Tag: law

Intra-Democrat war

This promises to be an interesting political battle, featuring Vibrant Americans vs Jewish women.

“If it’s not handled by… the start of next season, I don’t see how we’re playing basketball,” NBPA vice president Roger Mason Jr. said in an interview with Showtime’s Jim Rome. “We have player reps, we’ve got executive committee members…  Leaders of the teams, they’re all saying the same thing, ‘If [Sterling] is still in place, we ain’t playing’. … I was just in the locker room three or four days ago. LeBron and I talked about it. He ain’t playing if Sterling is still an owner.”

Mason clarified that the ultimatum applies equally to Shelly Sterling, too. “No Sterling deserves to be an owner of that franchise any longer,” Mason continued. “And I’ve gone down the line from LeBron to the other guys in the league that I’ve talked to and they all feel the same way. There’s no place for that family in the NBA.”

James, who scored 49 points in a Game 4 victory over the Nets in the Eastern conference semifinals on Monday, took a public stand against both Sterlings earlier this week.

“As players, we want what’s right and we don’t feel like no one in his family should be able to own the team,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

It’s bad enough to argue that a man should be deprived of his property due to his private speech, but on the other hand, there are details related to Mr. Tokowitz’s signature on various NBA documents that appear to considerably complicate the matter. But the former Miss Stein didn’t do or say anything objectionable, so one wonders on what ground Mr. Mason and Mr. James could possibly argue that she should be deprived of her property.

I could not care less about the NBA, but this could provide some amusement. It should be interesting to see how fast the NBA reverses direction once Mrs. Tokowitz starts playing the sexist card and the media takes note of the fact that the league has no female owners.

Marital sex is never rape

Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law.

A Delhi court has ruled that sex between a husband and wife, “even if forcible, is not rape.” The judge’s decision, which was made public Saturday, upheld section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which does not recognize “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age,” as rape.

The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so. Reality is not defined by politics; we cannot settle the question of evolution by natural selection by simply passing a law that declares God created the world and everything in it last Tuesday.

Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed. And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.

The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.

Assassinating the citizenry

Rand Paul opposes the appointment of a known defender of citizen assassinations to the federal judgeship, particularly since the Obama administration is hiding the man’s defenses of those assassinations from the Senate:

The Bill of Rights is clear. The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Sixth Amendment provides that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury,” as well as the right to be informed of all charges and have access to legal counsel. These are fundamental rights that cannot be waived with a presidential pen.

In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield, however despicable, are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution. No one argues that Americans who commit treason shouldn’t be punished. The maximum penalty for treason is death. But the Constitution specifies the process necessary to convict.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who was subject to a kill order from Mr. Obama, and was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a missile fired from a drone. I don’t doubt that Mr. Awlaki committed treason and deserved the most severe punishment. Under our Constitution, he should have been tried — in absentia, if necessary — and allowed a legal defense. If he had been convicted and sentenced to death, then the execution of that sentence, whether by drone or by injection, would not have been an issue.

But this new legal standard does not apply merely to a despicable human being who wanted to harm the United States. The Obama administration has established a legal justification that applies to every American citizen, whether in Yemen, Germany or Canada.

Defending the rights of all American citizens to a trial by jury is a core value of our Constitution. Those who would make exceptions for killing accused American citizens without trial should give thought to the times in our history when either prejudice or fear allowed us to forget due process.

One would think that Jews in America, more than anyone, would understand the intrinsic danger of permitting a government to legally kill its own citizens at will. I find it astonishing that most of them in the media appear to be more interested in defending the Obama administration than ensuring that the U.S. government is prevented from hunting down and killing Americans without trial.

Post-constitutional America

So much for the theory that transforming the racial and cultural demographics of America was not tantamount to turning America into not-America:

Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.

The trial judge in the case asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

The trial judge ruled that the indefinite detention bill was unconstitutional, holding:

    This Court rejects the government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention.

But the court of appeal overturned that decision, based upon the assumption that limited the NDAA to non-U.S. citizens:

    We thus conclude, consistent with the text and buttressed in part by the legislative history, that Section 1021 [of the 2012 NDAA] means this: With respect to individuals who are not citizens, are not lawful resident aliens, and are not captured or arrested within the United States, the President’s [Authorization for Use of Military Force] authority includes the authority to detain those responsible for 9/11 as well as those who were a part of, or substantially supported, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners—a detention authority that Section 1021 concludes was granted by the original AUMF. But with respect to citizens, lawful resident aliens, or individuals captured or arrested in the United States, Section 1021 simply says nothing at all.

The court of appeal ignored the fact that the co-sponsors of the indefinite detention law said it does apply to American citizens, and that top legal scholars agree. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case, thus blessing and letting stand the indefinite detention law stand unchanged.

 Now, do you really think it is an accident that a post-Christian and multiracial America just happens to also be post-constitutional? Do you really think it is nothing more than pure coincidence that those who reject the strictures of the Natural Law also reject the limits imposed by Constitutional Law?

The men who wrote and signed the Constitution were, for the most part, straight white male Protestants of English descent. There is not a single straight, white, male Protestant of English descent on the U.S. Supreme Court that just granted the military and the executive branch agencies extra-judicial powers over the American citizenry. If you do not believe that the differing population demographics that distinguish European culture from aboriginal culture are irrelevant, why do you assume that the different population demographics between the authors of the Constitution and the current Supreme Court must be irrelevant?

Legalizing prostitution

Dr. Helen considers whether legal prostitution would free men from sexual control by women:

How can it be legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it? Who are you selling sex to if no men are allowed to buy it? Of course, any time one sees a feminist of the Catherine MacKinnon ilk, all logic goes out the window as long as men are rounded up and put in jail. This is sick, twisted logic and has no place in a free society. It was a group of women who apparently banned prostitution in the US according to this Wikipedia entry:

    Originally, prostitution was widely legal in the United States. Prostitution was made illegal in almost all states between 1910 and 1915 largely due to the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Perhaps women don’t want the competition from prostitutes for resources from men? Or they just feel disgusted that a man might be able to get sex so easily? I do wonder if men were able to go freely to prostitutes without fear of jail time if it would free them sexually from female and (and state) control?

It’s hard to think it would make too much difference, but then, the sexual marketplace does tend to look very different to a high status man to whom there are more sluts readily available than he can possibly nail than it does to a low status man who is working on a multi-year dateless spell.

The thing is, the Alphas and Betas don’t need more sexual access and I don’t see too many Deltas and Gammas availing themselves of whores because it’s hard to put a prostitute on a pedestal. It would tend to dispel the illusion of womanly virtue to which they cling, often in direct denial of the evidence.

My suspicion, and it is only that, is that legalizing prostitution might have a net virtuous effect on women, as the distinction between SMV and MMV would be more clear. In which case, the answer would be no, legalization would not free men from the sexual control of women.

In any event, there is no reason to ban prostitution except on grounds of religious morality, and if it is unconstitutional to ban everything from homogamy to abortion on those grounds, then I see no reason why the trade in sexual services should be limited in any way. Whether one pays the woman or not, the moral infraction committed is the same.

The players’ union

I’m not a big fan of unions, but there is no question that college football players have a much better claim to be permitted to unionize than policemen and federal employees.

In a ruling that could revolutionize college athletics, a federal agency ruled Wednesday that college football players at Northwestern University can unionize. The decision by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board means it agrees football players at the Big Ten school qualify as employees under federal law and therefore can create the nation’s first college athlete’s union….

CAPA attorneys argued that college football is, for all practical
purposes, a commercial enterprise that relies on players’ labor to
generate billions of dollars in profits. That, they contend, makes the
relationship of schools to players one of employers to employees.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to argue with that. The fact that the employer is a university doesn’t mean that the janitors and professors are not employees, and they generate considerably less income than the football players do.

These young men are actually putting their bodies on the line, and they deserve the right to a significant slice of the income their activities are producing.

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.