Tag: law

Can public schools now ban blacks?

That would appear to be one unintended legal consequence of the recent 9th Circuit Court’s decision concerning limits on the freedom of expression:

Officials at a Northern California high school acted appropriately when they ordered students wearing American flag T-shirts to turn the garments inside out during the Mexican heritage celebration Cinco de Mayo, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the officials’ concerns of racial violence outweighed students’ freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would enflame the passions of Latino students celebrating the Mexican holiday. Live Oak High School, in the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill, had a history of problems between white and Latino students on that day.

The unanimous three-judge panel said past problems gave school officials sufficient and justifiable reasons for their actions. The court said schools have wide latitude in curbing certain civil rights to ensure campus safety.

There is even less question of the connection between blacks and racial violence than American flag T-shirts and racial violence. So, now that we know “concerns of racial violence” supersede the 1st Amendment in public schools, it should be obvious that they must supersede every other Constitutional and legal stricture as well.

That’s an incantation to which everyone should learn to resort. “I’m sorry, I fear racial violence on the basis of past problems.” It’s a free legal pass to restore freedom of association.

In fact, Live Oak High could probably cite this decision in refusing to permit Hispanic students to attend school on Cinco de Mayo. Or, as is more likely the case, white students.

Krinocracy in America

Or rather, the absence therein:

Ending a day that cast a glaring national spotlight on Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have given business owners the right to refuse service to gay men, lesbians and other people on religious grounds. Her action came amid mounting pressure from Arizona business leaders, who said the bill would be a financial disaster for the state and would harm its reputation. Prominent members of the Republican establishment, including Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, also sided with the bill’s opponents, who argued that the measure would have allowed people to use religion as a fig leaf for prejudice.

Not that we needed any additional confirmation that Mitt Romney was a social liberal and against the Constitutional right of free association, but this is just one more reason that conservatives were right to stay home rather than vote for the man. Meanwhile, a federal judge provides Texans with a good cause for revolution as he tries to overthrow the Texas State Constitution:

A federal judge in Texas struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage on Wednesday, ruling that the laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman violated the United States Constitution and handing gay-rights advocates a major legal victory in one of the nation’s biggest and most conservative states.

The judge wrote that the amendment to the state Constitution that Texas voters approved in 2005 defining marriage as between a man and a woman — and two similar laws passed in 1997 and 2003 — denied gay couples the right to marry and demeaned their dignity “for no legitimate reason.”

“Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose, state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our United States Constitution,” wrote Judge Orlando L. Garcia of United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, in San Antonio.

As I said years ago, the DOMA people were right. Without writing the defense of marriage directly into the Constitution and thereby making it definitionally Constitutional, the wicked judges of the land would simply overturn any law, any vote, and, apparently, even the Constitution of a Sovereign State. We don’t live in a democracy or a nomocracy or even a Constitutional Republic, we live in a krinocracy where judges rule and freely legislate from the bench with about as much legal coherence and legitimacy as freestyling rappers.

What is interesting isn’t that the terminally aggressive lavender lobby is insanely overstepping its bounds, ensuring a vicious and well-merited swing of the pendulum, but rather the way it has educated foreign governments to realize that they dare not give their homosexual communities an inch, lest they immediately seize a mile.

I strongly suspect the recent political gains for gays in the United States are directly linked to the recently expanded criminalization of gays in India, Nigeria, and Uganda. And the foreign response is not only sensible, but advisable. I’m a “leave everybody alone” libertarian with no particular animus towards gays myself, but it is obviously preferable to see an increasingly obnoxious minority locked up and forcibly closeted than see both democracy and the freedom of association completely destroyed and thereby immanentizing the societal eschaton.

Actions always have consequences. We know that civil society can survive the mild societal oppression of gays, (and in the USA, it was mild by every historical standard). We do not know, and in fact, we have good cause to believe otherwise, that it can and will survive the intense suppression of democracy and free association by krinocracy that we are presently observing.

Anti-democracy in America

It’s hard to deny that the Swiss people are considerably more free and democratic than the American people when one compares the results of two referendums. In Switzerland, the entire national government is forced to bow to the will of the people. In the USA, a single judge can completely and unilaterally override it:

A federal judge on Thursday evening declared that Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, in the strongest legal reversal yet of restrictive marriage amendments that exist throughout the South.

“Our Constitution declares that ‘all men’ are created equal,” wrote Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Norfolk. “Surely this means all of us.”

The ruling, which overturned a constitutional amendment adopted by Virginia voters in 2006 as well as previous laws, also said that Virginia must respect same-sex marriages that were carried out legally in other states.

I look forward to men stepping forward and mounting legal challenges to women’s bathrooms, the Selective Service, female preferences in the family law, high school sports for girls, and the WNBA. After all, if equality means all of us, all of these outdated sexual distinctions are clearly unconstitutional, not merely those related to marriage.

Knock or die

Perhaps this ruling will help the police eager to dress up and play soldier to remember that it’s perfectly legal to shoot and kill anyone breaking into your house without warning, even SWAT team members:

In an astonishing ruling, a Texas grand jury declined to press capital murder charges against a man who shot and killed a law enforcement officer executing a no-knock raid on his home. A Burleson County SWAT team raided the man’s home near Snook on December 19th of last year.

28-year-old Henry Goedrich Magee said he shot and killed Burleson County Sgt. Adam Sowders, 31, because he thought he was being robbed and acted to protect his pregnant girlfriend and children.

“He did what a lot of people would have done […] He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home,” said Dick DeGuerin, Magee’s lawyer. The jury agreed, citing a lack of evidence Magee knew the invader was actually a law enforcement officer, they neglected to charge him despite his being a “cop killer.”

Warrants and procedural limits on police actions aren’t merely there to protect the innocent. They will also tend to protect the police from their own militarization.

Ban government marriage

The State’s push to force homogamy on the Church has finally resulted in the realization that the Church should never have accepted the State’s encroachment in its affairs in the 19th century:

State lawmakers are considering throwing out marriage in Oklahoma.The idea stems from a bill filed by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Edmond). Turner says it’s an attempt to keep same-sex marriage illegal in Oklahoma while satisfying the U.S. Constitution. Critics are calling it a political stunt while supporters say it’s what Oklahomans want.

“[My constituents are] willing to have that discussion about whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all,” Turner said. Other conservative lawmakers feel the same way, according to Turner.

Banning state interference with marriage is the conservative position. Since most people are historical ignoramuses, it will likely surprise many that marriage licenses didn’t even exist until 1631. And as I noted in my 2004 WND column entitled Divorcing the State, some State governments didn’t interfere with the sacrament until 1958.

All the misguided attempts to accommodate the State have failed. It is time for the American Church to accept the fact that it must now go into the implacable resistance mode that has characterized Christianity for a good part of its historical existence. This may mean persecutions and the falling away of those of weaker faith in time, but then, that is nothing that the Church has not seen or survived before.

Rep. Turner’s action is well-advised. Oklahoma would do well to cease recognizing all marriages as would the other States. If they don’t, they will find that people will simply cease to bother obtaining marriage licenses as is the case in the majority of the black community and an increasing percentage of the white community as well.

Banning government marriage is the right thing to do on libertarian grounds, on religious grounds, on practical grounds, and on the grounds of sexual fairness. I am pro-marriage but I would not recommend obtaining a marriage license to any unmarried young man or woman these days. And if a woman isn’t willing to marry a man without a marriage license, that will serve as sufficient notice that she is already married to the State.

The fading First Amendment

Even the New York Times appears to be a little concerned about the incarceration of a blogger:

For over six years, Roger Shuler has hounded figures of the state legal and political establishment on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, a hothouse of furious but often fuzzily sourced allegations of deep corruption and wide-ranging conspiracy. Some of these allegations he has tested in court, having sued his neighbor, his neighbor’s lawyer, his former employer, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, the Alabama State Bar and two county circuit judges, among others. Mostly, he has lost.

But even those who longed for his muzzling, and there are many, did not see it coming like this: with Mr. Shuler sitting in jail indefinitely, and now on the list of imprisoned journalists worldwide kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists. There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere.

A former sports reporter and a former employee in a university’s
publications department, Mr. Shuler, 57, was arrested in late October on
a contempt charge in connection with a defamation lawsuit filed by the
son of a former governor. The circumstances surrounding that arrest,
including a judge’s order that many legal experts described as
unconstitutional and behavior by Mr. Shuler that some of the same
experts described as self-defeating posturing, have made for an
exceptionally messy test of constitutional law….

On Nov. 14, the judge held a hearing, and Mr. Shuler, who was
representing himself, took the stand, insisting that the court had no
jurisdiction over him and calling the court a joke. The judge decided
that the hearing had “served as a trial on the merits” and made his
final ruling: Mr. Shuler was forbidden to publish anything about Mr.
Riley or Ms. Duke involving an affair, an abortion or payoffs; was to
pay them nearly $34,000 for legal fees; and was to remove the offending
posts or remain in jail.

That didn’t take long. How long ago did the Left first start banging the drums about the need to ban “hate speech”. Ten years ago? And now we’re already seeing overtly political speech being banned in America. It’s only a judge’s action rather than a legislative act, but then, as we’ve learned from the examples of California and other states, it is the courts that now make the law, not the legislatures.

As per Barack Obama, the executive branch merely decides whether the government feels like implementing it or not.

The incarceration of Roger Shuler is merely one more example showing that there is not even the pretense of the rule of law in the USA anymore. The USA has devolved into a Maughamite state. Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law, with due regard for the federal agent around the corner.

Diversity and the law

It will be interesting to see if the left-wing gay activists who are so enthusiastic about diversity and immigration will stop to rethink their enthusiasm in light of a series of new laws in various African countries:

Nigerian authorities today began arresting gay men after legislation was
quietly approved criminalising homosexuality and imposing prison terms up to
14 years for breaking the new law. Several gay couples were taken into custody in the country’s majority-Muslim
north, and rights groups feared that others would be targeted across the
West African country.

Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president, signed the Same Sex Marriage
Prohibition Act into law on January 7, but there was no public report of the
new law until journalists obtained a copy of the act on Monday. It prohibits homosexuals from even meeting in groups of two or more, bans
marriage or civil unions between people of the same sex, and criminalises
gay clubs and events.


Reuben Abati, the presidential spokesman, said Nigerians were happy with the
new law. It makes Nigeria the 38th African nation to enact legislation
persecuting gay people.

This is obviously wonderful news for left-liberals around the world, since as we all know, increased government intervention is an inevitable indication of social progress. And given the increased number of Africans in the USA, obviously it will be important for Americans to respect their cultural mores by permitting them to arrest any homosexuals who offend them.

It would, of course, be racist, xenophobic, and cultural imperialist to suggest that the newfound American enthusiasm for legal buggery should be forced upon Africans. I find it amazing to observe that 38 countries across Africa alone have criminalized homosexuality. It’s not something one often hears the American media mention despite their interminable sob stories about the Dark Continent.

Ten years ago, I would have seen such a law as an outrage. Not something to justify foreign intervention, you understand, but still, it would have been an outrage to my libertarian sensibilities. However, after seeing the increasingly fascist behavior of the gay rights activists, I’m not only indifferent towards Nigeria’s actions, but fully expecting similar laws to start taking effect in the West once the current Washington-Brussels axis collapses. After all, we’re already seeing them start to surface in Russia and Eastern Europe.

In an age of global communications, it’s simply not possible to make the same deceptive arguments over and over again. Other countries see what has happened in the USA and elsewhere and they don’t wish to experience the same consequences. “Some have suggested Nigeria’s
new law and a proposed one in Uganda were a backlash to Western pressure for
gay rights.”

From Big Government Republicans to drag queens, everyone feeling their political oats always seems to forget that social mood is a pendulum. But one of the best ways one can predict what is likely to happen in the future is to observe whose pendulum appears to be closest to peaking.

A warning to fake reviewers

Someone should send news of this legal decision to the attention of Virginia Conterato of Minneapolis, the fake reviewer of A Throne of Bones. As well as the various fake reviewers on GoodReads.

In a decision that could reshape the rules for online consumer reviews, a Virginia court has ruled that the popular website Yelp must turn over the names of seven reviewers who anonymously criticized a prominent local carpet cleaning business.

The case revolves around negative feedback against Virginia-based Hadeed Carpet Cleaning. The owner, Joe Hadeed, said the users leaving bad reviews were not real customers of the cleaning service — something that would violate Yelp’s terms of service. His attorneys issued a subpoena demanding the names of seven anonymous reviewers, and a judge in Alexandria ruled that Yelp had to comply.

The Virginia Court of Appeals agreed this week, ruling that the comments were not protected First Amendment opinions if the Yelp users were not customers and thus were making false claims.

It will be interesting to learn what position GoodReads and Amazon take on this, since in most cases the reviewers are customers, but are provably making false claims with the complicity of the site host given its ability to check if they have purchased the book or not.

Given where this appears to be going, I think Amazon would be well-advised to take a strong position against fake reviews and only permit those who have a) bought the books and b) are willing to click a checkbox affirming that they have read the book in its entirety are permitted to post reviews there.

I have always felt that it was fraudulent to post a fake review and it is good to see that this is indeed the case.

Searching everything for any reason

So much for security in one’s papers and effects. At this point, the federal courts aren’t even really trying to pretend the Constitution is still in effect:

A federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy people’s laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion…. In June, in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, DHS released its
December 2011 Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment of its
electronics search policy, concluding that suspicionless searches do not
violate the First or Fourth Amendments. The report said that a
reasonable suspicion standard is inadvisable because it could lead to
litigation and the forced divulgence of national security information,
and would prevent border officers from acting on inchoate “hunches,” a
method that it says has sometimes proved fruitful.

The absurd thing is that the reasoning that justifies the open abandonment of the Constitutional limitations on the federal government could be used to justify literally anything. Sure, a hunch could lead to stopping a terrorist attack, of course, it could just as credibly lead to stopping a demonic invasion by transdimensional god-aliens.

And yet, it strikes me that there is no “terrorist attack” or “demonic invasion by transdimensional god-alien” clause anywhere in the Constitution. It must be in one of those emanations or penumbras. This is why you can’t ever allow for “reasonable exceptions” in any organization. It never takes long for the reasonable exceptions to become unreasonable ones.

The rule of the game is now pretty simple. The federal government rules by a combination of force and fraud. They’re unwilling to openly throw out the Constitution, but the fig leaves they are using these days to cover their actions are growing increasingly small.

Only racists will criticize this law

I am entirely confident that anti-racist activists will be quick to cry raciss of anyone who speaks out against this African law. And since it is progress, who can possible question this evidence of the way morality is evolving in Uganda.

Ugandan lawmakers on Friday passed an anti-gay bill that calls for
life imprisonment for certain homosexual acts, drawing criticism from
rights campaigners who called it “the worst in the world.” The legislations sets life imprisonment as the
penalty for gay sex involving an HIV-infected person, acts with minors
and the disabled, as well as repeated sex offenses among consenting
adults, according to the office of a spokeswoman for Uganda’s
parliament. The bill also prescribes a seven-year jail term for a person who “conducts a marriage ceremony” for same-sex couples.

Since we are often informed that wise Africans who take a village are our moral superiors, it would be a terrible moral failure were the US Congress to fail to pass a similar law.  After all, homosexuality activity is already criminal in 70 percent of African countries.