Perhaps recognizing how its reasoning may be used, the majority attempts, toward the end of its opinion, to reassure those who oppose same-sex marriage that their rights of conscience will be protected. . . . . We will soon see whether this proves to be true. I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.
By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.
I just saw this article by Edward Pentin: "Pope Francis: Rigid People Are Sick" (National Catholic Register, October 24, 2016).
In this article, convention Catholics who insist on believing and practicing what the Church has always taught are told by the Holy Father that they suffer from a "pathological sickness" which renders them "heretics, not Catholics," that they are advocates of a "self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism," and need to loosen up and embrace the God of mercy whose gifts are "meekness," "benevolence," and "forgiveness," but "never rigidity."
I couldn't help thinking of Matthew 5:17-20 and wondering what the Pope of Mercy would have to say about the words of Jesus:
“Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
Why is the Gospel made to appear in the words of some Church leaders like a wax nose, which can be bent easily to serve the whims of prevailing ideologies?
Gangsta-in-Chief, President Barack Hussein Obama has now raised the total number of sentences he's commuted for convicted felons to 562. His motive is reportedly 'compassion' for the mostly black families of offenders sentenced for non-violent charges of drug dealing -- families who, he says, need their fathers home. Oh really? You don't think you have some idea of how that's going to play out? Do you suppose, for a moment, that it's intended to quell the tensions of racial violence sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement? Think again. One suspects that as a lame duck president, since he has nothing more to lose, this president of surprises will have many more such 'gifts' to pass on to his beloved America.
An older post worth reading, by John Barach (Theopolis Institute, December 9, 2014). As Guy Noir says:
Point 2 especially should strike a chord with us. Canon law, the Latin Mass, indulgences, St. Rose of Lima.... Yes, as freshly-scrubbed and World Youth Day-ready as we all want to make the faith appear, we all also know that at its base it is both amazingly true-to-life and relevant and at the same time foreign, otherworldly, and weird. No matter how many interviews we set up between atheists and popes...
Yes, worth reading.
I had a professor once, whom I eminently respect, H.E. Runner, who used to suggest that most Christians get the Bible wrong by trying to read the New Testament as though that alone were their Bible. Exaggerating to make his point, he would say: "The New Testament is nothing more than an appendix to the Old Testament to show us that its promises come to be fulfilled."
This was his third sodomy case at the Supreme Court where [Justice Anthony Kennedy] authored the pro-sodomy opinion....
Justice Kennedy, who has also voted to uphold a constitutional right to abortion, resides in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, along with many other pro-sodomy and pro-abortion politicians. He has been seen at Mass often, including at parishes run by conservative priests.
The bishop, the Most Reverend Paul Stephen Loverde, has stood firm in a position of Communion-on-Demand, no matter who presents himself at the altar rail (or missing rail, as the bishop has also banned the construction of altar rails).
Putting on a tie using his car's mirror before attending Mass -- the one in Latin of course.
Antonin Scalia attended the traditional Latin Mass nearly every Sunday, at St. John the Beloved church near his home in McLean, Va., or at St. Mary Mother of God church in the Chinatown section of Washington, D.C. When he went to the latter location, it was usually followed by a day of reading in his nearby Supreme Court office, which he did for decades on certain Sundays during the court's term.
"It's a fitting tribute to a very down-to-earth man who loved the traditional Latin Mass, music and being with the people.
His funeral Mass tomorrow certainly won't reflect this passion for tradition. But, at least, the world will know how he preferred to properly worship Our Lord, thanks to Ken."
The first video ["Planned Parenthood and Race"] shows Planned Parenthood representatives accepting donations from a man who says he wants his donations earmarked for the African American abortions because there are too many blacks in the country. The Planned Parenthood reps willingly go along with the caller, insisting that they'll comply with the caller's request, because they'll happily take the money regardless of why anyone donates.
The second video (below) is a montage of outright lies, fabrications, abuse on the part of Planned Parenthood in some case assisting clients involved in sex trafficking, sometimes involving minors. Sickening.
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of apparent natural causes Saturday on a luxury resort in West Texas, federal officials said.
Scalia, 79, was a guest at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, a resort in the Big Bend region south of Marfa.
Scalia arrived at the 30,000-acre ranch on Friday and attended a private party with about 40 people that night, according to a federal official.
Yes, I know, this will give the regnant Evil Empire another chance to appoint a nefarious antinomian justice, but I'm not interested in that now. Whatever his personal defects (such as his too easy acceptance of legal positivism in his juridical practice), he is a man who will be missed. As a reader suggests, "We will not see another like him."
Here is an older piece by a liberal that raises a very good point; amidst misreadings of Scalia, comments that are themselves very telling: Dahlia Lithwick, "No. No. Not That I Know Of" (Slate, October 7, 2013) -- excerpt:
Much has been made of the fact that Scalia admits in the piece that the only newspapers he and his wife have delivered are the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. The radio he listens to is “talk guys, usually,” especially Bill Bennett, because they “keep off stupid people.” He also says that it’s unusual for him to listen to NPR and that he “used to get the Washington Post, but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.” He contends that the Post’s coverage of “almost any conservative issue … was slanted and often nasty.” And that he decided not to bother anymore because “why should I get upset every morning?” The Post, he concludes, had become “shrilly, shrilly liberal.”
He shuns the State of the Union every year because it is “a childish spectacle.” He isn’t sure he has any gay friends, but insists that “I have friends that I know, or very much suspect, are homosexual. Everybody does.” When asked by Senior if any have come out to him, Scalia says, “No. No. Not that I know of.” Stop and consider, for a moment, how difficult it would be in a major American city in 2013 to construct a social world in which you might not know anybody who’s openly gay. And, perhaps most tellingly, when Scalia needs to get “outside the Beltway with people of the sort I had never known before,” it’s to hang out with hunters who “live in the woods. Give ’em a gun, they could survive in the woods on their own.” (This is precisely what Justice Clarence Thomas does when he undertakes his summer NASCAR tours.) In other words, when Scalia craves ideological diversity, he goes out and meets real Americans who hate shrill liberals as much as he does.
Apparently he was spending time with some of those friends outside the beltway whose company he actually enjoyed. A prayer for the repose of his soul ...
The American Principles Project has posted a "Statement Calling for Constitutional Resistance to Obergefell v. Hodges," signed by over 64 law and jurisprudence professors and other academics and public figures, including Hadley Arkes of Amherst College, Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame Law School, and Robert George of Princeton. They are urging civil disobedience against Obergefell and suggesting grave consequences if it comes to be accepted by the public as settled law.
The "love" that dare not speak its name, which has become the "love" that won't shut up, is now going after soft targets, like cowardly mass murdering shooters with assault rifles going after sitting-duck targets in "gun free zones" (like schools) where they won't meet resistance, or, better, like Planned Parenthood, with the support of tax dollars, going after even softer targets like babies in their mother's wombs.
The same-sex couple who were previous customers of Aaron and Melissa Klein and their bakery, and were refused only their request of catering a cake in celebration of their same-sex "wedding," have decided, instead of walking down the street to another bakery, to behave like veritable crybabies and claim $150,000 in "psychological" and "emotional" damages for being refused a ... "wedding" cake. "It's THE LAW!" cry their cold-blooded fans. Let 'em suffer, Christian bigots! Serves 'em right. And so ... the "love" that dare not speak its name, which has become the "love" that won't shut up, has become the "love" that hates Christians so much that it's willing to destroy their livelihood and bury a loving family and all their kids in oceans of financial debt. All out of the "love" of their tender sodomitical hearts.
Thus "liberalism" shows its true illiberal colors. The promoters of sexual "tolerance" and "rights" have become the most ruthlessly repressive jack-booted thugs in recent history, hellbent on depriving others their religious rights. Only the cowardly crybabies won't face their opponents in the ring, but hide behind their new homofascist laws, their money-grubbing lawyers, and their water-carriers in the drive-by media, whining like crybabies that their f-e-e-l-i-n-g-s were hurt because their were turned down a cake. (Let them try a Muslim bakery in Dearborn, Michigan, and see what happens.) The pattern is all too familiar to any student of history, from the French Revolution, which devoured its own children, to the Bolshevik Revolution, which outdid the French by slaughtering upwards of 50 million people according to the Rousseauian dictum, "they must be compelled to be free." Plato was right: democracies teetering on the edge of anarchy can quickly collapse into totalitarian tyrannies.
I don't usually address topics like this, but Marshall Lewin makes a pretty good case for how I would explain, among other things, the otherwise seemingly counter-intuitive reason why I avoid movie theaters which have signs prohibiting firearms. Yes, it IS counter-intuitive. It doesn't mean you yourself necessarily have to be armed. But public gathering places that explicitly ban arms inadvertently advertise themselves as easy targets for mass murders. Here's how: Marshall Lewin, "Let's End The Charade Of Gun-Free Zones" (America's 1st Freedom, September 25, 2015) - abridged and edited:
“Gun-free zones” don’t protect anyone except the evil. How? By disarming law-abiding, peaceable people. By giving the lawless and the merciless a monopoly on force. And by guaranteeing that suicidal mass murderers will have zero resistance and 100-percent success against disarmed and defenseless victims....
Gun-Free Zones At Military Facilities
This summer’s attacks on two military facilities in Chattanooga, Tenn.—in which Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez murdered four Marines and a Navy sailor at a recruiting office and Navy reserve center—are far from unique.
From the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, where an Islamic jihadist killed 13 people and wounded 32 more while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” ... to the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shootings, where a lone gunman shot 15 people, 12 of them fatally ... to the 2014 Fort Hood shootings (again) in which four people were killed and a dozen more were shot—every one of these crimes was committed at military facilities where our own soldiers and sailors were rendered helpless by “gun-free zones.” ...
Magnets For Mass Murder
... Consider the case of the Aurora movie theater shooter. As [John] Lott wrote for Fox News, “There were seven movie theaters showing ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ within 20 minutes of the killer’s apartment.” Yet he didn’t choose the theater closest to home. And he didn’t choose “Colorado’s largest auditorium,” which was only 10 minutes away and surely must have been tempting for someone who wanted to kill as many people as possible. Why not? Because, as Lott wrote, “all of those theaters allowed permitted concealed handguns.” Instead, the killer chose “the only one with a sign posted at the theater’s entrance prohibiting guns.”
Internationally renowned self-defense firearms instructor Massad Ayoob, who refers to “gun-free zones” as “hunting preserves for psychopathic murderers,” has analyzed many such events. Here are just a few examples:
Pearl, Miss., 1997: A 16-year-old stabs his mother
to death, then takes a 30-30 rifle to his school, where he murders two
young women. As he tries to drive away to continue his shooting spree at
a nearby junior high school, Vice Principal Joel Myrick retrieves a
Colt .45 from his truck, intercepts the killer and holds him for
police.
Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A 14-year-old brings a gun to
an off-campus school dance at a banquet facility and opens fire, killing
a science teacher and wounding three others. Restaurant owner James
Strand retrieves a shotgun and, as the killer is reloading, points it at
him, forcing him to surrender.
Santa Clara, Calif., 1999: A 21-year-old man rents a
9 mm handgun at a gun range, then takes it into the adjoining store,
fires it into the ceiling, and herds three store employees into an
alley, where he tells them he’s going to kill them. One of those
employees is secretly armed with a pistol, however, and uses it to end
the attack.
Grundy, Va., 2002: After a 43-year-old former
student shoots two faculty members to death, two students, Mikael Gross,
34, and Tracy Bridges, 25, immediately and independently run to their
cars, retrieve their firearms, return to the scene, disarm the gunman
and hold him for police.
Tyler, Texas, 2005: A man enraged over his divorce
proceedings and wearing body armor opens fire on the courthouse steps,
killing his ex-wife and wounding his son. Police fire upon the killer
with handguns, but he drives them back with his rifle. Hearing gunfire,
Mark Allan Wilson rushes to the scene with his Colt .45 and shoots the
gunman, who flees without inflicting additional casualties. The gunman
is later killed in a shootout with police.
Colorado Springs, Colo., 2007: After killing two and
wounding two more at a nearby religious center, a gunman opens fire at
New Life Church, killing two and injuring three more. Jeanne Assam,
working volunteer security at the church, rushes the killer, shooting
him with her Beretta 9 mm before he kills himself.
Moore, Okla., 2014: An Islamic jihadist who has
pictures of Taliban fighters on his Facebook page returns to Vaughan
Foods, where his employment had recently been suspended, and beheads a
54-year-old grandmother. He then slashes the throat of a 43-year-old
female employee, but before he can behead her, company CEO Mark Vaughan,
an Oklahoma County reserve deputy, retrieves a rifle from his car and
shoots the assailant.
Chances are, you haven’t heard about most of these cases—or if you have, you haven’t heard about the armed citizens who stopped the attacks. And the reason is because that truth doesn’t fit into the media’s anti-gun narrative.
Some people complain that there are too many annulments, and no doubt there are some abuses. Some annulments are given out lightly and I expect with the new rules even more annulments will be doled out too quickly and automatically. However, that need not be the case [huh? did I miss something?], and the more efficient rules will mean that the obvious cases for annulment can be dealt with more quickly and this will help all those involved in the pastoral care of those in broken marriages.
Is it necessarily a terrible thing that there will be more annulments?
I will never forget what one pastor said when discussing this matter: “Of course there are more annulments than ever before. That’s because there are more invalid marriages than ever before.”
I’m sure nobody would dispute the fact that marriage and weddings in our mixed up society are a total mess. [Emphasis added by Guy Noir]
(Our correspondent, Guy Noir, remarks: "[I]f marriage is so difficult a concept to grab hold of, so rarely now actually realized, maybe the communion ban on divorced people should not be an issue at all -- ban most everybody! Buying into the new meme, it could convincingly be suggested but that Church invite to communion only bonafide singles and those they believe were actually and validly married in the first place. Because they seem to think this latter group is a pretty small one, such a practice would be far sounder and much safer, since under a Franciscan diagnosis society has produced within the Church a morally-addled mess. Running with the hospital analogy, the majority need saving before feeding, confession before Mass. And, I guess, somewhere in there, marriage. Yes, I agree, let's make things as complicated as we possibly can!")
... The indissolubility of marriage is a Divine and unmodifiable law of Jesus Christ. The Church cannot “annul” a marriage in the sense of dissolving it. She can, through a declaration of nullity, verify its inexistence, due to the lack of those requisites which assure its validity. Which means that in the canonical process, the Church’s priority is not the interests of the spouses to obtain the declaration of nullity, but the validity of the marriage bond itself [my ephasis].
... In Pope Francis’ Motu Proprio this view has been overturned. The interest of the spouses has primacy over that of marriage. It is the document itself that affirms this, by summarizing the fundamental criteria of the reform in these points: the abolition of the double-sentence in conformity, substituted by only one sentence in favor of the enforceability of the annulment; the attribution of monocratic power to the bishop, qualified as sole judge; the introduction of an expedite process [brevior], de facto uncontrollable, with the substantial downsizing of the role of the Roman Rota.
... Favor matrimonii is substituted for favor nullitatis, which comes to be the primary element of the law, while indissolubility is reduced to an impracticable “ideal”. The theoretical affirmation of indissolubility of marriage, is accompanied in practice with the right to a declaration of nullity for every failed marital bond. It will be enough, in conscience, to deem one’s own marriage invalid, in order to have it recognized as null by the Church. It is the same principle with which some theologians consider a marriage “dead”, where according to both, or one of the spouses, “love has died”. [emphasis from Rorate Caeli]
For anyone interested in delving deeper, I recommend, from Canonist Ed Peters' blog, In the Light of the Law:
Guy Noir - Private Eye shot me an email 9 hours ago with the subject line: "Post-Obergefell Remedial Reading." Indeed. He writes: James Morgan at CRISIS has one of the better answers to the consternation surrounding the Gay Marriage decision. He offers a needed corrective to extended commentaries that engage the Constitution and Religious Liberty but the hardly touch on topic of sex. The greatest compliment I can pay his words is that they made me want to go find my old copy of Christopher Derrick's Sex and Sacredness: A Catholic Homage to Venus. And Peter Kreeft's Making Choices: Practical Wisdom for Everyday Moral Decisions. Both books seemed close to containing words on fire when I first read them. Yet I also recall Kreeft's pointing to Derrick, when he initially wrote 20 some years ago, and remarking even then that even as he himself assigned S & S as required book, his students would routinely register blank uncomprehension at its central theses. So the seeds of our present destruction had been strewn that long ago... But here is Morgan. I don't agree with every word, but there is this incisive commentary [Noir's emphases]:
...the true losers in Obergefell are the same as in Windsor: those experiencing same-sex attraction. The blessing is that, post Obergefell, there is no more political frenzy to cover over sadness of soul. Those in homosexual relationships will have to face the hard facts of their lifestyle. Many have already suffered under the normative lie that homosexuality can bring happiness, and many more will suffer now that this lie has been quite literally wedded to state power. Those now given the imprimatur of the federal government on the dead-end slavery of sin—and the children who are condemned to witness this slow-motion destruction of human dignity firsthand—are the true sacrificial victims in this war. If we were not praying for them before, let us start doing so today....
Hence, the fourth blessing: not only are we called to love, but we are now given the chance to demonstrate it in a very real way. The homosexual activists consistently ground their concept of love in two places: the body itself, and the way the body feels. The glittery bacchanalia that started in the Age of Aquarius and has now culminated in Obergefell thus has a very narrow conception of love. For the sensualists, love is an adjunct to the personality. Love gives our sexual identities purchase and heft. It dispels loneliness, assuages fear, and makes us feel better about ourselves. But does love do anything besides fill the vessel of the ego? One need but look at the Cross to know. Love is kenotic. It dies to itself. It lays down its life for the sake of the wayward other. It counts no cost, reckons no reward, holds no grudge. It pours itself out in unmerited bounty for all alike. Love dwindles to nothingness so that others might have eternal life. It is not the self, but the very negation of the self.
Seen this way, the Obergefell conception of love can never rise into the upper reaches of our beings. Obergefell love sinks like carbon dioxide in a room, huddling around the homely flesh and fleeting emotions that are the twenty-first century’s poor substitutes for the full promise of the human person. The homosexual activists find this sort of love so unfulfilling that they are forcing three hundred million people to pay homage to it in order to distract from its failure to bring enduring happiness. But regardless of how many hundreds of millions applaud the abstract idea, homosexuality is doomed to be love’s opposite: the tragic amputation of sexual desire from the deep wells of the soul—the mere mutual slaking of animal lust. This love will never satisfy, and we must not abandon our brothers and sisters to the hell they now festoon with the rainbow of God’s covenant. In their orgiastic celebrations, the homosexual activists are crying out for real, transformative love.
Fifth, Obergefell is a chance for repenting of the greatest sexual failure of our generation: not homosexuality, but fornication. For every lost soul searching fruitlessly for love in a gay bar, how many hundreds more are de facto polygamists or polyandrists, shuttling from one wrecked relationship to the next, and increasingly numb to the lies that he or she is telling with body, words, and heart? If there is any moral high ground in the debate over sexual ethics, I for one am utterly unworthy of approaching it. I will stand, instead, beside the gutter from which God’s Grace rescued me, the better to remember, at the very least, who is holy in all of this, and who is made holy thereby. In a very real way, those with same-sex attraction have been fighting, at least in part, for the right to be as flamboyantly promiscuous as all the rest of us. Let us see who among us will dare to cast the first stone.
New Life from Dead Liberalism
Sixth, the majority opinion in Obergefell was a stunning admission of the intellectual poverty of late-stage liberalism. Proceeding by breezy judicial fiat was the only recourse open to the United States Supreme Court, for in seeking to legitimate the paradox of homosexual marriage they could make no honest appeal to reason, truth, Scripture, tradition, common sense, biology, or the natural law. They simply had to harden their hearts and wave their magic wands. Obergefell makes shockingly apparent the impossibility of forming any sort of community based on what is, at the very best, finely-tuned mutual antagonism. Justice Anthony Kennedy therefore has the distinction of having written, not the most insidious or disingenuous opinion in the history of the court (Roger Taney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harry Blackmun, and Henry Billings Brown must all outdo Kennedy in this regard), but the silliest. The linty non-sense of the Obergefell decision is a tremendous boon for a United States now coming to the extremities of an unsustainable philosophy. By dint of sheer hokeyness, the Obergefell majority opinion should be enough to wake whole battalions from their intellectual torpor.
But here’s the problem: Scalia’s dissenting opinion, while correctly arguing that Congress, and not the Courts, is the law-making branch of government in America, opens with this line: “The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes … It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage.”
While Scalia's dissent is brilliant in many ways, but while his personal sentiments are clearly Catholic, his legal reasoning displays the fatal flaw juridical positivism. What does this mean? In a nutshell, it means that law has no basis other than what is posited by human legislation. In other words, the basis of human law in natural law is no longer assumed.
Let me illustrate using an example from C.S. Lewis:
EVERY ONE HAS HEARD people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: "How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?"--‘That’s my seat, I was there first"--"Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm"--"Why should you shove in first?"--"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"--"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that some thing has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
This is about the most concise illustration and explanation of natural law I can think of. The only justice of the Supreme Court who still shows any evidence of adhering to natural law as a foundation for human law is Clarence Thomas. (Interestingly, Joe Biden opposed Robert Bork's nomination to the SCOTUS because he DIDN'T believe in natural law, then opposed Clarence Thomas' nomination because he DID believe in it, which tells us something about the character of Catholic politicians these days.)
The very best introduction to the contemporary crisis in jurisprudence is Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition,which ought to serve our times as the equivalent of William Blanckstone's Commentaries on the Law of England for his time.
Michael Voris, "Excommunicate Them All!" (The Vortex, July 1, 2015). He's talking about people like Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Harsh? Maybe. Or perhaps you would prefer a rainbow-colored Care Bear to cuddle with on your way to your ISIS execution or the Last Judgment?
One of the core problems with a decision like the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell ruling is that it does the opposite of what a Supreme Court presided over by justices-for-life is supposed to do.
As Chief Justice Roberts makes abundantly clear in his ruling, he looked at politics, not the law, concluding that upholding the clear text of the Affordable Care Act would have killed it, and inflicted chaos on a health insurance system already driven mad by ObamaCare.
He made a political judgment – with copious pressure from President Obama and his followers, and the weight of his own previous decision to put politics above the law to preserve the individual mandate – that the Affordable Care Act was a writ of nearly-unlimited power to do what its framers say they want to accomplish today, not a law with a balance of both power and responsibility based on what it said at the moment it was signed.
This is a very bad precedent to set, especially if Roberts’ reasoning is followed to the conclusion that the bigger and more ambiguously-written a law is, the more untrammeled executive power it grants. No matter what ultimately becomes of ObamaCare, that will come back to haunt us in many other contexts in the future.
... I am of the opinion that tough political outcomes are a burden worth bearing to preserve the rule of law, but here we are instead: Democrats doing a creepy “ALL DEBATE IS NOW OVER!” victory dance to celebrate the Constitution-smashing preservation of a law the American people don’t like, whose passage has already blown them into a congressional minority, and which they own 100 percent. It would be easier to maintain optimism about Republicans fighting on such favorable political terrain if they had demonstrated an institutional talent for fighting winning battles on solid ground, and doing important things with the power thus obtained.
The American people are getting a raw deal out of ObamaCare, but the President was not wrong when he crowed today that the law is working the way he wanted it to. The American system has been bent and twisted beyond recognition by the agonizing pain of digesting a law that conflicts with such basic values as the freedom of religion, and even the freedom to decline engaging in commerce. The “consent of the governed” matters less than ever. The amount of money sucked down by ObamaCare and distributed to the government’s Little Partners in the insurance industry is staggering. A huge swath of the formerly independent middle class is now helplessly dependent on subsidy payments, whose termination can be threatened if they get any funny ideas about putting the Leviathan State on a diet.
... The Left will redouble its efforts to silence and marginalize Americans who are suffering under ObamaCare..... Most people get a queasy feeling when they hear the phrase “the ends justify the means.” They know that’s wrong, and they know those words have been cited to justify tyranny and evil. The Roberts decision is wholly based on that idea. The American system was founded on the opposite ideal: that the ends do not justify the means, the system should not be shredded to impose a “good idea” with haste, the rule of law is more important than any goal that could be achieved by discarding it.
... A “law” that imposes no restraint or obligation on the government, not even the need to respect the plain text of the law itself, contains a payload of power that should be unacceptable to every patriotic American. Sometimes Republicans talk about the Constitution as an object of worship, an abstract idea they hold in reverence, without discussing its practical effect upon the real world. Well, Chief Justice Roberts just gave us a very powerful example of how the abandonment of Constitutional principle disrupts the everyday lives of ordinary people. Use it.
The underground correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep its secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, was clearly troubled about something, but kept a cool head. He wrote:
I keep stewing over the Supreme Court decision, primarily because I read no commentary anywhere that quite touches on my gut reaction.
Marriage is about children, gender matters, court over-reach, impending persecution... blah blah blah.
What I wonder is this:
How can any Catholic leader not connect the dots this way...
Homosexual sex is bad (last I checked, we can call things that are sinful 'bad')......
Even dignified people can besmirch their dignity.....
It's close to impossible to read Romans 1 or the documents of the CDF and not get the idea that homosexuals who are sexually active besmirch their dignity.....
Thus when the White House looks like this, it is calling evil good and fundamentally besmirching humanity's dignity. It's the President graphically supporting ant-Catholic, anti-Christian, and ungodly living.
Not to mention wasting a lot of taxpayers' monies on schmoozing a constituency base. At First Things a guy from Focus on the Family goes on and one about how 'inappropriate' it is to hijack the White House for any cause. I couldn't stand it. That's not what's appalling. It's that the White House is being hijacked for what clear-thinking Christians know is a fundamentally bad and -- yes -- evil cause. Enabling sin in such a rhetorical manner... and the effect this will likely have in swaying the black church to boot ... Depressing and almost unforgivable in my book. [Emphasis added]
And Peter Kreeft's 