak across the border, drop a baby and say, Ha-ha! You didn’t catch me! My kid’s a citizen

– while Americans curse impotently under their breath.

As the Supreme Court said in Elk: “[N]o one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.”

The anchor baby scam was invented 30 years ago by a liberal zealot, Justice William Brennan, who slipped a footnote into a 1982 Supreme Court opinion announcing that the kids born to illegals on U.S. soil are citizens. Fox News is treating Brennan’s crayon scratchings on the Constitution as part of our precious national inheritance.

Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is America’s most-cited federal judge — and, by the way, no friend to conservatives. In 2003, he wrote a concurrence simply in order to demand that Congress pass a law to stop “awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States.”

The purpose of the 14th Amendment, he said, was “to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves,” adding that “Congress would not be flouting the Constitution” if it passed a law “to put an end to the nonsense.”

In a statement so sane that Posner is NEVER going to be invited on Fox News, he wrote: “We should not be encouraging foreigners to come to the United States solely to enable them to confer U.S. citizenship on their future children. But the way to stop that abuse of hospitality is to remove the incentive by changing the rule on citizenship.”

Forget the intricate jurisprudential dispute between Fox News blowhards and the most-cited federal judge. How about basic common sense? Citizenship in our nation is not a game of Red Rover with the Border Patrol! The Constitution does not say otherwise.

Our history and our Constitution are being perverted for the sole purpose of dumping immigrants on the country to take American jobs. So far, only Donald Trump is defending black history on the issue of the 14th Amendment. Fox News is using black people as a false flag to keep cheap Third World labor flowing.

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IRS Commissioner Warns that Christian Colleges Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status for Stand Against Gay Marriage!

By Tim Brown / 6 August 2015

<!—->

OK, the very things that Christians warned of concerning the illegal, and unconstitutional, ruling regarding sodomy-based “marriage” is coming to pass. Sadly, it seems the even those who oppose such perversion are falling prey to the propaganda. Senator Mike Lee(R-UT) asked Internal Revenue Commissioner John Koskinen if he would pledge not to remove tax exempt status from Christian colleges without the authorization of Congress of the courts and the commissioner said that he wouldn’t surprise anyone, but give fair warning. “Will you commit to me that while you remain on as the commissioner … you will not in the absence of a directive by Congress or by the courts, that you will not take any action to remove the tax-exempt status from religious colleges and universities based on their belief that marriage is between a man and a woman?” Senator Lee asked Koskinen.

First things first. Neither the courts nor the Congress not the Executive Branch have authority, according the Constitution, to remove such status (See here and here). Lee assumes they have this authority.

Going along with the bone thrown to him, Koskinen replied, “We would issue a regulation … the Treasury and the IRS issue jointly. If we ever did that, we would issue it for public comment. There would be no surprises.” “The public would have plenty of notice and plenty of opportunity to comment, and that’s not going to happen in the next two and a half years,” Koskinen added.

He should have said, “We don’t have authority to do that,” and Lee should have phrased his question to better get to the point of where the IRS would have found such authority to exercise it.

Furthermore, how can you trust a corrupt federal government that has already targeted its citizens concerning tax exempt status to tell you the truth about whether they will or will not target Christian institutions regarding their views on marriage?

Koskinen did tell Lee, “I can make that commitment.”

This comes from the man who had no clue as to what was going on in the IRS under Lois Lerner and still has not fully complied with all of the demands of Congress concerning that investigation.

The Christian Post reports:

However, Koskinen did leave the door wide open for tax-exempt statuses to be a problem for Christian schools in the future.

Lee, who introduced legislation in the Senate last month that would prevent the federal government from imposing consequences on individuals or organizations that uphold religious beliefs on marriage, asked Koskinen if Christian colleges losing their tax-exempt status could be an issue as the nation moves forward with the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision.

Lee explained that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said that it “is certainly going to be an issue,” when asked by Justice Samuel Alito during the Supreme Court oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges in May. Lee asked if Koskinen shares that view and if that is going to be a real concern.

The conversation did continue.

“The [subcommittee] chairman, [Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas,] last week, asked the same question in a letter asking for our response and we responded to the chairman and we have responded publicly that at this time, we see no basis for changing our examination criteria as a result of this Supreme Court case,” Koskinen said.

“When you say ‘at this time,’ is that meant to qualify or restrict your answer or are you saying there is no basis upon which you could revisit tax-exempt status,” Lee queried further.

“At this time there is no basis for us to revisit tax-exempt status on that that grounds. We will continue, obviously, to ensure that those who enjoy tax-exempt status are still doing the work they said they were going to do,” Koskinen elaborated. “But that exam and those reviews will continue as they always have.”

“I don’t mean to leave uncertainty there. It’s not the IRS’s position to make public policy. We implement the laws as they stand,” Koskinen added. “It is our view right now in terms of overall lay of the land that there is no basis at this point to make any different change in our review policies and our exam policies. We can’t predict over the next years what is going to happen in terms of decisions that will be made in public policy but those aren’t decisions that we are going to make.”

When Lee asked if Koskinen disagreed with Solicitor General Verrili’s comments ‘that is certainly going to be an issue,” Koskinene replied, “Not necessarily, but he was not saying that it would be an issue with the IRS. I think what he was trying to say was that over time and other areas over time, public policy decisions have been made by courts and legislatures that ultimately then did influence tax-exempt status,” Koskinen contended. “The Bob Jones case is one of those. But that was not a case of policy made by the IRS, that was a case over 15 or 20 years of decisions made by courts and legislatures.”

Koskenin assumed the IRS did have the power to action in such a measure not according to law, but according to policy. For you see, the IRS is an unconstitutional entity.

“Down the road, if the IRS ever moves in that direction because of public policy changes, it would first issue a draft regulation for public comment so the public would have plenty of notice and plenty of opportunity for comment and that’s not going to happen in the next two-and-a-half years,” Koskinen said.

Lee concluded by pointing out the obvious.

“While I greatly appreciate Commissioner Koskinen’s word that he will not target religious institutions for their religious beliefs, it worries me and it should worry every American that the IRS does not absolutely disavow the power to target religious institutions based on their religious beliefs, even if the current IRS commissioner has committed not to use that power for the time being.,” Lee said.

That’s exactly right. This behemoth called the federal government has grown and already shown it has broken the chains of the Constitution, and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, has engaged in a “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” Therefore, it is no longer time that we debate the issue as those who formed the beast that now seeks to devour us. It is time to eliminate it permanently.

Jefferson went on to state what the rightful remedy to such tyranny is:

“…it is their right (the people), it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

May the God of Heaven, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant such measures in our land once again.

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4 Supremes alert America: ‘Trouble is coming’

Published: 07/11/2015 by Greg Corombos

URL of the original posting site: http://mobile.wnd.com/2015/07/4-supremes-alert-america-trouble-is-coming/#5QldO8KEXkHFdmWU.99

Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts

America needs to prepare for a major governmental assault on religious liberty in the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling, but those standing against the tide can find plenty of inspiration from those who pioneered the concept of religious freedom at the American founding.

Michael Farris is co-founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and author of “The History of Religious Liberty.” The book details the fierce fight for the religious freedom provisions that eventually emerged in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Farris said history is critical to understand in the wake of the marriage decision and the brand new threats to liberty being advocated on the political left.

The day after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision was handed down, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., told MSNBC she believed religious liberty was a much narrower concept than has been understood for centuries. “Certainly the First Amendment says that in institutions of faith that there is absolute power to, you know, to observe deeply held religious beliefs,” Baldwin said. “But I don’t think it extends far beyond that. We’ve seen the set of arguments play out in issues such as access to contraception.”

She added, “Should it be the individual pharmacist whose religious beliefs guides whether a prescription is filled? In this context, they’re talking about expanding this far beyond our churches and synagogues to businesses and individuals across this country. I think there are clear limits that have been set in other contexts, and we ought to abide by those in this new context across America.”

Michael Farris’ “History of Religious Liberty” is a sweeping literary work that passionately traces the epic history of religious liberty across three centuries, from the turbulent days of medieval Europe to colonial America and the birth pangs of a new nation.

Farris is dumbfounded at Baldwin’s reading of the First Amendment. “The ignorance of members of Congress and the U.S. Senate never ceases to baffle me. How did they get there in the first place without taking a basic civics course? Or maybe they have and they just don’t believe it,” Farris said. “This senator has just simply walked away from not only the text of the Constitution and the meaning of the Constitution but our great American traditions.”

In fact, Farris believes Baldwin’s concept of religious liberty is almost completely backward. “It is an institutional right,” he said. “Churches have religious freedom, but it’s primarily an individual right. The Supreme Court – back in the day when it used to think straight – would say things like it’s not up to the government or the courts to determine which individual within a faith has correctly understood the demands of that faith. You’re allowed to go your own way.”

In response to the court decision, Govs. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, have announced their states will vigorously protect the religious liberty of the people. Farris applauds the efforts but warns those policies won’t stop all government intrusion into Americans’ lives or the practices of religious institutions. “That’s a good thing. It limits the areas where a church or a school can expect an attack. But a Christian college residing in one of those states can still expect an attack from the IRS or from the accrediting association or from the U.S. Department of Education if they don’t go along with the federal edicts on this,” said Farris, who warned schools and churches would be wise to protect themselves legally now given the dire warnings offered in the dissents to the Obergefell decision. “We have four justices on the Supreme Court effectively warning all the religious institutions, ‘You better do something about this because trouble’s coming.’ I don’t think that’s an idle speculation,” he said. “That’s about as strong of a warning from about as high a source as you can possibly get.”

&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;Please enable Javascript to watch this video&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;Farris expects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to provide federal protection for Christian individuals and organizations, but only to the extent that Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledges it.

In “The History of Religious Freedom,” Farris details the long, unlikely triumph of religious freedom in America’s founding. Just as in Europe, colonial America witnesses various denominations cracking down on others.

Modern history textbooks credit enlightenment thinking for the emergence of religious liberty in America. To Farris, that’s academic fantasy, and true scholars have actually debunked that notion. “It’s simply not true,” he said. “I lay out the historical evidence in great detail. One Harvard historian around the 1920s said the evidence that people who are indifferent to religion, that basically is the enlightenment crowd, were the cause of religious liberty is an unsustainable argument. There is simply no evidence for that point.” He added, “It was people who cared very deeply. It was grassroots kinds of Christians fighting establishment kind of Christians who gave us religious liberty for everybody. The battle for religious liberty wasn’t settled on the Mayflower.”

Protections for the free exercise of religion were anything but guaranteed in America. Farris said the colonial government of Virginia teamed with the Anglican Church to punish dissenters as late as the 1770s. In 1776, Virginia’s Declaration of Rights became the first declaration of religious liberty anywhere in the world.

In 1789, Congress approved the Bill of Rights and sent them to the states for approval. That same year, the French Revolution unfolded. The upheaval in the two countries has long been compared, especially as the U.S. moved forward with stability and France subsequently endured the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic era.

Farris said there are key reasons for the very different results of revolutions rooted in freedom, including America’s much deeper respect for personal religious liberty and vastly different views about the nature of man.

“France believed that man was perfectable and that we could create our own utopia, whereas the American Revolution followed the Christian biblical idea that all men are sinners and that’s why you needed limited government, because you can’t trust any man in government to rule faithfully forever,” he explained.

According to Farris, the greatest parallel between the colonial struggle for religious freedom and today’s cultural battles is where the battle lines are drawn. Religious freedom was not championed by the ruling class. “It was a monumental battle,” he said. “It was the common people, who believed in Jesus, who believed the Bible was the authority for their faith and their life, who really fought the war and won. Many of them paid with their lives.”

Farris said the founding generation should serve as inspiration for the religious freedom fights of this century.

“Common people armed with bravery and faith in God can turn anything around,” he said. “I’ve seen it in my own life through the homeschooling movement. We were outnumbered and outgunned by the teachers’ unions day after day after day. We won battle after battle after battle because (we were) common people armed with the Constitution of the United States and belief in the Word of God.”

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon

Happy Fourth(?!)

July 3, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://conservativebyte.com/2015/07/happy-fourth

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon

? and Stripes

July 3, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://conservativebyte.com/2015/07/and-stripes

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Gay Rights Adaptation Of Iwo Jima Marines Sparks Outrage

by Caroline May1 Jul 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/01/gay-rights-adaptation-of-iwo-jima-marines-spark-outrage

Ed Freeman / Getty Images

A gay rights inspired adaptation of the famous image of Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima in 1945 is sparking outrage following the recent Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage nation-wide.

The image — of four muscular, skin-baring men raising the rainbow flag posed like the Marines at Iwo Jima — was taken some ten years ago and appeared on a gay magazine, but was recirculated last week following the Supreme Court decision.

Twitter is in an uproar.

And dont compare gay marriage to the Marines who fought and died in Iwo Jima. The two events are not comparable pic.twitter.com/rqwtR2eoHh — Paulie Walnuts (@PAULme_maybe69) July 1, 2015

Replacing the soldiers on Iwo Jima standing up the American flag with the gay pride flag is disrespectful— Mitchell Moyers (@m_moyers8) July 1, 2015

They really recreated the Iwo Jima flag with the gay flag. Just stop — Evan Moriyama (@AsMoriyama) July 1, 2015

6821 people died in Iwo Jima,over 19,000 wounded.Apparently that ain’t nothi compared to gay people’s struggle huh — AmericanMuscle (@MrFakeDope) July 1, 2015 #gay #TCOT

this is offensive how dare you besmirch Marines at Iwo Jima who gave their lives so there is a supreme ct pic.twitter.com/ARRqXwJC0u — Rosebud (@Murba1515) June 30, 2015

The Washington Post highlighted the outcry Wednesday, recalling the bloody operation that spurred to the first iconic photo taken on February 23, 1945 by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Three of the Marines pictured were killed in combat, among the nearly 7,000 other Americans who died on Iwo Jima. Another 20,000 American troops were wounded.

The photographer of the gay rights image, Ed Freeman, The Post reports, has received hate mail, backlash on social media, and at least one death threat since the image went viral. “He said if he ever saw me, he’d kill me,” Freeman told The Post. “I got swamped with vitriolic hate mail.”

Freeman received disapproving responses to his when he posted on Facebook that Friday, “When I took this picture almost ten years ago, it never, never occurred to me that it would someday come to symbolize the victory we are celebrating today. Congratulations to all of us! Love to you all.”

Freeman told The Post that he did not intend for the image to be disrespectful and chalked the outrage up to people’s frustration with the Supreme Court decision. “The principle complaint that people have is that I am equating the gay struggle with the contribution and sacrifice of American servicemen,” Freeman said. “But there is no equal sign here. This is not meant as a sign of disrespect. For God sake, no. I totally support people in uniform. There is no comparison going on here. The comparison is going on in people’s heads, and they’re spoiling for a fight. They’re already on edge because of the gay marriage decision.”

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American College of Pediatricians on Marriage Ruling: “A Tragic Day for America’s Children”

Reported by Onan Coca June 30, 2015

This past Friday, the President of the American College of Pediatricians, Dr. Michelle Cretella, ripped the Supreme Court’s decision to force every state in America to allow sodomy-based “marriage.” Dr. Cretella argues that, “[T]his is a tragic day for America’s children. The SCOTUS has just undermined the single greatest pro-child institution in the history of mankind: the natural family. Just as it did in the joint Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton decisions, the SCOTUS has elevated and enshrined the wants of adults over the needs of children.”

At their website, the College has posted a wealth of information and scientific evidence that same-sex “marriage” is destructive to children and that children do best in natural families. In April, the College posted the following press release to their website, urging the Supreme Court to protect America’s children.

The American College of Pediatricians urges the Supreme Court of the United States to consider the well-being of children in the case before them this week to legalize same-sex marriage. While the debate over the legitimacy of same-sex “marriage” can be viewed from many perspectives, there should be little debate about the effects it has upon children: Same-sex “marriage” deliberately deprives the child of a mother or a father, and is therefore detrimental. The College advocates for children in this debate from an objective position grounded in scientific evidence.

President, Michelle Cretella, states, “The court must understand the gravity of their decision in its impact upon children around the world. Every child needs a mother and a father. Same-sex marriage directly disenfranchises children of this right.”

There is unequivocal evidence of the fundamental value of the married, father-mother family unit to the optimal development of the child. For more information, including a link to the Amicus Brief filed with the Supreme Court, visit the Same-Sex “Marriage“ page on the College website.

The College joined an amici brief in the recently decided Obergefell v. Hodges case; in their brief they recounted that there is sound scientific research to defend traditional marriage while trying to discourage sodomy-based “marriage.”

Despite being certified by almost all major social science scholarly associations—indeed, in part because of this—the alleged scientific consensus that having two parents of the same-sex is innocuous for child well-being is almost wholly without basis. All but a handful of the studies cited in support draw on small, non-random samples which cannot be extrapolated to the same-sex population at large. This limitation is repeatedly acknowledged in scientific meetings and journals, but ignored when asserted as settled findings in public or judicial advocacy.

You could say that the science on same-sex “marriage is settled,”… but you know those anti-science liberals — they’re always so narrowminded.

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States move to counter gay marriage ruling

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/246582-states-move-to-counter-gay-marriage-ruling

More than a dozen states that saw gay marriage bans struck down last week by the U.S. Supreme Court are vowing to protect religious liberty, even though they grudgingly accept that the ruling is now the law of the land.

In the wake of Friday’s decision, Texas’s attorney general told county clerks in the state that they have a statutory right to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples if they have religious objections to gay marriage.
In Alabama, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore — a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage — said a new state court order could temporarily delay the practice, only to walk back the remarks.
And in Louisiana, the attorney general contends there is nothing in the Supreme Court’s ruling that renders it effective immediately, raising questions about how soon the state would have to comply.

Many other states across the South and upper Midwest are criticizing the ruling as an encroachment on states’ rights and religious freedom, though most acknowledge they cannot ignore it. “Ultimately, my position is that the state should have been legally entitled to define marriage,” South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley told The Hill. “I feel the state has traditionally held that role, and certainly when it’s in the state’s constitution it should be respected.” “But we are a nation of laws and we must respect that,” he added.

Before the Supreme Court’s ruling last Friday, those states and 11 others — Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio and Tennessee — had laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. Though not outright defying the high court’s decision, states are now seeking to make clear the limits of its scope. “The ruling does not tell a minister or congregation what they must do, but it does make clear that the government cannot pick and choose when it comes to issuing marriage licenses and the benefits they confer,” said Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the state would issue exemptions to county clerks, judges and justices of the peace who express religious objections to issuing gay marriage licenses, promising to “defend their religious beliefs.” “The government cannot force them to conduct same-sex wedding ceremonies over their religious objections,” Paxton said, accusing the Supreme Court of “ignoring the text and spirit of the Constitution to manufacture a right that simply does not exist.”

In cases where there are objections, however, other public officials would issue the documents.

A federal judge ruled in May that Alabama’ s same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional and stayed her opinion until the Supreme Court ruled on the issue. This week, Moore — the state Supreme Court’s chief justice — initially said a new motion in the earlier case would effectively table Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, a case known as Obergefell v. Hodges.
But same-sex marriage advocates argued that the order has no tangible effects thanks to a federal injunction, and Moore later backed away from the assertion. “In no way does the order instruct probate judges of this State as to whether or not they should comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell,” he said.

Still, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange accused the Supreme Court of “overturning centuries of tradition and the will of the citizens.” “I expect the focus will now turn to the exercise of one’s religious liberty,” Strange said.

A number of attorneys general also complained that the Supreme Court’s decision infringes on states’ right to define marriage how they see fit. Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said the court’s ruling “overturns the will of the people of Louisiana, and it takes away a right that should have been left to the states.”

Caldwell is threatening to essentially disregard the Supreme Court’s ruling for the time being, saying there is “nothing in [the] decision that makes the court’s order effective immediately. Therefore, there is not yet a legal requirement for officials to issue marriage licenses or perform marriages for same-sex couples in Louisiana.”

Gay rights activists warn that any acts of perceived defiance would threaten to undermine the legal system. “It’s a dangerous message for southern governors to disobey an order from the Supreme Court,” said Marc Solomon, national campaign director at Freedom to Marry. “The notion that public employees get to pick and choose which laws they follow based on their religious beliefs is a really dangerous precedent and a terrible public policy,” he added. “If you’re a public official, you need to carry out those laws, and you don’t get to decide whether they’re right or wrong.”

The attorneys general in North Dakota and Mississippi both said they are waiting on other court cases to be resolved before they enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. Other states like Ohio and Nebraska expressed disappointment that the Supreme Court was interfering with their marriage laws but also indicated they would respect the ruling.

And top officials in a handful of states that formerly banned gay marriage are now welcoming the Supreme Court’s ruling. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said he would move swiftly to recognized same-sex marriage in the wake of the court’s ruling. “The history of our country has always been one of moving toward inclusion and equality,” Koster said in a statement. “I applaud the court for their courage and strong sense of fairness. Missourians should be seen as equals under the law; regardless of their gender, race, or whom they love.”

Austin Yack, Hanna Krueger, Kate Hardiman and Rachel Ravina contributed.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon

The Proverbial Camel

July 1, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://conservativebyte.com/2015/07/the-proverbial-camel

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Video Of The Day: Sharpening Your Traditional Marriage Argument

Posted by Rottdawg — June 29, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://joeforamerica.com/2015/06/votd-sharpening-your-traditional-marriage-argument

Here are a couple videos that will help strengthen your argument should you be in the traditional marriage camp. The Supremes really let the citizens of America down with their moronic argument supporting same-sex marriage.

This one here is a bit NSFW, but Christopher Cantwell has a message for all of those that rainbowed up their Facebook profiles in celebration of the SCOTUS decision.

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U.S. DEPT OF EDUCATION: Their Facebook Profile Picture Is an Ominous Sign of What’s Coming

Posted on June 28, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://clashdaily.com/2015/06/u-s-dept-of-education-their-facebook-profile-picture-is-an-ominous-sign-of-whats-coming

This has to be the only reason you now need to pull your kid from public school ASAP. The push is coming – and it’s going to get ugly.

This picture was posted as the profile picture for the U.S. Department of Education’s Facebook page on June 26, the day that the Supreme Court announced its ruling for Same-Sex Marriage in the United States.

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The Left’s Moral Relativism Has Eaten Our Culture Alive — and Conservatives Have No Political Strategy to Stop It

June 26, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/06/26/the_left_s_moral_relativism_has_eaten_our_culture_alive_and_conservatives_have_no_political_strategy_to_stop_it

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, I know everybody is trying to understand this, and everybody’s trying to explain it to each other. Everybody’s looking to everybody else for a deep meaning, an explanation that makes sense. Because none of what’s happening makes sense to people. So what’s going on? Well, hang in there. I’m going to give my shot at this today, folks.

The EIB Network and Rush Limbaugh, get ready. Oh, yeah, that too. Open Line Friday, which could be juicy today. This is where we try to emphasize callers a little more than we do Monday through Thursday. Never know how it’s actually going to play out. But the rule is on Friday whatever you want to talk about, have at it. Telephone number is 1-800-282-2882. And the e-mail address elrushbo@eibnet.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, not to be — I don’t even know what the word is — dismissive, the outcome of this case today has never been in question. The fact that the Supreme Court was going to find gay marriage as they did should not be a surprise. It doesn’t mitigate the result. I mean, just like yesterday we could all predict what was going to happen with Obamacare, but being alive and seeing it happen and living through it, the reality of it, it’s crushing. Same thing here.

The only question on this one was going to be the vote, was it going to be 5-4 or 6-3. It turned out to be 5-4. Now, everybody’s looking for an explanation. Everybody’s reading dissent opinions. Everybody’s consulting. A lot of people calling each other, emailing each other, “Gee, what?” I can’t tell you the number of people who have sent me e-mails with a simple theme, the same theme. “How do you persevere? How can you go on the radio today? What in the world, how do you even know anybody’s going to be listening? Do you realize, all seems lost, what in the world is there to say?”

Well, I’m here, and I’m going to do my best to put this into some sort of perspective. One thing I’m not is in a state of denial. I think there’s a lot going on, and to try to put them in any kind of priority, “Okay, this is the worst and then this is the next worst.” That’s a futile exercise and ultimately meaningless. But I think, folks, you can almost include Obamacare in this. In this decision today, the court legalizing gay marriage, this is in a way Roe v. Wade all over again. The country was involved.

As Scalia pointed out in a dissent, there was a pretty robust debate going on, state by state, over gay marriage. It’s now been shut down. So once again, five justices have forced a way of life on people, and many of them disapprove of it, do not support it, and have not had a chance to vote on it. So I think we’re faced with a future where a culture will continue to be roiled much as it has been since Roe v. Wade.

I’ve heard commentators today on all the cable networks, and they run the gamut. One of the seemingly common themes among some quasi, so-called conservative commentators or analysts is, “Hey, these are just people and they just want what’s been denied them,” and it goes on and on. “They just want dignity and respect. It’s not asking for much, they just want –” and it’s not about that in all cases. The rule for gay marriage is not about joining anything, it’s about redefining.

I mean, if the move for gay marriage was about joining, then a couple that walks into a bakery and wants a cake baked for their wedding and proprietors say, “No, it’s against our religious beliefs to support gay marriage,” then the gay couple would leave and go find some other bakery to bake their cake. But that’s not what happens. They go to court and they try to get that bakery shut down, or that photography studio shut down. So it makes me dubious of this idea that there’s just an effort here to join the majority. There’s clearly an effort underway to up-end and redefine and punish.

Take a look at what happened in Charleston, South Carolina — by the way, all this comes under an umbrella, which I’ll explain. There’s a singular theme for all of this that’s happening. And maybe even pretty much a — though you may not agree with it — singular explanation for it. But after the shooting in Charleston, look at how quickly that became a Republican event. And look at how quickly people moved to banish the Confederate flag.

The Confederate flag had nothing to do with anything involved with the Charleston situation. It had nothing to do with it. It was totally unrelated. An opportunity was made, seen and acted upon by the Democrat Party to move their agenda forward. The Republican Party was totally unprepared for it. The conservative movement was totally unprepared for it, was left to either join it or be humiliated and held up for ridicule.

Now, I think in the case of this gay marriage decision today, the answer to this sadly is not going to be found in politics or policy, because the problems and the truth go way beyond that. I think we’re dealing with a culture that is under assault and is deteriorating rapidly. The truth is that all this transcends the Constitution. I think there is a spiritual war going on where truth is no longer truth. There is no objective truth. Everything is relative now, particularly morally. Words have no meaning. Words can be whatever the most forceful group of people want them to mean. Whatever the most intimidating group of people wants a word to mean is what it will mean.

So the door’s open for liberals and oligarchs to do whatever they want to do. And I don’t know that politics or legal solutions alone are the remedy for what is happening. To me, a bigger casualty than the healthcare debacle and the socialism aspects of Obamacare is the assault on the Constitution and an even bigger casualty still was on the truth itself. Words no longer mean anything. They’re just tools for liberals to accomplish whatever ends they want to accomplish.

Now, I’m going to get into some of the words from dissenting justices on the case today, the gay marriage case, because they’re poignant, and they get to a point, make a great point. But I’ll tell you, folks, everybody’s trying to understand the difference in John Roberts, his decision today, his opposition to gay marriage compared to what he wrote yesterday for Obamacare, is incoherent. The two don’t make any sense side by side. I have a theory.

I think I know or have a good idea of why Obamacare survives, amnesty survives and will survive, and I think it’s basically fear. Fear of being the one, anyone in history, who dared oppose or repeal anything accomplished by the first African-American president. I think that has created a paralysis in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement and at the Supreme Court and at Congress and at the Senate. I think it’s pervasive and I think it’s going to be forever. I think that fear is going to survive long after Obama has served his terms of office.

In other words, the effort to repeal Obamacare in, say, 2017, 2018, I don’t know who is going to have the guts to actually do it. Somewhere along the line somebody is not going to want their name attached to it because the historical notation that X was a leader in the movement that repealed the act of Obamacare brought to us by the first African-American president. My point is, I think there is more fear than we have ever understood. I think there is a paralysis-type fear brought about and brought on by the election of the first African-American president.

It is made even more intense by the fact that people can see what the media does to you if you dare stand up in opposition to Obama. And Obama has made it clear that after his terms in office are over he’s not going anywhere. He’s going to have a residence in Washington and one of the reasons for that is to protect his legacy. If anybody makes a move to repeal anything, whatever it is, and we’ve still got a year and a half. I told you in January of this year, folks, buckle up, these next two years will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen. They’re starting out that way. We’re now six months in. And it is the case.

But here’s the thing, folks. When you get right down to it, everywhere I look today — yesterday, the day before, last year, the year before that, the last decade, the decade before that. Everywhere there’s conservative anger — everywhere — over everything that’s happened. Today the anger is at the Supreme Court. Yesterday the anger was at the Supreme Court. And that’s all there is, is anger. There’s never anything done beyond expressing the anger. There aren’t any policy reactions.

There aren’t any efforts whatsoever to deal with the assaults and the attacks that are relentless and daily from the left. I mentioned Charleston. I mean, here you have a horrible, sad event in Charleston, South Carolina. And within minutes it became the fault of the Republican Party! It became the fault of the conservative movement. The media, as per usual, began looking for any evidence that Dylann Roof had any tie whatsoever to the Republican Party.

They focused on the Confederate flag. It became yet another daily march of the Democrat leftist agenda, which has — as its number one objective — to eliminate political opposition in this country. I’ve said it for the past two days and I’m going to say it again. The biggest threat that Obama and the Democrats have is us. They fear us more than they do ISIS or the Iranians or whatever, because they view us as able to take away from them their power via elections.

They’re not worried about ISIS taking their power away; they’re not worried about the Iranians doing that. So we must be destroyed. We must be attacked and annihilated and rendered irrelevant. The Dukes of Hazzard, for crying out loud! A television show, because the Confederate flag was on the roof of the car, comes under assault. There never is any strategy to deal with this. We know what’s coming — at least I do! I’ve made a career here out of warning everybody what’s coming, and there never is…

There doesn’t ever appear to be any awareness of what’s coming and there certainly isn’t any strategy to deal with it. And that is one of the reasons why I know you’re frustrated and maybe despondent. You have invested in everything you think you can do. You’ve donated. You’ve purchased. You’ve voted. You’ve gotten out the vote. You’ve done everything you can. You have called. You have emailed. You have faxed.

You have let your opinions be known, and you hear everything you want to hear during campaigns — and that’s the last time you hear it. The fact of the matter is a Republican Congress is helping Obama build his power base by not stopping any of it, by not opposing any of it. I continue to see no opposition strategy. Gay marriage, Obamacare. Both of these, particularly Obamacare, the best I can tell the Republican strategy has been, “We’re not going to fight Obama because he’s the first black president.

“We’re just not going to do it. Say what you want, conservative voters, but we’re not going to do it. There’s no future in it. The media will kill us. They will call us racist. We’ll let the Supreme Court deal with it.” For military base closings back in the late ’80s, Congress would go out and hire Blue Ribbon commission members — former Congressmen, retired people — to do this and that, to do the heavy lifting of closing military bases rather than get their fingerprints on it.

Campaign finance reform?

Same thing.

Everybody you talked to in the Republican Party said, “It’s unconstitutional. We can’t support that!” President Bush signed it. They said, “Let the court fix it.” The court didn’t fix it. They found it constitutional. “We’ll let the court deal with Obamacare. The Supreme Court will fix it. We’ll go to the court. We’ll sue. That’s what will happen.” And we keep losing every time we go to the Supreme Court because we do not have a political strategy. Nor is there a political will to even devise a strategy.

Everything is, “Wait until the next election. We’ll get them in the next election! We’ll get them in 2017.” We have a year and a half to go until 2017! Who knows what kind of destruction will take place between now and then? But yet, folks, there’s a conservative apparatus all over Washington, DC. There are conservatives everywhere. There’s an entire TV network made up of ’em. Conservative talk radio is made up of conservatives. There’s no shortage of conservatives. They’re everywhere.

We’ve got conservative think tanks here, think tanks over there. We’ve got conservative analysts; we’ve got conservative advisors. They’re everywhere!

Raising money…

Fundraising…

Writing books…

Promising…

Nothing changes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It’s Open Line Friday. I’m going to go to the phones, and the only way to do this is to be disciplined about it. I say provocative things all the time, and I’ve just gotten started today, folks. Hang in there. Be tough. That was just the open monologue. That was just warming up. I’m going to go to the phones, though. Ovi in Orlando. Great to have you on the program, Ovi. Hi.

CALLER: Actually, it’s O-z-z-i-e, like Ozzie and Harriet. (chuckles)

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: But in any case, I was going to disagree with you a little bit. I don’t think Republicans are so much afraid of challenging what Obama does because he’s the first black president. I think the real issue for Republicans is they don’t know what to do with those 30 million Americans that — if they change Obamacare — would be uninsured.

RUSH: Ozzie, they’re not insured now. Ozzie, they’re not insured now.

CALLER: Mmm?

RUSH: Obamacare is an absolute disaster. Obamacare deserves to have been thrown overboard years ago. Obamacare is destructive. Obamacare is going to destroy people’s ability to end up with disposable income in their lives and get ahead. Obamacare is an absolute disaster like much of everything this administration has brought us. It has not insured any significant millions of uninsured. Now, I understand the theory.

The theory is, “The Republicans don’t want to throw Obamacare overboard because that means they’ll have to fix it.” That’s exactly my point! I made the point yesterday that the conservative movement has become not a party of opposition, not a movement of opposition, but a movement of fine tuning. And what does it fine tune? Democrat proposals! Democrat ideas! Instead of rejecting them, instead of throwing them overboard and proposing to the American people — who are smart enough to understand — alternative ideas, we fine tune socialism and call it conservatism.

Sorry, that’s not the answer.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, here we are right on schedule. Right on schedule. Here is a headline from the Washington Examiner: “Poll: 72% Fear Economic Crash, Concern ‘Highest Ever’.” What the story is about, if you read it, the GOP pollsters are telling Republicans, “You’ve got to let go of those social issues, they’re killing you. It’s the economy, stupid people, you’ve got to drop the social issues.”

It is my contention that Republicans aren’t doing a damn thing on social issues. The Democrats are the ones forcing social issues on everybody. Today, the latest example, it’s the Democrats forcing these things and average, ordinary Americans are trying to defend what they believe in. There is no aggressive behavior on the part of Republicans or conservatives. Everybody is in a defensive posture. Everybody is just standing by trying to hold on to what they believe in and what they have left.

Every bit of the aggressiveness, every bit of the offense, every bit of whatever is being undertaken is from the Democrat Party. And yet, here we go, the Republican candidates for president are being told, “Get rid of social issues, let them go. It’s the economy, the economy is the way to win.” And letting go of the social issues is how our culture is being corrupted. It’s another one of these things that’s 180 degrees out of phase. And the social issues, I know what it is, folks, I know, I know. It’s a bunch of moderate Republicans who think they’re losing on abortion.

They’re losing on everything. And they just don’t know it. They’re losing on everything. You think they’re winning on the economy? We live in the most disastrous economy since Jimmy Carter, and the Republicans may be winning elections. Is there any pushback on any of this? There’s a lot of talk. There’s a lot of requests for donations. There’s a lot of fundraising going on. A lot of people promising you that they’re enacting policies or thinking about policies and they’re going to do this and they’re going to do that. The moment of truth comes and they don’t do it, and they kick the can down the road because it’s not the right time.

It’s never the right time. There isn’t any opposition. Those of you that are feeling lost today, those of you who feel like it’s over, you’re at your wit’s end, we’re winning nothing, we’re losing everything, you’re still the majority. That’s what’s got you so bedraggled. That’s what’s got you so ticked off. You’re still the majority. You know it. Less than two percent of the population is bullying its way through the country and nobody is doing anything to stop it because of fear or what have you. And that’s what’s got you upset.

What good is winning elections? That’s the big truth. The big, final, ultimate act is going and voting and you succeed in winning landslide victories in 2010 and 2014, what have you got to show for it, nothing. That’s why you’re mad. Tired of feeling like losers? Tired of feeling like there’s no recourse. The way the game is being played right now there isn’t. The Supreme Court, throw them in the mix, depending on the issue, and they’ll pretend they are the federal government, lock, stock and barrel. The other two branches don’t even count and don’t even matter.

A story from yesterday: “Christian Farmers Fined $13,000 for Refusing to Host Same-Sex Wedding Fight Back — The owners of a small family farm in upstate New York fined $13,000 for discriminating against a same-sex couple for refusing to host a wedding on their property are fighting back.”

Too bad they’ll lose, especially with the court’s decision today. All resistance to the militant gay agenda now is just officially just a rear guard action. It’s a lost cause, like the Confederacy. Pretty soon, like the Confederacy, all this is gonna be a hate crime to even remember.

“In an appeal filed today before an appellate division of the New York Supreme Court, a lawyer for Cynthia and Robert Gifford, owners of Liberty Ridge Farm near Albany, N.Y., argued that when finding them guilty, the court did not consider their constitutional freedoms and religious beliefs. ‘[The decision] violates the Giffords’ free exercise of religion, freedom of expressive association, and freedom of expression protected under the United States and New York Constitutions,'” according to their lawyer. Plus it was their property.

There isn’t a freedom of religion in the US anymore. Not for Christians. That’s the point. “The Giffords were found guilty of ‘sexual orientation discrimination’ by an administrative law judge,” and have been told that they must attend sensitivity training classes.

END TRANSCRIPT

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Coalition of African-American Pastors Threaten Civil Disobedience If Supreme Court Passes Gay Marriage Law

By Vincent Funaro , Christian Post Reporter, June 25, 2015|2:20 pm

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.christianpost.com/news/coalition-of-african-american-pastors-threatens-civil-disobedience-if-supreme-court-passes-gay-marriage-law-140842/#KdHwXPVmQZtlRQkZ.99

: Rev. Bill Owens, the president and founder of the Coalition of African American Pastors. (Photo: Facebook/Bill Owens)

A coalition of African-American pastors vowed this week that there will be massive civil disobedience if the U.S. Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage in a ruling on the matter expected this month. At a press conference in Memphis, Tennessee, members of the Coalition of African-American Pastors joined Christian ministers at the Church of God in Christ’s historic Mason Temple to warn the Obama administration to prepare for massive civil disobedience among pastors and clergy if state bans on gay marriage are deemed unconstitutional.

“If they rule for same-sex marriage, then we’re going to do the same thing we did for the civil rights movement,” said Rev. Bill Owens, president and founder of CAAP. “We will not obey an unjust law.”

“The politicians and courts have tried to take God out of this country,” continued Owens. “This country was founded on Godly principles. We will not stand back.”

Rev. David Welch, president of the Pastor’s Council in Houston, Texas, spoke out at the conference explaining the lengths people of faith might go to resist gay marriage.

“God created marriage between a man and woman and no Supreme Court jurisdiction can define this,” said Welch. “We stand clearly saying we will acknowledge God’s law no matter what the cost, no matter what the price. If they want to fill jails with pastors across the nation of every color, denomination and every size who will stand for the laws of God and His truths.”

Welch also compared Christians resisting gay marriage to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and encouraged pastors to fight for their right to worship freely.

“If it comes down to declining to perform same-sex weddings, that we will be charged with a civil or criminal penalty, then we will accept the penalty,” said Welch. “But this isn’t just about the wedding ceremony itself. This is a core, fundamental issue of our First Amendment freedom that the court is toying with right now. Either we have the right of freedom of conscience and religion and the freedom to practice it, or we don’t.”

Opponents of gay marriage around the U.S. are going to different lengths to resist it. Texas Republican lawmakers proposed a bill that would seek to enforce a ban on gay marriage even if the U.S. Supreme Court decides to declare such bans unconstitutional, While it was co-signed by 87 Republican members of the House, HB 4105 wasn’t brought to the floor for debate before the midnight May 15 deadline, which rendered it dead. Democratic lawmaker and businesses such as Dell, Celanese and Dow Chemical lobbied against the bill.

Lawmakers in the state Senate, however, managed to pass a bill known as the “Pastor Protection Act,” which goes into effect Sept. 1, and allows clergy to refuse to conduct marriage ceremonies that violate their religious beliefs.

“Freedom of religion is the most sacred of our rights and our freedom to worship is secured by the Constitution,” Abbott said at a June 11 signing ceremony, according to the Texas Tribune. “Religious leaders in the state of Texas must be absolutely secure in the knowledge that religious freedom is beyond the reach of government or coercion by the courts.”

On April 28, the Supreme Court heard arguments on an appeal from the Sixth Circuit of Appeals regarding four state-level gay marriage bans. Many experts have said the Supreme Court will narrowly rule this month that all states must allow same-sex couples to obtain a state marriage license.

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Supreme Court Rules Same-Sex Couples Have Right To Marry Nationwide

June 26, 2015 12:15 PM

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/06/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-couples-have-right-to-marry-nationwide

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — The Supreme Court declared Friday that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States. Gay and lesbian couples already could marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The court’s 5-4 ruling means the remaining 14 states, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans on same-sex marriage. Gay rights supporters cheered, danced and wept outside the court when the decision was announced.

The outcome is the culmination of two decades of Supreme Court litigation over marriage, and gay rights generally. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that same-sex marriage must be allowed under the United States Constitution.

“No union is more profound than marriage,” Kennedy wrote, joined by the court’s four more liberal justices.

“From their beginning to their most recent page, the annals of human history reveal the transcendent importance of marriage. The lifelong union of a man and a woman always has promised nobility and dignity to all persons, without regard to their station in life. Marriage is sacred to those who live by their religions and offers unique fulfillment to those who find meaning in the secular realm. Its dynamic allows two people to find a life that could not be found alone, for a marriage becomes greater than just the two persons. Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations,” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy also wrote the court’s previous three major gay rights cases dating back to 1996. It came on the anniversary of two of those earlier decisions. As Kennedy read his opinion, spectators in the courtroom wiped away tears after the import of the decision became clear. One of those in the audience was James Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court fight. Outside, Obergefell held up a photo of his late spouse, John, and said the ruling establishes that “our love is equal.” He added, “This is for you, John.”

President Barack Obama placed a congratulatory phone call to Obergefell, which he took amid a throng of reporters outside the courthouse.

Kennedy was joined by the four liberal justices of the court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer.

Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented, and all wrote separate dissents.

Alito wrote, “Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage.”

Roberts said gay marriage supporters should celebrate, but don’t celebrate the Constitution.

“If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it,” Roberts wrote.

Scalia wrote his dissent “to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.”

“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves,” Scalia wrote.

Thomas wrote, “Aside from undermining the political processes that protect our liberty, the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect.”

Obama called the ruling a “big step in our march toward equality.” In a statement in the Rose Garden, Obama said that justice arrived like a thunderbolt. “This ruling is a victory for America,” Obama said. The president thanked gay rights supporters who worked tirelessly for this cause. “America’s a place where you can write your own destiny,” he said.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton weighed in, calling the ruling a “historic victory for marriage equality.”

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said in a statement that the Supreme Court should have allowed the states to decide. “Guided by my faith, I believe in traditional marriage. I believe the Supreme Court should have allowed the states to make this decision. I also believe that we should love our neighbor and respect others, including those making lifetime commitments,” the former Florida governor said. “In a country as diverse as ours, good people who have opposing views should be able to live side by side. It is now crucial that as a country we protect religious freedom and the right of conscience and also not discriminate.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser celebrated the ruling saying the court’s recognition of same-sex marriage as a right in every state “affirms our democratic values, that each of us is equal.”

The ruling will not take effect immediately because the court gives the losing side roughly three weeks to ask for reconsideration. But some state officials and county clerks might decide there is little risk in issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The cases before the court involved laws from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Those states have not allowed same-sex couples to marry within their borders and they also have refused to recognize valid marriages from elsewhere.

Just two years ago, the Supreme Court struck down part of the federal anti-gay marriage law that denied a range of government benefits to legally married same-sex couples. The decision in United States v. Windsor did not address the validity of state marriage bans, but courts across the country, with few exceptions, said its logic compelled them to invalidate state laws that prohibited gay and lesbian couples from marrying.

The number of states allowing same-sex marriage has grown rapidly. As recently as October, just over one-third of the states permitted same-sex marriage.

There are an estimated 390,000 married same-sex couples in the United States, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, which tracks the demographics of gay and lesbian Americans. Another 70,000 couples living in states that do not currently permit them to wed would get married in the next three years, the institute says. Roughly 1 million same-sex couples, married and unmarried, live together in the United States, the institute says.

The Obama administration backed the right of same-sex couples to marry. The Justice Department’s decision to stop defending the federal anti-marriage law in 2011 was an important moment for gay rights, and Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage in 2012.

(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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Confirmed: White House Lied About Jonathan Gruber’s Role in Developing ObamaCare

by John Hayward22 Jun 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/22/confirmed-white-house-lied-about-jonathan-grubers-role-in-developing-obamacare

The Associated Press

President Obama’s dismissal of MIT’s Jonathan Gruber as just “some adviser” he barely remembers, rather than a key architect of ObamaCare, has always been one of the flimsiest and most transparent lies told by this profoundly dishonest White House.

Everyone knew Gruber was critical to ObamaCare, and when he was caught on tape high-fiving himself for helping to fool what he described as “stupid” American voters with the Affordable Care Act’s web of false promises and ludicrous projections, he was speaking from the Administration’s heart. It’s still newsworthy that the House Oversight Committee has released emails to the Wall Street Journal showing Gruber had a far closer working relationship with the White House than it wanted to admit:

The emails show frequent consultations between Mr. Gruber and top Obama administration staffers and advisers in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the Affordable Care Act. They show he informed HHS about interviews with reporters and discussions with lawmakers, and he consulted with HHS about how to publicly describe his role.

[…] “His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House oversight committee. “There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this façade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”

Mr. Chaffetz on Sunday sent a letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell requesting information justifying the department’s sole-source contract with Mr. Gruber for his work on the health law.

Good luck with that, Rep. Chaffetz. At the rate this Administration responds to congressional and public inquiries, you’ll be getting the answer to your letter sometime in 2018.

The emails show Mr. Gruber was in touch with key advisers such as Peter Orszag, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House that oversaw federal programs.

He was also in contact with Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president, and Ezekiel Emanuel, who was then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.

One email indicates Mr. Gruber was invited to meet with Mr. Obama. In a July 2009 email, he wrote that Mr. Orszag had “invited me to meet with the head honcho to talk about cost control.” … “Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”

In an August 2009 email, Lawrence Summers—then a top economic adviser in the administration—emailed Mr. Gruber and asked “if you were POTUS, what would u do now?” Mr. Gruber responded that Mr. Obama should hold out for enough money to do universal coverage.

There’s a lot more at the Wall Street Journal piece linked above, including Gruber’s invaluable assistance in spinning reporters, working out deals with Big Labor, and getting recalcitrant Senators including Mary Landrieu (D-LA) on board. How’s that ObamaCare working out for you career-wise, Ms. Landrieu? Are you happy Gruber was able to talk you into supporting the law you knew was a pile of garbage?

As with every bit of truth cudgeled out of this furtive Administration, it took a long time for the House Oversight Committee to get to the bottom of this, after obtaining 20,000 pages of emails from MIT. Once again, the Obama delaying tactics worked like a charm.

When the President falsely denied Gruber’s role to the media, it gave them the go-ahead to largely ignore those bombshell videos in which he not only confirmed that the much-anticipated Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell should be a slam-dunk against ObamaCare, wiping out the subsidies illegally paid through the federal exchanges, but also explained at length how so much of the Affordable Care Act was an elaborate scam designed to keep American voters in the dark about the legislation’s true objectives and ramifications.

On the former point, Gruber was quite clear that the denial of subsidies to states that don’t set up their own ObamaCare exchanges was a deliberate feature of the legislation, not a typo or some old idea accidentally left lurking in the poorly-written Affordable Care Act. The reason we’re going to need the Supreme Court to decide the fate of the subsidies is that, contrary to the expectations of the brain trust that devised ObamaCare, the vast majority of states decided not to create such exchanges (and some of the states that did had to junk theirs, after wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money on them.)

Gruber and his pals figured only a few states would resist creating the exchanges, and the loss of subsidy money to their citizens would quickly pressure the holdout governors to knuckle under and set one up, thus allowing the federal government to offload the expense and hassle of the program (which ObamaCare’s creators always knew would be far, far greater than what they told the public) onto hapless conscripted state governments. As with so much of the Affordable Care Act, voluntary participation was an illusion, a lie. The states were to be given a hypothetical choice not to “opt in” to the exchange program, but in reality the subsidy baseball bat would be applied to the kneecaps of holdouts until they abandoned their resistance.

This is also the reason President Obama lied, and lied, and lied again about how you would be able to “keep your plan if you like your plan.” You were tricked into thinking participation in ObamaCare would be voluntary, and you could just stay with your old health care if you decided the new government-controlled offerings weren’t right for you. Obama explicitly put it that way when he was crisscrossing the country to spread the Keep Your Plan lie – he said the Affordable Care Act would be so wonderful, saving average Americans some $2,500 a year on the cost of insurance while delivering a superior product, that people would voluntarily abandon their old plans and demand ACA plans in droves.

If the Obama media had paid proper attention to the significance of the Gruber revelations, and the White House had not been able to downplay the depth of his influence on the plan, the uncovering of his videotaped chest-thumping – by a citizen, not any sort of professional “journalist” – would have been devastating. Instead, once again, the media eagerly helped Obama shape a painful news cycle with falsehoods, and the truth comes out literally days before the Supreme Court rules on the subsidies – too late to influence the Court, while Obama was given a clear field to bully them into protecting his health care con job again. The Obama Administration has always understood that truth depreciates in value over time. Today’s blockbuster revelation becomes tomorrow’s footnote. This is especially true under the “progressive” philosophy of never returning liberty it has taken.

The American people were never told ObamaCare would be a permanent disfigurement of the Constitutional order, invulnerable to repeal no matter how many of its promises were proven false, or how much damage it did to the lives of law-abiding taxpayers. They are never told this vision of “democracy” works by banana-republic rules: one man, one vote, one time; no apologies, no refunds, no more choices in the future. “Hope and Change” are popular slogans until the Left gets what it wants – then it’s Despair and Stasis, forever, and only heartless, selfish Enemies of the State would dare to hope for change.

By keeping the truth of ObamaCare hidden until Democrats were able to shove the Affordable Care Act down America’s throat in a dead-of-night vote, the Left accomplished its vital goal of tricking its subjects into signing away their freedom and taking steps toward collectivism they will never be able to retrace. What good does it do to learn the truth now? We live in an age where truth has full depreciated to become a yard-sale item, while we are forced ever deeper into debt to pay for illusions.

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Mike Lee: Liberals won’t stop at same-sex marriage victory

By Paul Bedard | June 11, 2015

Photo – Republican Sen. Mike Lee warned Thursday that liberals will use the victory to impose other restrictions on those opposed to gay weddings including churches, colleges and military chaplains. (AP Photo)

Republican Sen. Mike Lee, strongly suggesting that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to approve same-sex marriage this month, warned Thursday that liberals will use the victory to impose other restrictions on those opposed to gay weddings including churches, colleges and military chaplains.

“They seem tempted by the intolerant impulse to punish Americans,” Lee said in a thoughtful speech at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington.

Sen. Mike Lee. (AP Photo)

Lee, of Utah, used the speech to preview legislation he is drafting to protect religious-affiliated schools and institutions that don’t support same-sex marriage from federal attack if the court approves the ceremonies.

President Obama’s top lawyer told the court that the institutions might be targeted if the court makes gay marriage constitutional and that could threaten the tax status of over 25,000 colleges and schools.

Lee seemed to suggest the Left will win. “At the very moment this campaign appears to be on the brink of success,” he said, adding, “sometimes in a democracy, the other side wins.”

And, he warned what could happen next if supports of religious freedom don’t respond:

Regardless of how the Court rules in this particular case, it is becoming increasingly clear that the next controversies will not be over whether gay couples should receive marriage licenses, but:

— Whether people who don’t think so may keep their business licenses.

— Whether colleges that don’t think so will be able to keep their accreditation.

— Whether military chaplains who don’t think so will be court-martialed.

— Whether churches who don’t think so will be targeted for reprisal by the state.

— Whether heterodox religious belief itself will be swept from the public square.

Lee, called the GOP’s ideas factory in the Senate, however said he sees opportunity and said conservatives should focus on equality just like those promoting same sex marriage. “Political conservatives and religious traditionalists may not like how the gay marriage debate is going. But it is no small thing that the gay marriage movement has succeeded in recent years only by adopting our principles – of tolerance, diversity, and equal opportunity,” he said.

He called on conservative to demand a debate on religious freedom, and even quoted former President Bill Clinton who signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and said it protects the “space of freedom between government and people of faith that otherwise government might usurp.”

That’s where his still unnamed religious liberty bill comes into play. He explained:

If we want to reinforce religious liberty in America, our first step must be to protect that crucial “space of freedom” from undue government interference. That is the principle behind a bill I will soon introduce in the Senate.

It would protect the tens of thousands of religiously affiliated schools in America – preschools through college – from government discrimination. And it would prevent any agency from denying a federal tax exemption, grant, contract, accreditation, license, or certification to an individual or institution based on a belief that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.

Moving forward, the debate will be less and less about marriage and more and more about freedom of conscience. Those of us who value that basic human right have the better of the argument. But that matters only if we have the courage to make that argument at every opportunity, before every audience.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.

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Pastors say ‘We Don’t have to Obey the Supreme Court on Gay Marriage’

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Onan Coca

A Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage could be announced any day now, and pastors across the country are already saying they intend to break the law. The Supreme Court is expected to announce a ruling on state gay marriage bans this month that could, depending on the ruling’s wording, legalize same sex marriage nationwide. Anticipating the decision, religious leaders fear they’ll lose their tax exempt status and be forced to wed gay couples or face fines and even jail time.

A coalition of those religious leaders purchased an ad in the Washington Post Wednesday in the form of an open letter to the Supreme Court Justices urging them to uphold traditional marriage.

“We are Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian pastors, clergy, lay leaders and Jewish leaders, who collectively represent millions of people in our specific churches, parishes, denominations, synagogues and media ministry outreaches,” the letter reads.

So far, more than 43,000 people have signed a petition supporting traditional marriage, many of them church leaders fearful that if gay marriage becomes constitutional, their refusal to participate will jeopardize their tax exempt status and even land them in legal trouble. Pastor Robert Jeffress, who signed the letter and leads a 12,000 member congregation at First Dallas Baptist Church, compared himself to Martin Luther King for his civil disobedience. “That may mean we experience jail time, loss of tax exempt status, but as the scripture says, we ought to obey God rather than man, and that’s our choice,” Jeffress told The Daily Caller News Foundation. Jeffress said when he announced to his congregation his decision to take a stand on the issue, they gave him a standing ovation.

Cases of legal punishment for bakers and florists who refused to serve gay weddings have fueled this fear. In Washington state, an elderly florist named Barronelle Stutzman was sued by a gay couple for discrimination after she refused to arrange flowers for their wedding. She lost the legal battle and could lose everything to pay the fines. Religious leaders have warily watched Stutzman and others like her and want to preemptively protect themselves. “We implore this court to not step outside of its legitimate authority and unleash religious persecution and discrimination against people of faith,” the letter reads. “We will be forced to choose between the state and our conscience, which is informed by clear biblical and church doctrine and the natural created order.”

During oral arguments in April, Justice Antonin Scalia raised similar concerns asking if exemptions that protected religious leaders from prosecution for discrimination would still hold if gay marriage became a constitutional right. “But once it’s — it’s made a matter of constitutional law, those exceptions — for example, is it — is it conceivable that a minister who is authorized by the State to conduct marriage can decline to marry two men if indeed this Court holds that they have a constitutional right to marry? Is it conceivable that that would be allowed?” Scalia asked Bonauto. Scalia also questioned whether the state would give clergymen the authority to marry if they would refuse to marry gay couples. “If you let the States do it, you can make an exception,” Scalia said. “The state can say, yes, two men can marry, but — but ministers who do not believe in same-sex marriage will still be authorized to conduct marriages on behalf of the state. You can’t do that once it is a constitutional proscription.”These questions are the ones haunting religious leaders and driving them to have their voice heard before the ruling which is expected to come down this month. “The Supreme Court, regardless of what they may think, is not the highest authority in the land,” Jeffress told The DCNF.

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The Battle Over Coal. And the War on State Rights.

Posted by Rita Dunaway on June 04, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.conventionofstates.com/the_battle_over_coal_and_the_war_on_state_rights/?recruiter_id=11724

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “War on Coal” is a war that the states literally cannot afford to lose. With coal providing almost 40 percent of U.S. electricity and around a half-million American jobs, we all stand to suffer from proposed federal regulations that would force plants to close, drive our electricity bills up, and hinder the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers in the global market.

But this recent bureaucratic power grab is more appropriately described as a “battle” than a “war.” It is just one fight—albeit an important one—in the larger War on Federalism being waged day after day by a formidable national government in Washington, D.C. The specific power play being made by the EPA in this instance is handily representative of the processes that have steadily expanded federal power over the years. Just like President Barack Obama’s executive fiat on immigration policy, it involves actions that do not quite ignore constitutional boundaries, but simply lawyer around them.

Here, the EPA wants to order the states to apply the same crippling carbon dioxide emission standards to existing energy plants—already regulated under a separate section of the Clean Air Act—as the federal standards designed for new plants.

For decades, the EPA has been administering the federal law according to a common-sense reading of the language, whereby exiting sources of air pollution are regulated under one section and new sources or otherwise unregulated sources are governed by another.

Then came a failed attempt by the Obama administration to shepherd new climate change legislation through Congress. Voilà! Now, citing a dubious ambiguity in the wording of one provision of the decades-old Clean Air Act, the EPA claims that Congress actually authorized it to apply the more stringent standards to existing plants anyway.

The EPA’s attempt to steamroll what most see as a clear, congressionally-constructed boundary on its regulatory authority is made possible by a landmark Supreme Court precedent, a 1984 case called Chevron U.S.A. v. National Resources Defense Council. That case gave us the “Chevron Test” for evaluating the extent of agency authority by reviewing Congress’ statutory instructions to the agency. Essentially, if Congress’ direction to the agency is clear, that direction simply must be followed. If, however, there is silence or ambiguity in the language, then courts will uphold the agency’s action as long as it is based on a permissible interpretation of the law. In other words, an interpretive “tie” goes to the bureaucrats.

This judicial policy puts power tools in the hands of bureaucracies that, just by virtue of their consisting of human beings, are already predisposed to chip away at the limitations of their authority. It invites every administrative agency to expand its power at every turn by inventing creative statutory interpretations that can pass the low bar of being considered by some federal judge to be “permissible.” As it turns out, federal bureaucrats are creative geniuses when it comes to “interpreting” their statutory authority. Their creativity mirrors that of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in interpreting the Constitution itself.

Invariably, all this interpretive creativity comes at the expense of the states. In fact, this very Battle over Coal is an example of how much the states have already lost, for this battle is a tug-of-war between federal agencies and the federal legislature over an area of policy that rightfully belong to the states.

Strategies for winning this Battle over Coal in the short-term—including the usual expensive lawsuits—must not be mistaken for the needed long-term solution to the epidemic erosion of our constitutional federal system. We cannot allow our national government to continue distracting us with countless and repeated skirmishes over the practical and procedural terms of their abuses of power. Instead, we must engage in the larger war over fundamental constitutional principles that the feds are actually waging.

The states are well-equipped to win this War on Federalism decisively, but victory requires them to use the one effectual constitutional tool at their disposal that, until now, they have entirely neglected.

By invoking Article Five’s state-controlled process to propose constitutional amendments, the states can foreclose the feds’ opportunity to lawyer around limitations on their authority. The states can definitively end not only the EPA’s attempt to hijack legislative prerogatives, but also hundreds of other instances of overreaching by bureaucrats, the president, Congress, and even the Supreme Court.

A constitutional amendment could overrule the Chevron case’s “tie goes to the agency” framework and replace it with a rule that where Congress’ intent is unclear, the agency may not act. But more importantly, a constitutional amendment could limit the power of Congress to interfere with policies that the Constitution reserved to the states. For example, an amendment could overturn the current, overbroad interpretation of the Commerce Clause, which was originally intended to merely allow Congress to regulate economic activity that crosses state lines.

Americans must recognize that what is ultimately at stake here is our self-governance. Will the vast majority of our laws be created in the state and local governments that are most responsive to the people, as intended by the Constitution? Or will we instead allow ourselves to be ruled by an elite ruling class in a distant capitol, which hands down high-minded orders and cracks the whip on the backs of the states to carry them out?

Federalism is a defining characteristic of our exceptional Constitution, and it is under siege. But the War on Federalism is one that the states can win if they use the appropriate constitutional defense.

To learn more about the Article Five Convention of States process, read my five-part series.

Rita Martin Dunaway serves as Staff Counsel for The Convention of States Project and is passionate about restoring constitutional governance in the U.S. Follow her on Facebook (Rita Martin Dunaway) or e-mail her at rita.dunaway@gmail.com.

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Federal Court Forces University of Notre Dame to Obey Pro-Abortion HHS Mandate

Reported by Steven Ertelt, May 20, 2015, Washington, DC

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.lifenews.com/2015/05/20/federal-court-forces-university-of-notre-dame-to-obey-pro-abortion-hhs-mandate/

A federal appeals court has denied a request by the University of Notre Dame to get out of having to comply with the pro-abortion HHS mandate that is a part of Obamacare and requires businesses and church groups to pay for abortion-causing drugs for their employees. Notre Dame won a victory at the Supreme Court earlier this year. After a lower court dismissed the lawsuit, in March the Supreme Court ordered the lower court to reconsider its ruling that denied a Catholic university the freedom to follow its faith. But, today, a panel of a federal appeals court ruled that Notre Dame must comply with the mandate.

SCOTUS blog has more on the decision the appeals court issued:

In a two-to-one ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit cleared the way for a trial of the university’s challenge but denied any immediate religious exemption.

This marked the first time that a federal appeals court had rejected a claim that the Supreme Court’s ruling last June in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores should shield a non-profit religious organization from any role whatsoever in carrying out the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. The issue seems certain to return to the Justices, probably next Term, although Notre Dame could try to get some temporary relief by returning quickly to the Supreme Court.

The university’s case has yet to go to trial in a federal district court, so the appeals court ruling was limited to denying preliminary protection for the university in the meantime. Still, it was a strong signal that the Roman Catholic institution may have a hard time, at least in lower courts, getting an exemption.

Although the government has made clear that non-profit groups need to take only a minimal step to take advantage of a religious exemption, Notre Dame — like some other non-profits — has been arguing that even taking such a step would mean that it had helped to implement the mandate in a way that violates its religious opposition to birth control.

Although the Supreme Court has now issued four temporary orders in non-profit cases, it has made clear that none of those was a decision on whether such institutions will ultimately be spared any role at all under the ACA mandate. This Term, the Court has sent two of those cases — Notre Dame’s was one of them — back to appeals courts to examine the impact, if any, that the Hobby Lobby ruling would have on the non-profit sector.

Circuit Judge Joel M. Flaum dissented, saying that Notre Dame had already made a case for an exemption, and so enforcement of the mandate should have been blocked.

The university has the legal option of asking for further review by the en banc Seventh Circuit or instead returning to the Supreme Court. The Justices have only about six more weeks remaining in the current Term, so it would be too late to get a formal appeal decided before the summer recess.

After the ruling, pro-life Indiana Senator Dan Coats criticized the decision.

“Requiring faith-based institutions to betray the fundamental tenets of their beliefs is unconstitutional and contrary to the cherished American tradition of religious liberty. Whether it is Notre Dame or many other faith-based institutions of higher learning, the thread of faith that runs through these schools is essential to their religious beliefs and successful administration of a faith in learning education. This same thread of faith is vital to food banks, homeless shelters and many important organizations addressing social needs in Indiana and across the country,” he said.

Coats continued: “Under our Constitution, all people of all faiths have the right to exercise their faith within the bounds of our justice system, even if their beliefs seem to some as misguided, flawed or flat out wrong. Faith-based institutions should not have to facilitate insurance coverage for products that are counter to their religious or moral beliefs.”

Previously, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Miller Jr. dismissed the suit, claiming that Notre Dame is sufficiently protected by a very narrowly-drawn religious exemption in the mandate — that pro-life legal groups say does not apply to every religious entity. Then, a three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision on a 2-1 vote.

In appealing that decision, the University of Notre Dame brought its request to the Supreme Court — saying the lower court decision made it the only nonprofit religious ministry in the nation without protection from the HHS mandate. The Supreme Court’s ruling today vacates the entire lower court decision forcing Notre Dame to comply and the 7th Circuit must now review its decision taking into consideration the entire Hobby Lobby case upholding that company’s right to not be forced into compliance.

The Obama administration has relied heavily on that lower court decision in other courts around the country, arguing that it should be able to impose similar burdens on religious ministries like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

After the Supreme Court ruling in the Notre Dame case, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed an amicus brief in the case, commented on the decision.

“This is a major blow to the federal government’s contraception mandate. For the past year, the Notre Dame decision has been the centerpiece of the government’s effort to force religious ministries to violate their beliefs or pay fines to the IRS.” said Mark Rienzi, Senior Counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed an amicus brief in the case. “As with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby, this is a strong signal that the Supreme Court will ultimately reject the government’s narrow view of religious liberty. The government fought hard to prevent this GVR, but the Supreme Court rejected their arguments.”

He said University of Notre Dame’s pursuit of higher education is defined by its religious convictions. Its mission statement reads: “A Catholic university draws its basic inspiration from Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom and from the conviction that in him all things can be brought to their completion.” Its fight to stay true to its beliefs has brought it all the way to the Supreme Court – and back to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to Rienzi, over 750 plaintiffs in the other nonprofit cases have been granted protection from the unconstitutional mandate, which forces religious ministries to either violate their faith or pay massive IRS penalties.

A December 2013 Rasmussen Reports poll shows Americans disagree with forcing companies like Hobby Lobby to obey the mandate.

“Half of voters now oppose a government requirement that employers provide health insurance with free contraceptives for their female employees,” Rasmussen reports.

The poll found: “The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 38% of Likely U.S. Voters still believe businesses should be required by law to provide health insurance that covers all government-approved contraceptives for women without co-payments or other charges to the patient.’

“Fifty-one percent (51%) disagree and say employers should not be required to provide health insurance with this type of coverage. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.”

Another recent poll found 59 percent of Americans disagree with the mandate.

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Romans 13, Christian Resistance, and the Coming Tyranny

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Gary DeMar

In a previous article I discussed the biblical principle of Christian resistance as it relates to the upcoming Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. As was pointed out in that article, there are examples in the Bible of God’s people resisting direct commands by civil officials based on a very specific set of higher law principles.

Christian apologist Francis A. Schaeffer wrote, “Let us not forget why the Christians were killed. They were not killed because they worshipped Jesus… Nobody cared who worshipped whom as long as the worshipper did not disrupt the unity of the state, centered in the formal worship of Caesar. The reason Christians were killed was because they were rebels”1 and placed the God of the Bible over the claim that the State and its Caesars were gods. The proof?: “they all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:7).

This is an old story that has a modern history. King James of the King James Bible wanted a translation that countered the notes in the 1559 Geneva Bible, the Bible of the Puritans and Pilgrims. “For example, the margin notes for Daniel 6:22 imply that the commands of kings are to be disobeyed if they conflict with the law of God: ‘For he [Daniel] disobeyed the king’s wicked commandment in order to obey God, and so he did no injury to the king, who ought to command nothing by which God would be dishonored.’”2

“Embarkation of the Pilgrims.”

Alister McGrath comments:

“Notice also how the Genevan notes regularly use the word ‘tyrant’ to refer to kings; the King James Bible never uses this word—a fact noted with approval as much as relief by many royalists at this point.”3

It’s no wonder that King James “authorized a fresh translation of the Bible to undermine the republican implications of the Geneva Bible.”4

Because of its no exception tone, Romans 13 is seen as prohibiting all resistance to the law of the State: “Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. . . (v. 1). The apostle lists no exceptions. Peter makes a similar statement: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right” (1 Peter 2:13-14). Again, no exceptions. This is the same Peter who declared, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29; cf. 4:19-20). How do we reconcile the apparent contradiction?

Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766) states the following in his 1750 sermon “Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers”:

“Thus, upon a careful review of the apostle’s reasoning in this passage, it appears that his arguments to enforce submission, are of such a nature, as to conclude only in favor of submission to such rulers as he himself describes; i.e., such as rule for the good of society, which is the only end of their institution. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not entitled to obedience from their subjects, by virtue of anything here laid down by the inspired apostle.”There are a number of places in Scripture where one verse speaks in absolute terms and other verses offer exceptions. This is not unusual. If I tell my grandchildren to go outside and play until dinner is ready, I have spoken in absolute terms. They are not to come into the house until they are called. No exceptions are given. What if it rains? What if a large dog enters the yard? Can they enter the house without violating my absolute and no exception command?

They would not be violating my “no exception” command because there are unspoken exceptions. They are assumed to be operating without them having to be repeated each time a new command is given. They have been told on previous occasions to “come in when it’s raining” and “do not get near stray dogs that wander into the yard.”

The Bible operates in the same manner. In one place Jesus says, “All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Does this include the civil magistrate? What about the person who strikes an assailant in self-defense? Is this not an exception to Jesus’ “no exception” statement? Since the Bible already discusses self-defense (Ex. 22:2-3; Deut. 19:21) and the role of the civil magistrate (e.g., Gen. 9:6), there is no need to repeat the exceptions since Jesus’ hearers knew He has anarchy and revolution in mind (e.g., Lev. 19:18), not the just use of the sword. Romans 13:4 explains that it is the duty of the civil magistrate to use the sword in certain specified cases. Is this a contradiction? No.

So then, when we read passages like Romans 13:1 and 1 Peter 2:13-14, we must not neglect the rest of the Bible that is equally authoritative and more fully explains and qualifies these passages.

“Many general statements of Scripture must be open to admitting exceptions even those qualifications are not immediately spelled out. Why are so many generalizations stated without qualification? Because the exact conditions restricting their applicability are not known, or because the “accidental” or providential circumstances that render them inapplicable occur so seldom as to be practically negligible, or because such qualification has already been stipulated in another inscripturated context.”5

In summary, we must recognize that as the State becomes more tyrannical and non-Christian in its social and political policies, conflicts between church and State will multiply. That conflict may make it necessary for Christians to say no to statist laws that will force them to violate the laws of God.

There is an additional reason why Christians must understand the limits of civil jurisdiction and the limits of resistance. Because of a desire to see the current corruption in our own nation reversed, some Christians may take it upon themselves to bring about change by revolutionary means. This is an unbiblical agenda to pursue. There is no warrant in Scripture for a revolutionary spirit.

How Christians go about resisting is a question that needs to be answered in exacting detail. The fact that we have lesser magistrates – state governments, governors, and state constitutions – that can serve as legitimate governing authorities as a means to rebuff civil and judicial tyranny is a viable governing avenue for Christians to take.

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Obama’s Chief Attorney Makes Chilling Admission During SCOTUS Marriage Arguments

Reported by Tony Perkins, on 30 April, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://barbwire.com/2015/04/30/0800-obamas-chief-attorney-makes-chilling-admission-during-scotus-marriage-arguments/

As the President’s chief attorney made stunningly clear, redefining marriage is not — and has never been — the end goal of homosexuals. Silencing dissent is. And you can’t silence dissent without punishing speech and belief — which is apparently what the government has in mind if the Court rules in the Left’s favor.

Looking ahead to a possible constitutional right to same-sex “marriage,” Justice Samuel Alito asked a key question: “In the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax-exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?” With chilling honesty, Verrilli admitted, “It’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is — it is going to be an issue.”

Translation: If churches, religious groups, schools, or nonprofits won’t surrender their beliefs on marriage, the government will make it hurt. A lot.

Imagine what’s happening to Aaron and Melissa Klein (slapped with a $135,000 fine for their marriage views) occurring on a national scale through hijacked tax exemptions, Pell grants, loans, and other government contracts. If the Supreme Court finds invisible ink granting a “right” to same-sex “marriage” in the Constitution, it will be a declaration of war on principled objectors. Any nonprofit that holds to a natural definition of marriage — the same definition our own President held three years ago — would have a target on its back. (Or a bigger target, I should say.)

Is it really a stretch, given the IRS’s history of harassment and discrimination against conservatives, to think that it wouldn’t show a “smidgeon” of prejudice? This ruling would give the political operatives at one of the country’s most powerful agencies even more ammunition to punish opposition. Resistance — even principled, seemingly protected resistance — wouldn’t be tolerated. The IRS, which has been weaponized under this administration, will stop at nothing, including stripping tax exemptions, to force acceptance.

Recognizing the damage his admission could do, Verrilli tried to soften the blow by suggesting that “different states could strike different balances.” But if liberals won’t accept the long-held right of the states to regulate marriage, what makes anyone think they would accept it here? Besides, Justice Antonin Scalia fired back, “If you let the states do it, you can make an exception… You can’t do that once it is a constitutional proscription.” Carried to its logical conclusion, the government would be in a position of punishing any non-sanctioned views. This is about controlling beliefs and actions the government doesn’t agree with — which is not only a direct attack on our First Amendment freedoms, but an attack on what it means to be an American. This is what the Left has been searching for: a selective, surgical removal of the conservative voice.

And the disadvantaged, poor, needy populations the Left claims to care about would be the unintended victims. Under this brave new world of “progressive totalitarianism,” as Ed Whelan calls it, churches, Christian media, schools, or groups like FRC wouldn’t be the only ones suffering. People around the world served by Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, and countless others who depend on the generosity and efficiency of their programs would feel that pain. So much for love being love.

As horrifying as Verrilli’s revelation was, the Solicitor General might have done us a huge favor. No one has made a better case for Congress’s Marriage and Religious Freedom Act than the Obama administration just did. Under the bill that conservatives plan to reintroduce, it would be illegal for the government to discriminate against individuals, organizations, and small businesses who believe in natural marriage. The same institutions that Verrilli vows to hunt down — child welfare organizations, private schools, religious universities, relief providers, abstinence groups, military religious contractors, adoption agencies, and political nonprofits — would be spared the government’s crackdown.

If you like your religious liberty, you could keep it. A concept that Tuesday’s proceedings proved is more and more foreign.

Huckabee: SCOTUS ‘cannot overrule God’

By David McCabe

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The Supreme Court “cannot overrule God” on same-sex marriage, likely Republican 2016 presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Wednesday night. “I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that — the supreme of the courts. It is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God,” he said at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, according to CNN. “When it comes to prayer, when it comes to life, and when it comes to the sanctity of marriage, the court cannot change what God has created.”

His comments come just after the court heard oral arguments on the question of whether same-sex marriage bans around the country are unconstitutional.

Huckabee also made light of his inability to speak Spanish before the crowd. “I do not come to you tonight with the ability to speak Spanish. But I do speak a common language: I speak Jesus,” he said, according to CNN.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), another possible candidate, reportedly spoke Spanish during his own appearance at the event.

Huckabee, a former pastor, has long drawn political support from the evangelical community. Next week, he will reportedly make an announcement about whether he is running for president in 2016. If he runs, he will immediately find himself competing for the votes of Christian conservatives with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Other possible candidates, like former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), may also make an appeal to evangelical voters.

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Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy says definition of marriage has stood for ‘millennia’

By Khalil AlHajal MLive.com on April 28, 2015, updated April 28, 2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2015/04/supreme_court_justice_anthony.html

Plaintiffs from Michigan April Deboer, left, and Jayne Rowse wave to the crowd as they leave the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, April 28, 2015. The Supreme Court is set to hear historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land. The justices are meeting Tuesday to offer the first public indication of where they stand in the dispute over whether states can continue defining marriage as

Update: Supreme Court justices press gay rights lawyer early in highly anticipated marriage arguments

Plaintiffs and attorneys celebrate in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, April 28, 2015, as they exit the court following arguments. The Supreme Court heard historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land. The justices met Tuesday to offer the first public indication of where they stand in the dispute over whether states can continue defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman

DETROIT, MI — The Supreme Court justice seen by many as the deciding vote in the nation’s same-sex marriage debate made early comments during highly anticipated oral arguments Tuesday could cause worry among gay rights activists.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said that marriage has been understood as the union of one man and one woman for “millennia-plus time,” according to an Associated Press reporter in the courtroom.

“It’s very difficult for the court to say ‘We know better,'” Kennedy said during gay rights lawyer Mary Bonauto’s presentation of arguments.

The hearing was interrupted at one point by a protester.

Crowd cheers as plaintiffs leave the Supreme Court, in Washington, Tuesday, April 28, 2015. The Supreme Court heard historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land.

Five lawyers are expected to spend more than two hours presenting arguments.

Full audio from the session is expected to be released later this afternoon.

The court is considering two specific questions.

The first in relation to cases out of Michigan and Kentucky: “Does the 14th Amendment (equal protection) require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?”

And the second on gay marriage cases out of Tennessee and Ohio: “Does the 14th Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state?”

Michigan’s case stems from a 2012 lawsuit filed by a Hazel Park lesbian couple who can’t jointly adopt their four children without a legal marriage. April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse were in Washington for the arguments Tuesday. U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Dearborn) planned to host a reception for the couple after the hearings. Legal experts supporting the coupled planned to speak to reporters at 4 p.m.

Many will be listening for clues from Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts to gauge the direction of a ruling expected in June or July.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Supreme Court’

Reported By Benjamin Arie | September 23, 2018 at

5:26pm

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Reported By Randy DeSoto | September 14, 2018 at 11:16am

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Reported By Ben Marquis | August 8, 2018 at 1:31pm

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Commentary by Ann Coulter | Wednesday Jun 27,

2018 6:39 PM

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Commentary by Ann Coulter | Thursday Jun 7, 2018 8:29 AM

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Reported By Jack Davis | June 4, 2018 at 8:19am

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a Christian Colorado baker cannot be forced to make a cake for a same-sex marriage when the ceremony violates his religious principles.

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President Donald Trump’s travel ban executive order is once again to largely go back into effect after the Supreme Court of the United States stayed two lower courts’ injunctions Monday.

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Reported by Kevin Daley | Supreme Court Reporter | 3:12 PM 11/30/2017

The Trump administration switched sides Wednesday in a case pending before the Supreme Court that could retroactively nullify tens of thousands of agency decisions.

The Constitution requires that the president, the courts, or the head of an executive department appoint all “inferior officers” of the United States.

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Reported By V Saxena | on September 12, 2017 at 8:10am

A Christian baker from Colorado received an unexpected blessing from the administration of President Donald Trump last week when the Justice Department filed a brief on his behalf to the Supreme Court, which is slated to hear his religious liberty case upon returning to the bench next month.

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Reported by Ryan T. Anderson / @RyanTAnd / June 26, 2017 /

Today was a good day for religious freedom at the Supreme Court. In a 7-2 decision, the court upheld religious liberty by saying that a state cannot exclude a church from a public program just because it’s a church. That was the big case at the court.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ryan T. Anderson/ @RyanTAnd

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Authored By Lydia Wheeler – 03/06/17 09:41 AM EST

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Authored by Brendan Kirby | Updated 06 Feb 2017 at 9:23 AM

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August 9, 2016By the Common Constitutionalist

I wonder if now that the Obama administration has paid the ransom “we owed” the Iranian regime, whether it will set a precedent for others to put their hands out and demand, or at least request funds from the U.S. treasury?

The Hill reports that Mahmoud is back and may be considering another run for president next year.

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August 1, 2016 By the Common Constitutionalist

In other words, the Satan After School program is a fraud, which Greaves is purposely perpetrating on schools and has nothing whatsoever to do with religious liberty.

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Authored by Casey Harper / 06/06/2016

Donald Trump has taken heavy fire for saying the judge presiding over his Trump University lawsuit is biased because of his Mexican heritage, but Democrats have a long history of invoking race on judicial issues.

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Reported by Rob Bluey / @RobertBluey / May 12, 2016

Do you know the difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic? Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett wants to clear up any confusion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rob Bluey @RobertBluey

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by Breitbart News, 23 Feb 2016

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Posted by Ken McIntyre / @KenMac55 / February 13, 2016

“A law can be both economic folly and constitutional,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, pictured here at a Heritage Foundation event in October 2015, once said.

(Photo: Jeff Malet for The Daily Signal)

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Authored by Rusty — February 16, 2016

With liberals trying to portray Republicans as only opposing a Supreme Court nomination by Obama because they’re racist, we thought it important to remind readers of the many, many times, that the President has delayed policies or votes for political purposes.

10) Rangeling in Corrupt Politicians

9) General Delay-Us

8) Bush’s Fault

7) A New Date For The Mandate

6) Cuts Like a Knife

5) Coal Country Crush

Lurking quietly in the shadows, behind a wall of political rhetoric and campaign season hype, is a post-election surprise that could ring the death knell for the coal industry, killing massive amounts of jobs in states such as Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Reports are beginning to surface that the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to implement a slew of anti-coal regulations after the election, which will result in the elimination of nearly 900,000 jobs annually.

4) Pipeline to Nowhere

In the end however, more than five years since the controversy began, President Obama has shown his allegiance to environmental extremists, continuing to avoid commitment to a project that former President Bush described as a “no brainer.”

3) Enrollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’, Right Past Election Day

2) So Long, Solyndra Employees

Ultimately, the White House was successful in masking this story until voters had already cast their ballots, with the layoff announcement being made on November 3rd, one day after the midterms.

1) Mr. Flexibility

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Monday, February 15, 2016

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by Dan Riehl, 14 Feb 2016, Washington, DC

President Barack Obama and his progressives can grab control of the nation’s constitution if he gets to appoint a Supreme Court replacement for Antonin Scalia, says Ed Whelan, a former law clerk for Scalia.

Senate Republicans would be grossly irresponsible to allow President Obama, in the last months of his presidency, to cement a liberal majority that will wreak havoc on the Constitution. Let the people decide in November who will select the next justice.

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And then, to paraphrase the film “Idiocracy,” government will un-Nazi the world, forever.