By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger
“So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
-Gary North, “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right,” (Christianity and Civilization: The Failure of the American Baptist Culture, Number 1, Spring, 1982)
In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S 1 (1967), the Supreme Court held that Virginia’s prohibition of interracial marriage violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “The freedom to marry,” wrote Chief Justice Warren, “has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” 366 U.S. at 12. Many people were hoping that the Court would formally accord that status to same-sex marriage last month. But it did not happen. Edith Windsor will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax refunds from the federal government, but the Court did not find it necessary to address the issue of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, and elected not to do so. United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307 (June 26, 2013).
While that central constitutional issue remains unresolved, opponents of same-sex marriage are on the move. The Freedom Federation, a coalition of civil and religious right-wing organizations ranging from Americans for Prosperity to Wallbuilders, has issued a pre-emptive strike in the form of a signed letter declaring that “the Supreme Court has no authority to redefine marriage… .” The letter, which can be found on the Freedom Federation website, asserts that should the Court grant legal recognition to same-sex marriage, it “will be acting beyond its proper constitutional role,” and concludes with the vaguely ominous warning that “this is the line we must draw and one we cannot and will not cross.”
We have witnessed in recent years an increasing willingness by state legislatures to adopt nullification statutes, facially unconstitutional but politically potent. Now the religious right has determined to extend the nullification doctrine to the judicial branch, employing the language of religious freedom to hide a theocratic dominionist vision of government and society.
In 2004 and again in 2005, legislation known as the Constitution Restoration Act was introduced in both the House and the Senate. If adopted, the act would have stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to consider any case challenging the acknowledgment of God as a source of law by any federal, state or local governmental unit. The act would have also mandated impeachment for any violation. The legislation did not make it out of committee, but its intention was crystal clear: the rejection of the secularist notion of separation of church and state.
The drafting of the statute was largely the work of Herb Titus, a lawyer who served as the first dean of the law school at Regent University and who famously represented Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama jurist removed as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for his refusal to comply with a federal court order compelling the removal from the courthouse rotunda of a monument to the Ten Commandments.
The failure of the attempted legislative assault on established jurisprudence construing the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, combined with the pronounced hatred of the LBGT community by many religious fundamentalists, virtually guaranteed that something resembling the Freedom Federation letter would emerge when it did. The co-author of the letter is Mat Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University School of Law. In March of this year, Liberty Counsel welcomed the Florida Faith & Works Coalition to its member organizations. The Coalition represents approximately 600 conservative pastors engaged in promoting universal Christian dominionism. From its website: “Subduing and having dominion over all the earth commands responsibility over the entire animate and inanimate world including the moral values that form the basis of society. We affirm that, historically, America was established as a Christian nation and its policies were based on biblical principles. The guardian of those biblical principles has always been His church. And His church, in recent history, has passively abdicated its guardianship responsibility.”
The arguments in the Freedom Federation letter are boldly theocratic. First, it is urged that marriage solely between a man and a woman is mandated by “natural moral law,” a product of reason. But it approaches natural law in the same manner that Justice Scalia approaches the Constitution, as a rigid and dead body of law. (It also fails to identity which system or systems of natural law it endorses, but that’s another topic.) The truth is that our understanding of natural law theory and of the Constitution have evolved precisely because reason evolves as it is informed by knowledge and experience.
The letter next asserts that natural moral law is “affirmed, fulfilled, and elevated by Christian teaching,” thus adding the biblical foundation for the treatment of marriage between a man and a woman as divinely ordained and not subject to expansion or modification by positive law. This is not only an argument against a secular view of marriage; in accordance with dominionist theology, it is also a rejection of religious pluralism.
Finally, the letter claims that same-sex marriage, once legitimized, will inevitably lead to its compulsory recognition by Christians, thereby undermining freedom of religion and conscience. This position is demonstrably absurd, of course, since no religious sect has ever been compelled to grant sacramental status to any marital union that conflicts with its own doctrinal requirements. And in the eyes of the law, no marriage has ever required religious approval as a condition of legitimacy.
Fundamentalist Christians must recognize by now that they are losing the battle against the ultimate acceptance of same-sex marriage. But they are also patient and vigilant. The Freedom Federation letter is a reminder that the preservation of secular government and religious freedom will also require patience and vigilance.
DavidM: The grip of homosexuality becomes so ingrained once that path is taken, people feel enslaved by it and unable to escape.
Homosexuality does not become ingrained, it IS ingrained. It is not a path “taken,” it is a path one is born upon. People are “unable to escape” because it is a physical characteristic of their brain and physiology; as much as their skin color or eye color or height.
There is a TON of physical evidence that homosexuality (and heterosexuality) is determined in the womb; more specifically the gender that is found sexually arousing to an individual is determined in the womb. What makes the homosexual experience unhappy, when it is, is cultural discrimination against it, it is authoritarians decided it is “bad” or “wrong” or “unnatural” when it is a born condition, it is the ostracization by ignorant bigots for no valid reason that makes homosexuals feel defective and devalued and condemned as human beings over feelings of arousal they do not control (even if they can refrain from acting upon them).
Homosexuality does not make people unhappy, homophobes and pointless hateful bigotry make people unhappy.
David,
Your brand on life and your type of Christianity leaves me wondering if you have a moral conscience…. But, that’s not for me to judge…. I just stay awa from people with your morals…..
Correction: I meant by “definition 3,” I left out 2) because it did not apply here.
Arthur: Gays are not discriminated against in marriage laws since literally millions are married to persons of the opposite sex.
I will ignore the spurious number “millions.”
Since you apparently need a remedial language lesson:
Discrimination:
1) a distinction; discernment, the act of discriminating, discerning, distinguishing, noting or perceiving differences between things.
3) (sometimes discrimination against) distinct treatment of an individual or group to their disadvantage; treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality; prejudice; bigotry.
Gays are discriminated against by the fact that marriage is defined as only one of the three possible gender combinations; Male+Female. Male+Male and Female+Female are, by definition 1, “discerned” and “perceived as different” and are disallowed.
By Definition 2, this results in “distinct treatment” for a class of people, namely those that identify as homosexual, to their disadvantage: Unlike heterosexuals, homosexuals are prohibited from marrying the person with whom they are mutually in love.
Language doesn’t get you out of this; the definitions and logic cannot be changed; defining marriage as heterosexual discriminates against homosexuals.
A right to anything is meaningless if it cannot be effectively exercised in any way desired. A right to “keep and bear arms” would be meaningless if we made it illegal to load them or fire them under any circumstances; your right to free speech is meaningless if you are only allowed to exercise it within a cordoned off area at the edge of town.
As you have pointed out, homosexuals already have the right to marry, but the restriction that it must be heterosexual makes that right meaningless to them. Anybody’s right to marry is meaningless if the government prohibits them from marrying the (willing, consenting, adult) person that they romantically love.
It is not the government’s job to enforce what you or anybody else thinks is “natural” or “good for us.” I know, they have overstepped their bounds on that principle many times, always to our detriment, but it isn’t their job, and previous failures are not an excuse to continue committing failures. They are bound to treat us all equally, and “freedom” means the right to choose as you will as long as your choice doesn’t violate the rights of others.
There is no violation of heterosexual rights if homosexuals marry. The law of symmetry applies here: Homosexuals marrying would not be a violation of any heterosexual rights any more than the reverse is true: If heterosexual marriage is a violation of homosexual rights, then heterosexual marriage must end!
Thus as clearly as heterosexual marriage is harmless to homosexuals, homosexual marriage is harmless to heterosexuals, married or not, and therefore there is no good reason to discriminate on the gender pairing at all.
Tony: Thank you for reclaiming the topic from those hijackers and for making cogent arguments based on law, facts and reason.
I flew out of Yreka, CA and Mount Shasta and got my rating there. I did a lot of towing in the C-182 and instructing in the other aircraft. It was pilot heaven for me, and if my real job paid more and would have let me burn JetA, I would probably still be there. I never got a chance to fly Minden but heard lots about it of course.
When we talk about Bob Hoover not getting airshow bookings, it was insurance that killed that. After he got his ticket back, he was a marked man when it came to getting airshow liability insurance. Bureaucrats again. The FAA guy who released those internal FAA emails from the two trolls who jerked his ticket, clearly showing it was a conspiracy against Bob, suffered the same fate as almost everyone who has tried to do the right thing. That investigator for the prosecutor’s office in the Zimmerman case is just the latest casualty of that.
I am not current, but would not take much to get recurrent. Joke is glider pilots fly IFR (I Follow Rope). There are several mountains here over six thousand feet, including Mt. Mitchell. This video is a time lapse of the lenticular clouds marking the Mt. Mitchell wave. The wave off Mt. Mitchell will not take you as high as Pike’s Peak or Minden, but still high enough to need oxygen. I got my gold altitude and first Lennie pin on the Pike’s Peak wave.
I remember what happened when the Aussie medical chief resigned because the head of the Aussie CAA was an FAA transplant trying to force him to revoke Hoover’s medical there. I would guess that the American fool lost his job, but I never heard any facts on that. I know that the American did that at the request of his buddies back at the FAA. So this is international in scope.
So far most of the dealing I have had with the FAA have been pretty good and I had two friends of mine who worked for the FAA. They were really good folks and fair and knew and did their jobs well. So I have to give the Feds good marks for the most part. There have been real a**holes I have run into as well who were incredibly ignorant about the regs and were miserable people too. So they exist in all spheres of life and work and will always be crooks, liars, and miserable people. I hope that you can do something about the fools you have run into.
OS
you can always strap on a couple of JATO bottles for insurance. (for the glider, not the ultralight)
Yep, I know Hoover. He is a truly interesting and charming guy–a true southern gentleman. I have the case file on his case. I guess that is about all I can say about that.
I can do the LSA thing, but am thinking about flying gliders again. I refuse to try to fly an ultralight. I don’t think I want to fly an airplane that weighs less than I do.
I love seeing Hoover fly his airshows. He is without question one of the best pilots ever and I read his book too. It is too bad he stopped doing the shows, but I guess that all good things must end sooner or later. The sad thing is that other folks won’t get to see him in the flesh.
I too have my glider rating, but I haven’t had the time or money to do any.recenty. Maybe when I really retire I will do it again. Though Houston is not the best place in the world for it, but your place should be pretty good up in those mountains.
Randyjet,
I have been against the age 60 law since I first heard of it years ago. There is no empirical evidence to show that one magically becomes incompetent at midnight on your birthday. A good friend of mine was somewhere over the mid-west on a coast-to-coast flight. At midnight, he got a call from ATC informing him he was cleared to destination, but if he had to land for any reason before that, he was grounded.
I gave up on my last medical renewal when the FAA medical examiner demanded another six thousand dollars worth of tests, identical to the same tests done 13 months previously, and that were done two years before that. All with perfectly normal results. My insurance will only stand for so much, and short of a life-threatening emergency, won’t pay.
So yep, I am sensitive to arbitrary rules and regulations that cannot be justified on any rational or scientifically empirical basis.
I am sorry to hear about that medical stuff. You can still fly sport planes though. Did you hear what they did to Bob Hoover? That was truly incredible and it least it got one FAA guy who went to Australia fired for trying to “fix” Hoover’s Aussie medical.
After they made most commuter airlines part 121, they had to grandfather in a lot of over 60 pilots and not one of them had any problems. In fact one guy flew to age 72 when they finally ended the grandfathering. I hope that we have better luck than we have had so far. To say that I hate ALPA is an understatement, and it looks like they will soon be history with all the suits and liablities they have incurred from their illegal shenanigans. It is only too bad we could not get them to act like a real union before they did us in.
OS Just a point that I was corrected rather hard when I said that Prof. Turley was filing suit in favor of plural marriage. In fact, it was to fight against the co-habitation laws that go after polygamous families. Big difference.
The state has the right to create marriage laws defining what marriage is. As long as it is open to all, there is no discrimination since gays can and DO marry under those laws.
I and many other older pilots are in a suit against the government and ALPA because of age discrimination. The law declared that any person over 60 had to lose their jobs flying aircraft in part 121 operations. The law was changed to allow us to fly to age 65, but if you turned age 60 before the law was passed, you still lost your job and could not return to your previous job. So far all the courts have said that discrimination against us is within the govenments right and that we are not discriminated against or have lost any property rights. In my case, it is even more egregious since I STILL had a job and was on a leave of abscense until the law was changed. When it was changed, I was taken off the seniority list and forcibly “retired” because Congress declared that was the way it was going to be. Tough!
Most of us are older white males and Vietnam veterans, so I guess that they figure that we don’t count for much and can piss on us. I think that is a bit more of a case of discrimination since it applies to people in the same class and category being denied their rights and property on the basis of their birthday and their position prior to signing the law.
Randyjet,
Note that I referred to rules that involve everyone. It is true there are limitations, but those rules must apply to all unions. The way things are set up now, legally competent people who could enter a straight marriage, are not allowed to marry if they are both the same gender. That creates a class of second-class citizens, and violates the equal protection clause.
No couple should have to leave the country in order to be married. If any couple wants to live in Idaho or Alabama, the rules for marriage should be the same for everyone. As for plural marriages, if you recall, our distinguished host has acted as counsel in behalf of plural families. Not my cup of tea, but whatever works for those folks in their religious belief system is really none of my business as long as what they do does not infringe on any of my own Constitutional or other legal rights.
Hey guys, I am in favor of straight male-female marriage. Wouldn’t have it any other way……for myself. I could give a….fig (I cleaned that one up quick) what marriage arrangements you or anyone else desires. What I do NOT want is to tell somebody else who they can marry if they meet all the ordinary legal requirements for marriage that apply to everyone. It is none of my damn business. Or anyone else’s.
It was not so long ago that a black person attempting to marry a white person could get them arrested or even killed. Even now, not being able to get married can cause a life partner to be deported, or to have family they have been estranged from for most of their life tell the surviving partner they cannot see them in Hospice or attend the funeral.
If you feel the need to protest you are not a bigot, it is time to look inward to see what made you feel compelled to say that.
Sorry OS you DO tell people who they can marry right now. You cannot marry a close relative, a mentally incompetent person, an underage person, and that they can only have ONE partner in a legal marriage. So I guess that you need to look at your bigotry towards Mormons, Muslims, and others, yes?
My objection is to say that Loving mandates same sex marriage which it clearly does not under any stretch of the legal canon. The SCOTUS simply observed that if you have marriage of one man/one woman, you cannot discriminate on the basis of race for that kind of union, per the 14th amendment. Warren was a good enough jurist to know that in such major case as Brown vs Topeka, he had to have a unanimous court to carry the ruling forward and gain acceptance of it. He was wise enough to know that split or very narrow decisions would subvert the legitiamcy of the rulings. Unfortunately, the proponents of judicial fiat gay marriage do not have the basis or wisdom to follow Warren’s lead.
Now if a state wishes to take on the tasks and costs of legalizing gay marriage, I have no major problem with that if the legislature passes it as New York did.I do not see that we need that kind of law and so support civil unions. That is New Yorks right, as is their right to legalize plural marriages. Will you support the rights of Muslims and some Mormons to have more than one wife under our laws? If you do not you then tell others who they may or may not marry.
The problems you cite can be addressed in many ways, and it is outright false that people cannot be with their partners since they can do that if they wish to do it on a spot basis. The US no longer requires permission to visit most countries other than Cuba. So they can be with who they wish. To my knowledge there has never been any state laws restricting who may visit patients in hospitals.
David,
Suck on this… Hip hoppers are known for violence and nasty mouths…. Etc… But listen to the video about where your brand of tolerance has led some to commit
suicide….
http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/26/meet-the-rapper-who-says-gay-love-is-same-love/
Anon – I appreciate the link, but we should not assume that a 13 year old committed suicide because of a society unaccepting of homosexuality, or even because of strictly bullying at school. Clearly other young teens have committed suicide over their heterosexuality or teasing for other reasons. Even if it was because of bullying, how can anyone be sure that counseling a 13 year old along the lines of how to deal with homosexual urges, or any sexual urges for that matter, that would lead the person away from pursuing a homosexual lifestyle. In my opinion, a 13 year old has no reason at all to deal with his sexuality other than to recognize that sex is something for later in life and that his focus should not be upon romantic encounters with others but rather with doing well in school and learning how to be responsible.
I remember one young man in college who professed to being a homosexual, yet he had never had any kind of sex yet. I begged him to be careful about his decisions regarding sexuality because one decision leads to another, and there is clearly a fork in the road for him. He had tremendous pressure from the university to identify himself as homosexual. I beseeched him with tears, telling him that homosexuals have higher rates of depression and suicide. While society is adamant that lack of societal acceptance is the reason for that, it is much more likely that the lifestyle is not processed internally the same way that opposite sex unions are. Whether the words natural or unnatural are used, or simply that one’s conscience becomes damaged by it, or however else you want to understand it, there is an issue involved that may not simply be externally caused by the perspective of others. Society pressuring people to enter into the homosexual lifestyle simply because they feel more comfortable with people of the same sex or feel sexual urges toward people of the same sex may actually be leading them toward a very unhappy life. The politically correct assumption is that people should follow a path wherever their sexual urges lead them, whether heterosexual or homosexual. Why is it taboo to question this assumption?
There was another man in college to whom I was very close. He came to me one day very distraught. He was reluctant to tell me what was going on, but he finally did. He was an extremely attractive man and very personable. All the girls loved him, but so did the guys. Well, he got involved with some homosexual men and it led him down a path that was destroying him. Crying, he told me he had to get away from these other men. He needed me to give him money so he could drop out of school and go away, away from the homosexual lifestyle to start over. He said he was trapped and could not get out of it without leaving.
I can tell you many stories like these from personal experience where homosexuality greatly damaged people, almost beyond repair. The grip of homosexuality becomes so ingrained once that path is taken, people feel enslaved by it and unable to escape. These are the reasons that I have worked hard to try to understand it and to articulate an intellectual understanding that would lead people, especially young people, along the right path in life. It grieves me how so many today just deal with it as an issue of, “oh, so you want to live this way… okay, I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me, so go ahead.” It further grieves me that society is teaching that if somebody has a different view from this libertarian mindset, then they are hate-filled homophobes who do not care about homosexuals.
DavidM: The homosexual agenda has hijacked the civil rights movement and confused people into thinking that same sex unions are equivalent to opposite sex unions and should therefore be treated the same.
Obviously their “agenda” is to be treated the same, and not discriminated against in the law.
They have fooled people into thinking that only a religious person would be against it, or a bigot or a homophobe.
By which you mean they have opened people’s eyes into seeing that only religion or bigotry or homophobia can explain why people would be so selfish to deny them marriage, when their marriage does not get them any rights, benefits or protections that heterosexuals don’t already enjoy. Refusing to let others have the same rights, benefits and protections as yourself is by its nature oppressive.
DavidM: The truth of this is rarely questioned.
Because it makes common sense, and people seldom question the truth of things they think are obviously true.
DavidM: It is trusted without evidence by most.
No it isn’t. They have the evidence of their eyes. Now that homosexuals have been afforded greater physical protection for some decades and are increasingly able to be open about their sexuality, and suffer primarily insults and vitriol from the haters, more people have been exposed to homosexuality and are aware it is not about the caricatures of pre-1980 or so.
The evidence is all around them, their neighbors and co-workers and in their own family, or the families of their friends. The closet door is open and the “monsters” turned out to be normal people and responsible citizens, parents, and teachers, with no “agenda” except escaping oppression in the workplace and society and achieving equality before the law.
They don’t question the evidence, not because they are fooled, but because they are living beside it and do not doubt their own eyes and ears just because homophobes like you tell them they should.
Gays are not discriminated against in marriage laws since literally millions are married to persons of the opposite sex. Now if the marriage laws established a test for gay/straightness that refused to allow a gay person to marry a person of the opposite sex, THEN that would be impermissable dscrimination and the state would have to prove some governmental interest in doing so on a rational means test. Marriage laws are simply set by the state to define what marriage is. If they wish to allow for same sex marriage fine,but because you do not like the definition of marriage does NOT make it discrimination.
I was single for many years, and as a result I had to pay more income taxes compared to my married co-workers. Was that impermissable discrimination? I do not think so. Does that constitute hatred towards single persons? I doubt it. The draft at one point exempted married men, so I suppose one could say that it really discriminated and really killed a lot of single guys at a FAR higher rate than married men. At least the MA Supreme Court decision allowed that it was discrimination, but a good one. So it considered single straight men lesser beings as long as the state needed them to die for us. That is a LOT worse treatment than not being able to marry a person of the same sex.
Arthur, thank you for your voice of reason and some interesting concepts to think about.
david, I am sorry that I alternate between names it is unintentional since I don’t look carefully at the name on the heading and the computer decides I guess.
I can understand the position of the libertarians supporting gay marriage since it is consistent with their philosophy of getting rid of government as much as possible and that the citizens have little or no obligations to the governmet. The liberal position is that it gays are nice people and they should get the same things as the rest of us. That neglects and capitulates to the libertarian philosoply that you can do whatever you wish and to hell with society and its needs and rights. My position is that we have an obligation to society as citizens, and society, the government specifically has obligations to us on a broad range of issues beyond keeping our borders safe and secure and securing our property rights.
I have always been amazed that the anti-gay marriage folks cannot advance any argument beyond their religious ones since as I have shown there are plenty of them. Of course, I can understand why they do that since they hate the idea that the government should do anything more than keep an Army and enforce their “morals” on the rest of us. Maybe you can pass these ideas on and let them start thinking outside of their religious boxes.
davidm2575, Everything you said about marriage below the link could be said (and probably was in substance) about slavery. The real shame is that universal civil rights is an idea that is so late-coming to us, but I’m glad it’s gaining traction.
lottakatz wrote: “Everything you said about marriage below the link could be said (and probably was in substance) about slavery.”
My statement started along the lines of: “… it is a rational legal response to a runaway secular court system which attempts to usurp the power of the legislature and create laws on its own, bypassing the democratic process.”
I’m not sure how you can suggest that I am advocating like those who advocated slavery. The court system sided with slavery. Remember the Dred Scott decision? It was their tyranny to preserve slavery that caused many to go to war. The Republican party was created in order to end slavery, to fight against the Democrat slave owners who were using the court system to force their perspective upon everyone. If it were not for the Republicans and the church pulpits preaching against slavery, we would probably still have it today.
The homosexual agenda has hijacked the civil rights movement and confused people into thinking that same sex unions are equivalent to opposite sex unions and should therefore be treated the same. They have fooled people into thinking that only a religious person would be against it, or a bigot or a homophobe. The truth of this is rarely questioned. It is trusted without evidence by most. Unfortunately, such philosophy ignores rational thought about exactly what marriage is in relation to the biology and order of nature, of mankind coming into this world as either male or female. It ignores the role of marriage in responsible reproduction, and the reasons that the State has taken an interest in encouraging marriage as the creation of a responsible family structure into which new human beings will be born. So they have turned the law upside down, making the responsible thinkers like me out to be irrational homophobes and bigots. Recently, the courts have moved toward legitimizing and legalizing a hatred and discrimination against me and those who think like I do. Now laws are being made so as to prosecute those who have a different opinion, to prosecute those who object to defining marriage in a more broad and vague way so as to lump same sex unions in with opposite sex unions.
Bravo OS!
Thank you OS….
davidm sez: ” You do not realize how shocking some of the posts made here are to those who have a different worldview.”
**************************************
David, you do not realize how shocking some of the posts you make here are to us who have a different worldview.
Everyone should be free to practice his religion, so long as he doesn’t attempt to practice it on me.
David,
Do you really believe what you write? I’m curious, or do you say things like that for shock value? Either way…. It must be difficult for you to associate much outside the people that think like you…. You know… We are all chosen in some way…. Yours, I think is to make sure people are firm in their own head before trying to interact with such tripe…..l
Anon – The perspective that I have shared is not shocking to many, probably not to half the country or more. I suspect that you, like many here, live in a bubble of society, associating only with elitists who think the same way that you do. You do not realize how shocking some of the posts made here are to those who have a different worldview.