1

Alabama Chief Justice Schooled CNN Host, Says Professor

Written by Bill Bumpas

An author and philosopher says CNN host Chris Cuomo needs a remedial lesson in American history after suggesting that America’s laws come from man, not from a Creator.

Cuomo made the comment February 12 during a testy interview with Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court justice who is defying a federal judge’s order that is allowing homosexual “marriage” to be recognized in the state.

Dr. Jay Richards, a writer, speaker and Catholic University of America research professor, suggests that Justice Moore (pictured at right) made a good counter-point during the interview by bringing up the Dred Scott case, which ruled in 1857 that slaves were not U.S. citizens.

“Which everyone now recognizes was an injustice,” Richards notes. “But how can you say a law determined by the Supreme Court was unjust unless you had a standard that transcended the laws of the land?”

That was Moore’s legal point to Cuomo, Richards explains, which is that laws, although written by men, “have to be founded ultimately on the laws of God – on the natural law that God has put into the created order.”

According to the CNN transcript, Moore asked Cuomo if he would have honored the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision or defied it on the grounds it was unconstitutional.

Cuomo refused to answer even after the justice pointed out he was dodging the question.

The interview included Cuomo suggesting that Moore, who is a Christian, is making legal decisions based on religion without allowing different views that disagree.

“Is that a fair suggestion?” Cuomo asked.

“No, that’s not a fair suggestion,” Moore replied. He then described a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. Ramsey, in which the justices ruled that marriage and family are based on the marriage of one man and one woman in a state of matrimony. Other state courts have also agreed with that opinion, he said.

“Naturally it existed hundreds and even thousands of years before the United States even came into existence,” Moore, speaking of natural marriage, told the CNN anchor.

“Right,” Cuomo replied,” but we are a nation of laws and not just God’s law.”

Moore went on to quote the Declaration of Independence and its reference to “unalienable rights,” which are freedoms not given by man – and therefore can’t be taken away – but are entrusted to the government to defend.

“They’re unalienable because they can’t be taken away and they can’t be mandated on the state in this instance,” Moore told Cuomo.

“That’s what Christians think. That’s what the American Founders think,” Richards tells OneNewsNow. “To argue for things like human rights and human equality, you need something that stands outside of the laws of men and judges them just or unjust.”

Cuomo also suggested that “times have changed” after Alabama voters approved a constitutional amendment to ensure legal marriage is defined by the normal definition.

Moore pointed out that 81 percent of Alabama voters approved the ballot measure in 2006.

“They haven’t changed their opinion,” he replied. “The only thing that’s changed is that one federal judge has come in and tried to force upon this state something which she cannot do. Her opinion is not law.”

Originally Published at OneNewsNow.com




Time for a Governor to Stand up to Judicial Tyranny

Note: now that rogue and renegade federal judges have struck down amendments that protect natural marriage in Mississippi and Arkansas, passed with 86 percent and 75 percent of the vote respectively, it’s time once again to review the solution: courageous governors.

There is one and only one short range solution to a runaway judiciary on the issue of sodomy-based marriage: a governor with the testosterone to stand up and just say no.

Governors take an oath of office to uphold the federal constitution and the constitution of their own state. Any governor in any state with a marriage amendment as a part of his constitution has the right, nay, the duty, to refuse to comply with any judicial order to recognize same-sex marriage.

The Constitution is utterly silent on the topic of homosexuality and marriage, which means, according to the Constitution the Founders gave us, this is an issue reserved exclusively to the states.

Any ruling from any federal court that imposes domestic policy on a state is by its very nature unconstitutional, and no governor has any obligation to obey it. In fact, quite the opposite. He must refuse to comply with it, for to comply would mean he must violate his own sacred oath of office.

A governor’s oath is to defend the Constitution of both the federal government and his own state. Defending something by definition means protecting it when it is under attack, regardless of where that attack comes from — even if the attack comes from a federal judge, a federal court, or the Supreme Court itself.

Governors have been meekly capitulating to judicial tyranny, one after the other, and timidly abandoning their posts.

Americans have no understanding of how little power the federal judiciary actually holds. It was designed by the Founders to be the least powerful branch of the federal government, with its jurisdiction limited to settling matters of dispute between individual states and matters of international controversy. The Supreme Court met in a closet for the first several decades of its existence, a sign of the lowly stature it occupied under the Constitution as written.

But the federal judiciary has mutated into a gargantuan beast, looming over liberty, freedom and the Constitution itself, and imposing its own benighted and twisted version of morality on the entire country with no legal, statutory, constitutional or moral authority.

But it has no police force it can order to arrest or detain anyone. If its unconstitutional rulings are ignored, what will the Supreme Court do? It can issue an arrest order, I suppose, but if a governor will not allow it to be executed, what can the Court do? The answer is nothing.

President Andrew Jackson once said, of a decision handed down by the chief justice of his day, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”  What happened in the face of this defiance from a co-equal branch of government? Precisely nothing.

The truth is the federal judiciary is impotent apart from the good will of the American people. Once the American people realize that the Supreme Court is a co-equal branch of government, not the superior branch of government, they can get back to governing themselves rather than deferring to black-robed oligarchs to make all the important decisions for them.

For a governor to stand up and refuse to cower to a federal court would not be civil disobedience at all. It would be constitutional obedience — obedience to the Constitution and its provisions in the ninth and 10th amendments, obedience to his own state constitution, and obedience to the oath he took before Almighty God.

Governors do not take an oath of allegiance to the Supreme Court. They take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. It’s time they started acting like it.