Tag: law

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.

The unconstitutional NSA

It’s about time the violation of the 4th Amendment is addressed by the courts:

For the first time since the revelation of the National Security
Agency’s vast dragnet of all Americans’ telephone records, a federal
court has ruled that such surveillance is “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional. In a scathing 68-page opinion
peppered with exclamations of incredulity, United States District Judge
Richard Leon, of the Federal District Court of the District of
Columbia, found that the seven-year-old phone-data collection program —
which was established under the Patriot Act and has been repeatedly
reauthorized by a secret intelligence court — “almost certainly”
violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable
searches.

Reaching into the 18th century from the 21st, the judge wrote that James
Madison “would be aghast” at the degree of privacy invasion the data
sweep represents. The ruling by Judge Leon, who was nominated to the bench by President
George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, was remarkable for many reasons, but
mainly because there were real people sitting in open court challenging
the government’s lawyers over the program’s constitutionality.

The plaintiffs, led by Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist,
sued the government after the program came to light. A similar suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union is in a federal court in New York. Judge Leon’s opinion took issue with the government’s reliance on a 1979
Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which upheld the police’s
warrantless capture of phone numbers dialed from the home of a robbery
suspect on grounds that the suspect had no reasonable expectation of
privacy in the numbers he dialed.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully expect the Roberts Supreme Court to decide that blanket surveillance is not an unreasonable search. After all, there is always an emanation or a penumbra out there somewhere to imagine and cite. But, in doing so, its actions will only underline the fact that the Constitution is now null and void.

And that will permit for the pro-Constitutional side to finally get in the game and start redefining the living, breathing version to its own liking.

Mailvox: so the slope was slippery after all

MP is a little bit excited about the new court ruling that declared polygamy bans to be unconstitutional:

Having severed marriage from any cultural traditions and values over the last fifty years, I thought it would be at least five more years before the Feds took marriage to the next step: polygamy. Marry whoever and whatever you like. Marry as many as you want. 

As of now it is not “cheating” to fuck other women when you are already married.  You are merely looking for your next wife.  The courts will have to work out some of the kinks, such as not needing the permission of your existing wife to get married again.

After all, I can contract to buy a car from one car dealer and contract to buy another car from another car dealer without asking permission of the first car dealer, right? 

And since marriage is nothing more than a voluntary contract between two people, the wife should have no say-so in preventing me from getting Wife #2 … or #3, … or even #4!

What business is it of my old wife to oppress me and prevent me from marrying the (new) one you love?  After all, she has the right to control her body and abort my child, why should I not have the right to marry who I want?

And don’t you Evil Religious Freaks start quoting the Bible or the Koran. We got rid of the old oppressive Christian monogamous “’til death do us part” junk many, many years ago.

At this rate we will have pure marriage-by-contract within 10 years: “Marriage” will be divorced from those Evil Religious Freaks and we will be able to construct our marriage contracts however we see fit!

What a Brave New World we are entering!

Do you know, I can remember when all those homogamy advocates were assuring everyone that the only reason anyone opposed altering the equation Marriage = One Man + One Woman was bigotry and that there was no possible way that changing Woman to Man could lead to changing One to One or More.

“In a game-changer for the legal fight over same-sex marriage that gives credence to opponents’ “slippery slope” arguments, a federal judge has now ruled that the legal reasoning for same-sex marriage means that laws against polygamy are likewise unconstitutional.”

American society is rapidly slip-sliding away, to the extent that it can even be said to exist at all anymore. One may not be able to legislate morality, but it is becoming eminently clear that one can legislate civilization. And barbarism, for that matter. But we may be past the point where civilization can be legislated; it may have to be imposed.

Wait, politicians lie?

I fail to see how the news that millions of Americans will lose their private insurance under Obamacare is supposed to be any surprise whatsoever:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

Barack Obama is easily the least honest president since Richard Nixon. And he has no pressure on him to be honest since he not only has the press covering for him, but relies upon the support of the two most gullible portions of the population. But, let’s face it, this isn’t going to stir any outrage among the “Obama gwan pay mah mortgage” crowd. It may spark a momentary skepticism in a few white urban liberals, but only until someone reminds them that Republicans are evil and racist, at which point they will dutifully abandon their crimethink.

Hung jury in Grisham trial

Some of the jury members obviously refused to go along with the judge’s attempt to railroad Chris Grisham’s trial:


A six-person jury was unable to reach a
verdict in the misdemeanor trial of Christopher Grisham, with the trial
ending in a hung jury Friday afternoon. Bell County officials announced they would try Grisham again, with the case slated to start on Nov. 18.

I’ve seen the video of the arrest. The fact that Grisham was arrested at all was absolutely outrageous. It was mostly because the policeman was clearly angry that Grisham was underwhelmed by the way he was throwing his badge around. It would appear that the county officials determined to keep trying him until they get the verdict they want.