Wingnut Judson Phillips Demands States Violate the Constitution and Nullify Federal Laws!
A person going by the name of Judson Phillips recently wrote a piece called “America in the era after liberty” for the blog “Tea Party Nation.” As you can imagine its just chock full of stupid.
America has entered the era after liberty. There is simply no other way to describe what transpired in the last week.
Let me guess, does this have something to do with the recent Obergefell v. Hodges supreme court ruling that struck down laws banning gay marriage across the land? You guys just hate gays don’t you? How about Obamacare? Does your anger have anything to do with that? You really can’t stand poor people being able to afford health care, can you? You can’t stand the fact that our new “socialized” healthcare is actually working? can you?
In the space of a week, the Supreme Court for the second time in three years completely ignored precedent and the law to rewrite Obamacare and save it. The same week, the Supreme Court set aside two hundred years of precedent to decide the Constitution really did have a right to homosexual marriage. For well over two hundred years, the Federal Courts have always regarded marriage as an issue for the states. Yet in one horribly written decision, suddenly marriage now is taken away from the states to be resolved in Federal Courts.
I knew it! I guessed right on both accounts! Do I win a prize?
In that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the discoverer of this heretofore-unknown right made a point of telling everyone that this new constitutional right would not interfere with the right to believe.
And Kennedy is absolutely correct, it won’t interfere with anyone’s right to believe anything. The federal government isn’t going to take away your first amendment rights to say homophobic things, or believe that God disapproves of homosexuality.
The problem is, this newly discovered right conflicts with a right that is specifically guaranteed in the Constitution.
And what “right” would that be exactly? Your right to treat people who live their lives in manner that you don’t like as scum? Sorry that isn’t mentioned in the constitution, unless of course the constitution you’re talking about isn’t the American constitution. Maybe that’s a major part of Wingnut Land’s constitution, Mr. Phillips but its nowhere to be found in any of our founding documents.
It is not the right to believe, but the right to the free exercise of religion.
No anti gay pastors can still refuse to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples. We still don’t force racist pastors to perform mixed race weddings, why should we think that the federal government is going to make homophobic churches carry out gay weddings? Its probate judges who won’t be able to refuse without losing their jobs. That’s hardly a violation of “religious liberty.” Government officials can’t pick and choose which parts of their job they will and will not do, regardless of their religion. Besides that court has ruled that the fourteenth amendment protects the rights of gay people to marry, every bit as much as it protects the rights of interracial couples to marry, regardless of how bigoted people like you feel about it. The fact that government officials won’t be able to discriminate against gay couples wanting to marry hardly represents tyranny.
Justice Antonin Scalia blasted the majority in his dissent warning that a nation that trusted its fate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers was not worth being called a democracy.
Sorry Justice Antonin Scalia’s argument for the constitutionality of same sex marriage bans is a joke. The same is true for every other argument homophobes put forth to justify them.
In the same session that produced those well known legal abominations, there were other, lesser known attacks on the Constitution. In City of Los Angeles v. Patel, Justice Sonia Sotomayor again discovered the Constitution was a problem and her job was to suggest ways around it. In this case, the Court rightly declared unconstitutional a statute that allowed police officers in the city of Los Angeles to inspect the guest register of any hotel, at any time, without any probable cause. While Sotomayor noted the necessity for a search warrant to obtain this information, she helpfully suggested that instead of requiring a judge to sign such search warrants, instead that task could be relegated to bureaucrats who would simply rubber stamp those applications.
I had to look this one up, since it apparently wasn’t covered that much. Los Angeles v. Patel wasn’t all over the news, unlike the recent gay marriage ruling. Although I’m not sure if I agree with their decision, rest assured, it isn’t anywhere near the threat to our liberty that Phillips makes it out to be. Off course this is a guy that thinks that not allowing states to keep people of the same gender from marrying is “a threat to our liberty”
The decisions and more prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the era of liberty in America is over. The Constitution no longer means anything other than what a majority of a committee of nine unelected lawyers says it means.
Yes the era of liberty is over because we can’t stop marriage equality. Why that’s such a threat to our liberty, even through the amount of freedom people now have in America, has actually increased.
For America it is a tragic day. What does the future hold for this nation?
I would say it looks like America could have a very bright future ahead of it, especially since marriage equality isn’t going to bring about the persecution of Christians so many wingnuts like you are terrified of. This is hardly a sign of the end times. Its a good thing, that same sex marriages will have equal status to heterosexual marriages under the law now. The only things Obergefell v. Hodges are a sign of, is how America is getting more tolerant and enlightened and how people like you are losing their power to force their “morality” on everyone else.
The Supreme Court has federalized marriage. Marriage is one of the powers that has exclusively been reserved for the states.
Wait, by your logic, didn’t Loving V Virginia already “federalize marriage?” Didn’t ruling that states can’t stop the “race mixers” from getting wed already do that? I mean the courts have already taken away the “rights” of the states to regulate marriage anyway they see fit long before this.
In an era that features the collection of excessive power in Washington, the future does not look good for freedom.
Well it doesn’t look good at the moment for your freedom to treat gay people as scum.
The federal government is a creation of the states. America’s founding fathers wanted the real power in government to be as close to the people as possible. They wanted that power to reside in the states.
The founding fathers never wanted states to be able to defy the constitution, and the supreme court has been striking down federal and state laws since Marbury v. Madison, over two hundred years ago.
Today the states are but empty shells of their former selves.
They have ceded their power to the federal government in Washington
The states did that long ago when they replaced the Articles of Confederation with our current constitution.
For the states the future only brings two real options. First, the states do nothing
Which would be fine by me.
If that happens, the United States will become the United State. America will simply be one giant federal nation with state borders being an anachronistic reminder of days gone by and state governments having about as much relevance and power as the Rotary Club.
Oh my God, the states can do nothing! California, New York and Mississippi are all exactly the same now, that none of them can stop gay people from getting married. All of their cultural and political differences are gone now that we can’t stop the gays! Resistance is futile, the former states of the United States, have all been assimilated into the borg collective known as the United State!
The other alternative is radical federalism. That means the states actually fight back against the Federal government. Fighting back means asserting the power of the states. It means nullifying federal laws and even disobeying the federal government.
Sorry nullification is unconstitutional. Federal law supersedes state law. For someone who claims to “love the constitution” so much, you sure don’t understand it, or its history that well. If states could just refuse to obey supreme court rulings, that they didn’t like, the the judges would be powerless to do their job. How would you have liked school segregation to continue indefinitely after Brown Vs Board of Education, just because a lot of racist white southerners didn’t like the ruling? Or do you actually believe that “separate but equal” really was equal?
It means refusing the money the federal government sends to the states and the strings that are attached to that money.
Oh convince the states to refuse federal money so they can discriminate against the gays? Good luck with that. The people in even the most homophobic of red states won’t be very happy for very long without their welfare payments, not to mention the money that the feds spend on everything else there.
Even so, even if you could convince state governments to refuse federal money, they would still be bound by federal law, including the constitution, thus they still wouldn’t be able to refuse to allow gays to get married. I know, such “tyranny”
It means the states demand that the Congressmen and Senators we elect protect the states and their rights. It means that the states demand Congressmen and Senators start moving power out of Washington and back to the states.
Even if they actually do start moving power back to the states, it won’t change the constitution. States will still have to recognize things like same sex marriages, and public officials will still have to perform them, no matter how much they may despise it.
The first option leads to nothing but a big, all-powerful, tyrannical central government.
No it doesn’t. Doing nothing right now allows the constitution to remain in place, and the federal government isn’t turning into a dictatorship because the supreme court ruled that the fourteenth amendment prohibits states from defining marriage only as a union of one man and one woman.
The other, while not perfect, offers the only alternative.
States refusing to obey federal laws, and keeping laws on the books that violate the constitution isn’t an option. Your only option now is to either pass another same sex marriage ban and try to convince the court to change its mind, or pass a constitutional amendment. Neither of those are likely to work for you. More and more Americans support marriage equality, and by the time that most of the judges who ruled with the majority in Obergefell v. Hodges, are no longer on the bench, the court is likely to be by far even more pro gay rights than it is now. Plus, by than same sex marriage bans will probably be practically impossible to pass anywhere in the country. You could try for a constitutional amendment to “restore the sanctity of marriage” and ban same sex marriage, but thankfully that’s unlikely to even get passed congress.
Why don’t you do yourself a favor Mr. Phillips, and just give up on this? You’ve lost.
America truly is living in the post-liberty era. The only question now is can we restore liberty or do we watch the tyranny of an era where liberty is only a punch line for politicians.
What a pathetic joke. Its clear to me that just about the only “liberty” you really care about here, is your ability to impose your bigoted religious views on other people. You have no idea what a real tyranny would be like. Ironically attitudes like yours have been used to justify such tyrannies in the past.