Free Republic

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government does not have to release 11-year-old photographs from the suicide of Clinton administration White House lawyer Vincent Foster.</p> <p>The unanimous decision makes it more difficult to use a public records law to access law enforcement records. Justices said the privacy rights of survivors outweigh the benefits of releasing some photographs.</p>

SALT LAKE CITY — A leading civil rights attorney prepared Monday to file a federal lawsuit challenging Utah’s ban on polygamy, citing the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas sodomy law. The suit says Salt Lake County clerks refused a marriage license to plaintiffs G. Lee Cook, an adult male, and J. Bronson, an adult female, because Cook was already married to D. Cook. That woman had given her consent to the additional marriage. In denying the marriage license, the county violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment right to practice their religion, attorney Brian Barnard says in...

Court Allows Arrests of All in Drug Stops WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court issued a traffic warning Monday: Beware of whom you ride with. If drugs are found in a vehicle, all occupants can be arrested, the justices said in a unanimous decision. It was a victory for Maryland and 20 other states that argued police frequently find drugs in traffic stops but no one in the vehicle claims them. The court gave officers the go-ahead to arrest everyone. In a small space like a car, an officer could reasonably infer "a common enterprise" among a driver and passengers,...

Sad day for freedomMona Charen (archive) December 12, 2003 | Print | Send On Dec. 10, 2003, freedom took two body blows. The first was the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to permit the limitation of political speech. This is not exotic dancing or flag burning. This is "Vote for Sam Smith" -- the beating heart of our democracy. The Supreme Court has just tied a gag around our mouths, and most of the intellectual class is delighted. Apologists obscure the crude reality of this repression by calling it "campaign finance reform." Well, you can call...

<p>Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cut to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.</p>

Supreme Court whitewash? Posted: December 11, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com The Associated Press story covering the Supreme Court hearing on requested release of Vincent Foster crime-scene photos read as follows: "Five government investigations concluded that White House attorney Vincent Foster's death in 1993 was a suicide." Not true. There haven't been five government investigations. In fact, there hasn't been even one real government investigation. Instead, there have been five cover-ups, all using the same tainted evidence and the same tainted investigators. Attorney Allan Favish believes the public may learn something from 10 unreleased police photos of Foster and has taken...

[Reading from an Associated Press wire story:] "A sharply divided..." There's nothing "sharply divided" about this. We got four liberals and we got two Republicans who read the editorial pages - or two conservatives who read the editorial pages - on the Supreme Court. Let me just stick with the details here, and then I will ad-lib my commentary and analysis after presenting to you the facts. "A sharply divided Supreme Court upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling today that the government may ban unlimited donations to political...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution Wednesday of a condemned inmate who was part of a lawsuit that challenged one of the drugs used to carry out the death sentence. Kevin Lee Zimmerman won his reprieve about 20 minutes before he could have been put to death for a fatal stabbing and robbery at a Beaumont motel in 1987. In a brief order, Justice Antonin Scalia stopped the punishment pending an additional order from him or the court. ``I'm disappointed,'' Zimmerman told a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman, Michelle Lyons. ``I was ready to...

In a tragic decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that jeopardizes a cardinal principle of the U.S. Constitution: free speech. Concerned Women for America's Chief Counsel Jan LaRue noted that the decision means less protection for political speech, the very speech the First Amendment aims to shield, than for pornography. The following article comes to us from the James Madison Center for Free Speech of Washington, D.C. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution mandates that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Today the United States Supreme Court has...

<p>WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court (search) upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling Wednesday that the government may ban unlimited donations to political parties.</p> <p>Those donations, called "soft money," had become a mainstay of modern political campaigns, used to rally voters to the polls and to pay for sharply worded television ads.</p>

The first killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going. The nation embarked on...

<p>A Utah man with five wives is in court fighting to get his bigamy conviction overturned on the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that decriminalized homosexual relations.</p> <p>The legal action by polygamist Tom Green in the Utah Supreme Court seems to confirm predictions of a Republican lawmaker and other social conservatives who warned that the high court's decision would open the door to attempts to legalize other sexual activities that historically have been outlawed by states, such as bigamy, polygamy, prostitution, adult incest and even bestiality.</p>

Think back: How long ago would you have scoffed at the idea of two men getting married? Or the Supreme Court endorsing sodomy? Or "domestic partners" enjoying the same rights and benefits as married couples? Or network television featuring shows with gays and lesbians? Or companies such as Avis announcing, "Domestic partners are automatically included as additional drivers. No extra fees charged. No questions asked." Or even that you would take the term "sexual rights" seriously? It wasn't that long ago. The forces for perversion have subjected us to a propaganda campaign of such intensity that most Americans have surrendered...

TORONTO - Garfield Dunlop is busy on the hustings, giving the same spiel at every door in his suburban Ontario district. "I've got some literature here on same-sex marriage," says the avuncular politician, pressing a pamphlet into the palm of a white-haired woman who smiles and motions him into her home. "It's a sin," he continues, climbing into the foyer. "And it could tear apart the fabric of our society." For a man in for the political fight of his life, an incumbent running for a seat in the provincial parliament, Mr. Dunlop's rhetoric could read like a death wish....

-snip- Judge Roy Moore, the publicity-seeker who put the 2.5-ton Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse, declared Monday that he could disobey the direct order of a federal judge because "judges do not make laws, they interpret them." Since, Moore continued, an interpretation can be wrong, therefore he may defy a judicial order. So presumably Judge Moore also thinks that if he sentences a man to prison, the man can declare that the interpretation might be wrong and walk free? It's exactly the same logic. Moore further said that the First Amendment precept, "Congress shall make no law respecting...

Left-wing "comedian" Al Franken got tripped up by some big fat lies this week. He's sorry he got caught, but smugly silent about making fun of countless American kids who have taken abstinence vows.Thanks to Court TV's Smoking Gun Web site (www.thesmokinggun.com), we now know that the Saturday Night Live leftover abused his position as an "academic fellow" (now that's funny) at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in a puerile attempt to trick Attorney General John Ashcroft into publicly sharing his personal experience with abstinence.Franken urged Ashcroft to share...

When an Oak Creek woman found her 14-year-old daughter nude in the woman's bed with a 14-year-old boy, the teens didn't strike her as being overly concerned. "They both freely admitted that their intention was to 'have sex,' " records quote the woman as saying. They "were confrontational and remorseless." The teens even "challenged" the woman to call police. So she did. Now, the couple's would-be sexual encounter in October has both of them facing serious criminal charges. Their case takes a course through the intersection of morals and law, a bustling crossroads at a time when sexuality has become...

The news that five members of the Supreme Court were winging their way over to Italy on the heels of the decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy law seemed somehow appropriate. Some of the flying judges were no doubt there to discuss their newly proposed constitution -- given as the official reason for the junket. But two or three of them must have at least contemplated communing with European elitists on how they ought to vote on upcoming cases here. After all, in the Texas case they had for the first time in a majority opinion cited European public opinion, decisions...

Back Door to History Thank J.R. Quinn for the gay celebrations Gay rights supporters hailed the U.S. Supreme Court's June 26 decision in Lawrence v. Texas as a watershed that will forever change gay and lesbian life in America. Many of the players in the drama have gotten their 15 minutes of fame, from the eagerly sound-biting lawyers to the publicity-shy defendants. But what about Harris County Sheriff's Deputy J.R. Quinn? He's the Frank Wills of this new day for gays ('70s trivia time: Wills was the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in). In 1998 Quinn arrested John Lawrence...

<p>WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's reference to foreign law in a ruling last month that overturned state anti-sodomy statutes stood out as if it were in bold print and capital letters.</p> <p>Writing for the majority in a landmark decision supporting gay civil rights, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that the European Court of Human Rights and other foreign courts have affirmed the ''rights of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct.''</p>