Tag: law

Yes, polygamy is next

Remember when all the pro-homogamy SJWs claimed that it totally would NEVER lead to polygamy and you were a homophobic bigot if you expected that it would? Yeah, guess what. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but they appear to have lied.

NOW that the dust is settling from the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a right to same-sex marriage, there are new questions. In particular, could the decision presage a constitutional right to plural marriage? If there is no magic power in opposite sexes when it comes to marriage, is there any magic power in the number two?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s dissent in Obergefell raised this very question, intending to show how radical the majority’s decision could become. But the issue was hard to discuss candidly while same-sex marriage was still pending, because both sides knew that association with plural marriage, a more unpopular cause, could have stymied progress for gay rights. (Opponents of same-sex marriage had reasons to emphasize the association, while supporters had reasons to play it down.) With same-sex marriage on the books, we can now ask whether polyamorous relationships should be next.

There is a very good argument that they should. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell did not focus primarily on the issue of sexual orientation. Instead, its main focus was on a “fundamental right to marry” — a right that he said could not be limited to rigid historical definitions or left to the legislative process. That right was about autonomy and fulfillment, about child rearing and the social order. By those lights, groups of adults who have profound polyamorous attachments and wish to build families and join the community have a strong claim to a right to marry.

And while Justice Kennedy’s opinion does not explicitly discuss this possibility, it is easy to see how future generations could read his language to include polyamory or plural marriage. Earlier court decisions about marriage, Justice Kennedy wrote, had “presumed a relationship involving opposite-sex partners,” but now we understand that the presumption was wrong. Similarly, while Justice Kennedy’s opinion repeatedly presumes that marriage involves two people, it is not hard to imagine another justice in 20 or 40 years saying that the assumption is similarly unenlightened.

I find it hard to get worked up about these things now that the die is so clearly cast. The civilizational foundations have already been sufficiently undermined, so all they’re quibbling about now is the exact shape that the wreckage will eventually take.

Don’t worry about the politics anymore. At this point, you should be preparing for the inevitable politics by other means that are on the way.

I used to wonder what the historians meant when they wrote that “all Europe was waiting for war” in the years leading up to WWI. Now, I finally get it. The good news, to the extent that one can consider it good news, is that the financial elite has proved they can kick a can that looked to be unkickable, so we should be able to make it to 2033 or thereabouts as I’ve repeatedly predicted.

Animal Firm

Rand Paul observes some legal rights are more equal than others:

While I disagree with Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage, I believe that all Americans have the right to contract.

The Constitution is silent on the question of marriage because marriage has always been a local issue. Our founding fathers went to the local courthouse to be married, not to Washington, D.C.

I’ve often said I don’t want my guns or my marriage registered in Washington.

Those who disagree with the recent Supreme Court ruling argue that the court should not overturn the will of legislative majorities. Those who favor the Supreme Court ruling argue that the 14th Amendment protects rights from legislative majorities.

Do consenting adults have a right to contract with other consenting adults? Supporters of the Supreme Court’s decision argue yes but they argue no when it comes to economic liberties, like contracts regarding wages.

It seems some rights are more equal than others.

I think Friday’s Supreme Court decision was the biggest step the USA has taken towards theocracy in some time. I already converted from pure abstract libertarianism to National Libertarianism some time ago for purely practical reasons; events had made it sufficiently obvious that the abstract position simply could not function in the real world.

Now I find myself wondering if even this more practical and pragmatic approach is logically consistent with real-world human behavior. It may be that if John Adams is correct and there is no system of government that can survive an insufficiently moral people, what the progressives think of as a linear progression will turn out to be even more cyclical than I had imagined. We know, per Cicero, that democracy leads to aristocracy. But does cultural degeneracy precede theocracy? Or is it simply the decline into low paganism that I have anticipated?

White Christian conservative attachment to the Constitution and traditional American ideals such as representative democracy are consequences of their deeper attachments. Once those connections severed, they are simply a larger, more dedicated, more effective, and better-armed group playing the game of power. I tend to doubt post-democracy is going to be all that those celebrating it now believe it will be.

“We shall obey God rather than man”

The Lutheran Missouri Synod responds to the Supreme Court’s further rejection of representative democracy yesterday:

A one-person majority of the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong – again. Some 40 years ago, a similarly activist court legalized the killing of children in the womb. That decision has to date left a wake of some 55 million Americans dead. Today, the Court has imposed same-sex marriage upon the whole nation in a similar fashion. Five justices cannot determine natural or divine law. Now shall come the time of testing for Christians faithful to the Scriptures and the divine institution of marriage (Matthew 19:3–6), and indeed, a time of testing much more intense than what followed Roe v. Wade.

Like Roe v. Wade, this decision will be followed by a rash of lawsuits. Through coercive litigation, governments and popular culture continue to make the central post-modern value of sexual freedom override “the free exercise of religion” enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

The ramifications of this decision are seismic. Proponents will seek to drive Christians and Christian institutions out of education at all levels; they will press laws to force faithful Christian institutions and individuals to violate consciences in work practices and myriad other ways. We will have much more to say about this.

During some of the darkest days of Germany, a faithful Lutheran presciently described how governments lose their claim to legitimate authority according to Romans 13…. “We shall obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29). Christians will now begin to learn what it means to be in a state of solemn conscientious objection against the state.

One almost has to laugh at the disingenuous way in which the rainbow lobby is frantically claiming the matter to be settled. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Lutheran pastor observed, the issue is now as settled as abortion in the USA, which means it will now become a much bigger and more divisive political issue than before.

The most significant problem with the decision has nothing to do with the actual issue at hand, but the way in which it rendered hundreds of millions of votes cast over decades to be totally irrelevant. The whole point of voting on divisive political matters like this is to avoid politics by other means. But when voting is no longer a permissible option, what else does that leave?

Nor was conscientious objection the only response to the decision, as ISIS took a decidedly different approach to the #LoveWins hashtag. “#Love”, such as it is, already has a bodycount.

 That’s “diversity”? It sure all looks the same to me.

The misrule of law

And the rule of lying men. This should suffice to explode any last lingering doubts about the survival of the rule of law in the USA:

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

Roberts continued, “In this instance, the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.” Using the acronym for the Supreme Court, Scalia said his colleagues have twice stepped in to save the law from what Scalia considered worthy challenges.

“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so,” Scalia wrote.

Scalia added, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words ‘established by the State.’ And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words ‘by the State’ other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges.”

The USA presently enjoys not only the rule of men, but the rule of lying men rather than law. And, needless to say, Chief Justice Roberts helpfully demonstrates that electing more Republicans is not going to solve the problem.

Bow not before Caesar

Unlike the Episcopalians and Anglicans, the Southern Baptists are standing strong against government-imposed abomination and the legal parody of marriage:

Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Texas, said American Christians should be prepared for massive fallout if the Supreme Court legalizes same-sex unions.

“We want to stay in the system,” Graham told me in a telephone interview. “We want to work in the system. We want to support our government. We want to obey its laws.”

But.

“But there’s a coming a day, I believe, that many Christians personally and churches corporately will need to practice civil disobedience on this issue.”

The foundation for such a possibility was laid Wednesday morning in Columbus, Ohio where the current and former presidents of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination sent a strong message to the country. 

“We strongly encourage all Southern Baptist pastors, leaders, educators and churches to openly reject any mandated legal definition of marriage and to use their influence to affirm God’s design for life and relationships,” the statement declared.

While affirming their love for all people – regardless of sexual orientation, the former Southern Baptist presidents said they “cannot and will not affirm the moral acceptability of homosexual behavior or any behavior that deviates from God’s design for marriage.”

“Our first duty is to love and obey God, not man,” they emphatically stated.

It has become abundantly clear that the U.S. federal government is increasingly opposed to the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, and Jesus Christ. And like every other government that has been foolish enough to take on the Body of Christ throughout history, it will demand obedience in vain.

Of course the lukewarm and the nominal believers will fall in line and fall away, that is what they always do. But as the pressure mounts, the faith of the faithful will grow harder and stronger, until their oppressors break upon it like a pane of glass striking a diamond.

MRAs against marital rape

David King writes an embarrassingly bad article in an attempt to bring the men’s rights position on marital rape in line with the feminist one.

The core thesis of Talukdar’s article is that the notion of marital rape is a contradiction in terms on the ground that marriage is irrevocable, explicit and on-going consent to sex. I disagree and, further, I think that this position is incompatible with the values and moral basis of the Men’s Human Rights Movement….

Since frequently arguments of this nature revolve around the meanings of
words I will spell out what I understand these core concepts to be and
the meaning with which I use these core words, just like a contract
would.

And there is the first sign that he’s going to get it completely wrong. He’s presenting a legal argument on the basis of what HE understands the core concepts to be and HIS definition of the core words. At this point, we already know he’s going to get it wrong, the only question is how.

Western definitions of marriage include provisions for alimony and division of marital assets after divorce, but I’m not aware that there is (now) any explicit obligation to provide for maintenance during marriage (the assumption being that, in cohabitation and in providing for himself, he provides for his wife also).

He already blew it. He’s ignoring the fact that a husband is legally obligated for his wife’s debts, legally obligated to pay support for her children, and more importantly, the fact that the obligation precedes the very existence of the written law.

“The husband’s duty to support his wife (and, under later common law decisions, his children also), and the wife’s duty to render services to her husband (and a less clearly defined duty to render services to her children), are two of the most ancient concepts of the common law.”
– Virginia Law Review, 1943

There is actually  LESS question concerning a man’s duty to provide for maintence during marriage than there is concerning a wife’s duty to provide for her children.

So, we have an explicit law that criminalises rape and, to my knowledge (though I am no legal scholar), there is no explicit legal obligation, by either spouse, to submit to sexual intercourse — at least, not in any western jurisdiction I know of. Whether there is such an explicit provision in Indian law, I cannot say. On the face of it, therefore, the law requires that, even within marriage, sex requires consent from both spouses or it is a crime.

 This is ridiculous, because without consummation, the marriage isn’t even completed. The focus on “explicit legal obligation” indicates the problem, David King thinks that the law is limited to “black letter law”, which is simply not the case. Both the common law and case law are not only relevant, in most cases they trump black letter law, which is the reason the various courts are able to throw out black letter law and declare it to be invalid.

It should be noted that Historia Placitorum Coronæ (the original
title of Hale’s treatise) is a chronicle, a contemporary description of
facts and events as they were understood at the time; such works were
and are not law and have no judicial authority (then or now), and can be
nothing more than of historical interest.

It should also be noted that Historia was written in 1736, and that both the law and social mores change over time. Once, slavery was lawful and only landed people (which included women, by the way) had the right to vote. If defences of such law offered before slavery was abolished have no moral relevance in the 21st Century, then Hale’s nearly 280-year-old interpretation of marital consent is of questionable relevance today.

First, King fails to grasp that the intrepretation is not Hale’s. He is merely repeating the “the position of the common law, which is that a husband cannot be guilty of the rape of his wife because
the wife “hath given up herself in this kind to her husband, which she
cannot retract”” What King is ignoring is that this is not only settled law, it has been settled law for considerably more than three centuries.

The depths of absurdity to which the denial of marital consent takes King is finally revealed towards the end of his article, where he inadvertently reveals that denying marital consent is tantamount to denying marriage altogether.

There’s something to that, insofaras Talukdar quite reasonably questions what rights the man has in return for the obligation to support and maintain his wife. But, the point could equally be used to argue for abolition of the man’s obligation to maintain his wife as much as to argue that his wife owes him sex in exchange for that obligation.

 In other words, marriage neither grants a right of support to the wife nor a right of services to the husband. Which, one can only wonder, raises the obvious question of why any man or any woman would get married in the first place, if they literally get nothing out of it?

The fact of the matter is perfectly plain. Marriage grants sexual consent, which is precisely why nearly 100 percent of all couples regularly have sex without either party ever granting verbal or written consent to the other. In his desire to play the legal white knight, David King has managed to transform what he claims are the “values and moral basis” of men’s rights into something all but indistinguishable from the Neo-Dworkinian position that all sex is rape.

This is one of the many reasons I am not a Men’s Rights Activist. With friends like these, enemies are superfluous.

Child Protection Stasi in action

This abuse of government authority has got to stop, and stop immediately.

Police seized 10 kids from their rural Kentucky home after receiving an anonymous tip to investigate the family’s “off the grid” lifestyle.

Joe Naugler happened to be away with eight of his children when the authorities arrived on the scene. Nicole Naugler, who happens to be five months pregnant, took their oldest children with her to drive away, but the authorities stopped her and took took them. She was arrested for “disorderly conduct and resisting arrest,” but she claims she was arrested after not allowing the officers to take her children without a “fight.” Officers told her husband he needed to hand over the other children or face felony charges, and he complied.

Pace Ellsworth, a family friend, said he believes the Nauglers were targeted because the government disagrees with their “free” lifestyle of “unschooling,” which focuses on learning through life experience and each child’s individual strengths.

The children have been placed in four different homes in four different counties that CPS chose. On Friday morning, officials inspected the Naugler’s home and concluded that they did, in fact, have good living conditions.

The Nauglers are hopeful to get their kids back. The family will find out the specific reason their kids were taken at an upcoming court hearing, but it’s hard to believe how EASY it was for the authorities to take their kids. This was all based on a baseless, anonymous tip.

There is absolutely no excuse or justification for this sort of thing.
Every policeman and CPS agent involved should be arrested and tried for
kidnapping. Whatever happened to Blackstone’s Formulation and the principle “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”?

The Child Protection Stasi aren’t protecting children. They are abusing them.

Hug rape!

Someone alert David Pakman! There are SERIAL HUG RAPISTS on the loose in Virginia:

A Hug Now Requires “Affirmative Consent” At UVA — Or You’re Guilty Of Sexual Assault

If you don’t explicitly ask for and get permission for your clothed body to touch another person’s clothed body in a hug, you could now be accused of “sexual assault” through “sexual contact” at UVA.

It’s part of UVA’s broad new “sexual assault” policy, explains Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding:

Because U.Va. lumps together touching, “however slight,” and intercourse when it comes to sexual assault, requiring “affirmative” consent for both. (“Affirmative consent” is a misleading term, and does not include many forms of consent that occur in the real world, and are recognized by the courts, as I explain at this link. The new policy further warns that “Relying solely on non-verbal communication before or during sexual activity can lead to misunderstanding and may result in a violation of this Policy.”

Here is the essential bit from the new UVA “sexual assault” policy:

    A. SEXUAL ASSAULT Sexual Assault consists of (1) Sexual Contact and/or (2) Sexual Intercourse that occurs without (3) Affirmative Consent.

    (1) Sexual Contact is:

    •     Any intentional sexual touching
    •     However slight
    •     With any object or body part (as described below)
    •     Performed by a person upon another person

    Sexual Contact includes (a) intentional touching of the breasts, buttocks, groin or genitals, whether clothed or unclothed, or intentionally touching another with any of these body parts; and (b) making another touch you or themselves with or on any of these body parts.

Better not hug your wife tonight. Not without Affirmative Consent. You might think “hug rape” sounds ridiculous now, but it wasn’t all that long ago that “marital rape” sounded totally nonsensical too.

“A job well done”

Now we know why none of the big banks were prosecuted by the Obama administration:

Just after announcing his resignation as U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder has accepted a top job with Wall Street finance giant JPMorgan Chase.

Starting in early November, Holder will serve as JPMorgan Chase’s chief compliance officer, where his responsibilities will include lobbying Congress on the company’s behalf and ensuring it “gets the best deal possible” from any new proposed financial regulations. Holder will also fetch morning coffee and breakfast orders for CEO Jamie Dimon and board members.

For his efforts, Holder will earn an annual salary of $77 million plus bonuses for a job well done.

At this point, I think the federal government should go back to the spoils system. It would be considerably less corrupt.

Equality in sentencing

A Michigan judge bucks the trend to let female sex criminals off the hook:

Saying there is no room for double standards, an Oakland County judge sentenced a 30-year-old female teacher to spend the next six to 15 years in prison for having a sexual relationship with a student.

Kathryn Ronk, who taught Spanish at a Catholic high school, could have been sentenced to as little as a year in jail, but Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Nanci Grant opted for prison time Tuesday, noting the boy was 15 at the time.

Grant was dismayed by letters asking for leniency for Ronk, a former teacher at Bishop Foley High School in Madison Heights, but making no mention of concern for the boy.

Attractive woman. Female judge. And what conclusions can we likely draw from this?  It is certainly unusual, given that attractive women usually receive less jail time than unattractive women in these situations.