The Supreme Court - About to Play God Again?
Posted on 03/27/2013 6:09:11 PM PDT by Olog-hai
During oral arguments on Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court on a case testing the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Samuel Alito suggested that Congress could have used a more “neutral” term than marriage in the law the defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman for federal purposes.
“Congress could have achieved exactly what it achieved under Section 3 by excising the term ‘married’ from the United States Code and replacing it with something more neutral,” Alito said. “It could have said ‘certified domestic units,’ and then defined this in exactly the way that Section 3—exactly the way DOMA defines ‘marriage.’”
At issue is Section 3 of the law, under the definition of marriage: “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” …
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
and if you want to have a church union as a man and a woman, you call it marriage, but a marriage license would now be a certified domestic unit.
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And many churches will have a church union of one man and one man or one woman and one woman.
I think people are misinterpreting what Alito was getting at. The sodomites are arguing that DOMA regulates marriage, a power that they (surprise! Leftists are for state’s rights!) say belongs to the states. Alito was simply saying DOMA didn’t have to refer to a committed male-female sexual union as marriage. They could have called it virtually anything without changing the (heterosexual) definition, just like thousands of other federal statutes that define terms. Alito was basically making the point that defining terms is NOT the same thing as regulating what the term refers to. Note that the pro-sodomite lawyer disagreed with Alito’s characterization, and rightly so as it would have blown a whole through the “federal government is regulating marriage,” anti-DOMA argument.
Gay is the new way... Gaymerica!
Drat! It would have blown a HOLE through the anti-DOMA argument that the federal government is regulating marriage. I hate it when I do that in my haste to post!
No, they prefer torture. A nuking lets America off easy.
I can;t get past the fact that we are not talking about the wording and other questions about this.
This is not a complex issue and shuld have stopped at the first court room.
It;s been around for thousands of years, children do better with a mother and a father, why is this such a complex issue, have the western world gone completely nuts and lost their marbles, has common sense gone for eevr?
I’m so frigging frustrated about this, for my kids, for America, for those who will be sued over this and our side who never spoke on the issue or said lets reach out, as well as the communist left which infitilrated the Dem party
Won’t fly with Sodimites. They want the language. They think calling it marriage legitimizes their abomination. It doesn’t. All it does is cheapen the word.
people here don’t understand what the issue is.
if three fags, a chimp and a potted plant want to
say they are married, that is OK with me.
what I don’t want is the three fags claiming, tax bennies,
survivor bennies, immigration BS, etc.
Exactly! That’s why the sodomite lawyer disagreed with Alito’s characterization. The sodomites want they’re abnormal sex acts to be called “marriage,” but they aren’t simply out for tolerance. They mean to stamp out religious as well as natural law objections to what they do. Marriage is just a step in that direction, but it’s an essential step.
RockyTx: “what I don’t want is the three fags claiming, tax bennies, survivor bennies, immigration BS, etc.”
They want the benefits, but that’s not the end game. The end game is the destruction of freedom of religion, private property rights, and free speech. They see this as a civil rights issue, and civil rights trumps everything else. It happened, rightly so, during the civil rights era. You can be charged with a hate crime if you utter a hostile word to a protected minority, and you can be sued if you refuse business to a protected minority.
The sodomites will not be happy until all dissent is tossed out and reality is turned on its head. You see, we’re haters, but no matter how hard I try to believe 2 + 2 = 5, I still come up with 4. (1984)
“There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no new morality. There is only one morality...all else is immorality. There is only true Christian ethics over against which stand the whole of paganism”.... President Theodore Roosevelt
ARGH! Their, not they’re! I’m really messing up posts tonight.
Well, Paul Clement is actually the lawyer representing the House in defense of DOMA, not the pro-sodomite lawyer (to use your term), but I think you’re probably right about the point Alito was making.
SCOTUS is just screwing with Intrade.
I wish that they would look at the CAUSE of the original lawsuit. The woman had to pay a horrific tax on her “friend’s” estate when it was willed to her. WHY? Isn’t that discriminatory taxation? Because the money had already been taxed from the person who earned it, why is it taxed again ONLY for some people? Why does ANYONE have to pay tax on it?
The new-found respect for states’ rights is what really amazes me. Where did that come from? More importantly, where has it been for the last 70 years?
that brings up and interesting point.
cohabitating homsexuals, assuming doma is judicially relegislated, will have companies drop the partners from cohabitation benefits.
You’re right. It appears I misinterpreted the discussion. I think the justices often attempt to help their favored side during oral arguments. I’m not sure oral arguments change many (any?) minds on the court. It appears the justices use the oral arguments to refine and make a public case for their own positions. In this particular situation, Alito might have been trying to help the pro-marriage lawyer, Clement, to better make his point that the federal government is not regulating marriage.
DOMA does not prevent a state from saying a ham sandwich is a “marriage” and paying for whatever benefits it thinks the ham sandwich deserves (if it so chooses). In other words, DOMA does not regulate marriage or tell a state what it can or cannot do. All DOMA does is say the federal government defines marriage as a heterosexual union of one man and one woman only—for FEDERAL matters. That definition does not affect state law at all, nor does it violate equal rights. A male with homosexual attractions has as much right to marry a woman as any other male. They can even marry another male in a pro-sodomy state. They just won’t be treated as a married couple by the federal government. The federal government is not required to defer to state law.
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