Posted on 06/24/2013 8:30:51 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
ASHEVILLE With a potentially ground-breaking decision on gay marriage expected next week, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Friday morning that he and other judges should stop setting moral standards concerning homosexuality and other issues.
Why?
We aren’t qualified, Scalia said.
In a speech titled “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” the outspoken and conservative jurist told the N.C. Bar Association that constitutional law is threatened by a growing belief in the “judge moralist.” In that role, judges are bestowed with special expertise to determine right and wrong in such matters as abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, the death penalty and same-sex marriage.
“n that role, judges are bestowed with special expertise to determine right and wrong in such matters as abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, the death penalty and same-sex marriage.”
Or, they could just test the laws against the Constitution. The “moral arbiter” problem only arises, when you decide the Constitution is a “living document”.
OH im sure the phone tapping and IRS digging has found something on Roberts a long time ago. Hence his twisted Healthcare ruling in favor of the Obama debacle.
This is a bad omen. If Scalia is speaking about it now, then it means that is exactly what has happened with these rulings. Look for Prop 8 and DOMA thrown out and 5 judges ordering the country to marry anyone.
If parents were making sure that their children were being taught the Constitution and its history, particularly the Founding States’ division of federal and state government powers, then grade school students would probably be able to point out that the Constituton’s silence about marriage means that it is a 10A-protected state power issue.
As a side note to Supreme Court decisions, note that when state lawmakers actually understood the Constitution that they swear to protect and defend, they knew that they could effectively overturn a Supreme Court decision by ratifying an appropriate amendment to the Constitution. In fact, the 11th, 16th and 19th Amendments are examples of the states doing so.
Don't forget the 14th Amendment. It invalidated the Dred Scott decision, so that it never had to be re-visited [and overturned].
Except that Reynolds makes the exact opposite argument that per the common law, marriage is one man and one woman.
The common law pre-exists the constitution and the constitution doesn’t abrogate common law protections for Habeaus Corpus, trial by jury and traditional marriage.
The other problem is, suppose you are right?
What happens with spousal visas?
Marriage has always been a federal domain, not the purview of the states.
So, which word will they change the definition of next, to make some special interest group feel better about themselves?
Scalia may be telegraphing that SCOTUS passes [for now] on a gay marriage decision.
SCOTUS may decide that each state is allowed to set its rules for marriage. That being said, SCOTUS may invalidate DOMA due to the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause and the Full Faith and Credit Clause.
Then, in the other case, SCOTUS may decide that the concept of gay marriage is so new that it is too soon to rule on it. Given that only 12 of 50 states have adopted it.
Therefore, SCOTUS may vacate the 9th Circuit’s ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional [at least for now] - citing that each state can decide its own marriage rules. And that Prop 8 was constituionally approved by CA voters.
the founding fathers had no problems with it. sadly scalia is no longer one of us.
all law is morality. is it going to be yours, or is itgoing to be someone else’s moral worldview? that’s the ultimate question.
nope.
marriage has been regulated by the states, forever, long before fedgov existed. it’s why marriage laws vary by state.
My thoughts as well. On his time scale, this behavior has happened yet again, with the court siding with the homos.
What’s particularly telling is that, in the past, he’d openly label homosexual acts as immoral. For him to now say that the court is unqualified seems like an ever-so-slight shift in tact.
“Tie-breaker vote will of course be the blackmailed in-the-closet pole smoker worthless John Roberts.”
Roberts may vote with the majority. But Kennedy is the tie breaker. He wrote Lawrence v. Texas, which enshrined sodomy as a sacred constitutional right.
Of course the four libs will vote for gay marriage as a sacred consitutional right. But so too will Kennedy. Roberts may vote with the majority too. But he may be allowed to vote with the minority to restore his credentials with conservatives as there’s already a 5-4 majority for and has been for years. It just took the right case.
For some reason, a 6-3 decision seems even more nauseating than 5-4. To the casual, ignorant, swing-vote observer, that kind of margin in favor of faux marriage would probably look lopsided.. that, and I can see the media portraying the three dissenting justices as “extremists.”
I just wish that this would be over with already.
David Souter is back, and he’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme court.
America is dead and gone.
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