As you read this, remember how many times leftists assured Americans that homosexuals wanted nothing more than to be left alone to do their thing in the privacy of their bedrooms. And remember how they asserted that the legalization of same-sex “marriage” would affect no one, no way, no how.

Two days ago, the Corruption of Marriage Act (COMA)—known euphemistically by leftists as the Respect for Marriage Act—passed the U.S. Senate and will now go back to the U.S. House where it is expected to slither quickly through a U.S. House vote like a snake in the grass.

Recognizing the unconscionable and unconstitutional threat to religious liberty posed by COMA, U.S. Senators Mike Lee, James Lankford, and Marco Rubio proposed amendments that would strengthen religious protections, all of which were rejected. Adding insult to conservatives to injury to the First Amendment, twelve treasonous Republicans voted for COMA.

Why would anyone on the right or left reject amendments that would strengthen religious liberty protections? The amendments failed because Democrats have no respect for religious free exercise protections, especially if they come into conflict with the cultural and political desires of those with deviant erotic predilections.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz describes the shape of things to come after COMA is signed into law:

The so-called Respect for Marriage Act is going to set the stage for the Biden IRS to target people of faith, and in particular, to deny tax exempt status to churches, charities, universities, and K-12 schools. This bill creates a federal cause of action to sue institutions that believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman. There are going to be hundreds of lawsuits filed all across this country, forcing underfunded defendants to settle and violate their beliefs or close their doors. That’s what the Democrats want. And 12 Republicans went along with it. 

COMA will overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which preserved in federal law the cross-cultural and historical definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. COMA will force the federal government and all state governments to recognize homoerotic, non-conjugal relationships as marriages. In other words, COMA codifies the unconstitutional U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision.

Quisling Senator Mitt Romney made a statement both silly and repugnant in support of COMA:

This legislation … signals that Congress — and I — esteem and love all of our fellow Americans equally.

Romney, as a sitting U.S. Senator, has proclaimed that esteem and love for others depend on passing laws that codify that marriage has no connection to sexual differentiation or reproductive potential. In so doing, he has insulted the thousands of people who believe otherwise, including many whose beliefs are central to their identity as Christians. And he has lent Republican weight to the allegations of hatred hurled at conservatives every day from every corner of American life.

Signaling esteem and love for all Americans equally does not require Congress, Mitt Romney, or any other citizen to affirm any particular beliefs about marriage. Presumably, Romney esteems and loves his fellow Americans who would like to marry their four poly partners. Does he seek to legalize plural marriage in order to signal his virtuous love and esteem?

What about adult women who want to marry their fathers or men who want to marry their brothers or young adult nephews? Does Romney want to signal to them how much he and Congress esteem and love them?

Such juvenile foolishness was bipartisan. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, who has a “married” lesbian daughter, emoted,

By passing this bill, the Senate is sending a message that every American needs to hear: No matter who you are or who you love, you, too, deserve dignity and equal treatment under the law.

Schumer claims to believe that dignity and equal treatment under the law require the law to recognize any union constituted by “love.” That will be very good news to Minor-Attracted Persons. All they have to do now is grow their lobby and change the definition of consent.

But the core question regarding marriage has nothing to do equality, dignity, love, or esteem. The core question is, “What is marriage.”

Romney’s foolish ideas about the role of government echo former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell:

The nature of marriage is that … two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation. … There is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry. … [Same-sex couples’] hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

At least Kennedy acknowledged that marriage has a nature. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to know what that nature is or why the government is involved with marriage.

He doesn’t explain why marriage is composed of two people. He doesn’t explain what criteria he used to determine that “there is dignity” in the erotic/romantic bond between two people of the same sex. He doesn’t explain why not being able to marry someone of the same sex dooms homosexual couples to “live in loneliness.” And where oh where does Kennedy find a right to dignity in the U.S. Constitution? If such a right lurks somewhere in the penumbra and emanations of the U.S. Constitution, how is it granted to those whose beliefs about marriage are attacked as hateful by members of Congress?

Here’s yet another remarkable statement from Kennedy on the dignity-dispensing role of government:

I thought [dignity-bestowing] was the whole purpose of marriage. It bestows dignity on both man and woman in a traditional marriage. It’s dignity-bestowing, and these parties say they want to have that, that same ennoblement.

The “whole purpose of marriage” is to bestow dignity on sexually differentiated marital unions? Really? Many Americans thought the inclusion of sexual differentiation in the legal definition of marriage was a recognition of the intrinsic nature of marriage and served to unite mothers and fathers to each other and to any children that may result from their sexual union, which in turn serves to protect the inherent needs and rights of children, which in turn serves the public good. The job of the government is not to affirm love or confer dignity on any type of union—conjugal and reproductive or erotic and sterile.

Always two or two dozen steps ahead of conservatives, leftists are anticipating the day when Obergefell will be overturned, and states will once again be free either to recognize in law what marriage in reality is or redefine marriage to help homoerotically attracted persons pretend their relationships are marital. Leftists want to ensure that states in which citizens vote to recognize true marriage are forced to recognize legal same-sex faux-marriages performed in other states.

COMA’s sponsors also cynically included interracial marriage in the bill, which strikes many as bizarre. Is there a movement afoot that no one has heard of to ban interracial marriage? Of course not. Including a reference to interracial marriage serves two pernicious purposes of leftists.

First, it is an implicit way to reinforce their nonsensical comparison of skin color to homoerotic desires.

Second, it enables leftists to cast aspersions on Republicans who oppose COMA. Unprincipled Democrats can now say in voices trembling with faux-umbrage, “Republican Senator (fill in the blank) voted against a bill to protect interracial marriage” as they wag their crooked fingers.

The GOP needs an overhaul. We need a Republican National Committee chair not named Ronna Romney McDaniel. We need men and women with working moral compasses and spines of steel. And we need to give fools and quislings like the dirty dozen in Congress a big joyous heave ho.

Today we give thanks to God for the wisdom and courage of U.S Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito,  Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for holding that the “Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are overruled; [and] the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

The syllabus (i.e., summary) in Dobbs v. the Jackson Women’s Health Organization outlines the major arguments addressed by the majority:

• Without any grounding in the constitutional text, history, or precedent, Roe imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules for pregnancy divided into trimesters much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation.

• Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State.

• Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. … Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion is different because it destroys what Roe termed “potential life” and what the law challenged in this case calls an “unborn human being.” None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion.

• [T]he Court cannot allow its decisions to be affected by such extraneous concerns [i.e., stare decisis/precedent]. A precedent of this Court is subject to the usual principles of stare decisis under which adherence to precedent is the norm but not an inexorable command. If the rule were otherwise, erroneous decisions like Plessy would still be the law.

Writing for the Court, Justice Alito made mincemeat of the lousy arguments proffered in Roe and Casey, but the political invertebrate Chief Justice John Roberts did what he does best. He tried to swim smack dab down the middle of this roaring river. Hard to do without a spine. The political Roberts voted with the majority but refused to overturn Roe and Casey despite numerous leftist legal scholars acknowledging for decades that Roe lacked any grounding in the U.S. Constitution.

Justice Thomas again renewed his quest to revisit “substantive due process” jurisprudence, which he argues “has harmed our country in many ways,” and, therefore, “we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity.” He shares this view with Justices Antonin Scalia and Hugo Black as well as Robert Bork and many other legal scholars.

Thomas has long argued that because of the “erroneous” nature of substantive due process jurisprudence, “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

Those cases addressed, respectively, the purported constitutional right to access contraception, the purported constitutional right to engage in homosexual sodomy, and the purported constitutional right of two people of the same sex to marry.

To be clear, Thomas’ argument regarding substantive due process jurisprudence has nothing to do with his moral view of contraception, sodomy, or marriage. Rather, he is making an argument about the constitutional basis—or lack thereof—of substantive due process doctrine, which Justice Antonin Scalia too criticized:

The entire practice of using the Due Process Clause to add judicially favored rights to the limitations upon democracy set forth in the Bill of Rights (usually under the rubric of so-called “substantive due process”) is in my view judicial usurpation.

Justice Hugo Black was similarly critical of substantive due process doctrine in Griswold:

[T]here is no provision of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court’s belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if ever it is finally achieved, will amount to a great unconstitutional shift of power to the courts which I believe and am constrained to say will be bad for the courts and worse for the country. Subjecting federal and state laws to such an unrestrained and unrestrainable judicial control as to the wisdom of legislative enactments would, I fear, jeopardize the separation of governmental powers that the Framers set up and at the same time threaten to take away much of the power of States to govern themselves which the Constitution plainly intended them to have.

Leftists mock Thomas for his substantive critique of substantive due process mischief. They do so because they fear losing the power of the Court to act as a supreme law-making body. Well, they did fear that while they controlled the Court.

But Thomas’ critique is not a fringe critique, and he may have at least one ally on the Court: Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Now, the arduous work of changing hearts and minds that have been corrupted by nearly fifty years of leftist propaganda becomes even more urgent.

We need to donate more money to crisis pregnancy centers, both to help mothers who are considering abortion and to repair damage from domestic terrorists like Jane’s Revenge that promises violence to organizations that seek to protect children in their mothers’ wombs.

We need to pour money into creative, compelling public service/social media campaigns and the arts in order to elicit support for protecting preborn babies.

We need to elect wise, courageous state leaders who stand boldly for the sanctity of lives that pro-abortion activists deem unworthy of life.

We need to pass fiscal and social policies that end—rather than create—poverty, and we need to create a culture that doesn’t think a solution to poverty is baby sacrifice.

And we need to educate our children in places that teach that humans in their mothers’ wombs are sacred and that neither their developmental status, nor their convenience for others, nor their imperfections grant to their mothers the moral right to have them killed.

And we need to pray ceaselessly for the least of these. We must pray that incipient human lives are able to survive the dangerous waters of their mothers’ wombs.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Nightmare-of-Roe-Ends.mp3

While a number of cases have reached the U.S. Supreme Court challenging government pandemic restrictions that limit churches’ and members free exercise of religion, Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church v. Pritzker presents direct legal conflict between jurisdictions (traditionally the primary basis for Supreme Court hearing) and raises crucial additional questions that need resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court, to re-protect and strengthen our first and most important liberty.

For these reasons, IFI has joined an Amicus Brief in support of Elim Romanian.

Until 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court had rightly afforded the highest level of protection to our first freedom, the free exercise of religion.  In order for actions of government to restrict free exercise of religion, the U.S. Supreme Court applied a standard called strict scrutiny, under which the government had to prove: 1) a compelling state interest, and 2) that any restriction was narrowly tailored to actually accomplish that interest.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.  ~George Washington.

In addition to other law, such as tax exemption, and housing allowance for “ministers of the gospel”, the Church’s freedom to gather and worship is protected no less than four times in the First Amendment alone, forbidding government from: establishment of religion, and prohibition of free exercise, speech and assembly.

However, in its decision in Employment Division v. Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Constitution meant something different than it had for over a century, and reduced the standard to “facially neutral and generally applied,” which demoted free exercise of religion to the same level as any other government restriction on freedom.

In response, Congress and 21 states including Illinois (but not California, Nevada or New York, the subjects of the cases related to Elim) passed Religious Freedom Restoration Acts to restore the strict scrutiny standard.  In the following 30 years, these laws have been challenged and weakened, and the Church in 29 other states has gone without this important extra protection.

Several Justices; a potential majority, have recently signaled the desire to correct this error. Elim is the best current vehicle for the Court to restore this most important freedom.

Earlier in the pandemic, a number of challenges to government restriction on free exercise rights were presented in multiple federal circuits, and largely rejected (e.g., Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, Nevada v. Sisolak).  Unwilling to intervene the U.S. Supreme Court denied appeals, even in an earlier version of Elim v. Pritzker (which has been renewed in this case).

“…this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School…Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.”  ~Justice Antonin Scalia, Dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges

The make-up of the High Court has changed for the better since Justice Scalia’s assertion that there was “not a single evangelical Christian,” (including himself), and even since this recent unwillingness to defend the Church’s Constitutional liberty amidst often onerous COVID restrictions.  To God’s glory, President Donald J. Trump was able to make 3 apparently sound appointments, including one protestant (Gorsuch, Episcopal – replacing Scalia) and possibly even an evangelical Catholic, in Justice Amy Barrett.

Accordingly, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed course in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn vs. Cuomo and Southbay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, from owing “significant deference to politically accountable officials,” to now even Chief Justice John Roberts (for a 6-3 majority in Southbay) conceding that such “deference, though broad, has its limits.”

This change creates a conflict between rulings and federal jurisdictions, which is one of the primary reasons for the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a hearing (the request for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case is called a “Writ of Certiorari”).

The amicus meaning “friend,” (of the court) brief IFI has joined, encourages a ruling on several additional key issues, including:

• Religious liberty should be applied to the community, or the Church corporately, not just to individuals. This element of religious exercise has greatly eroded to the extent that the Court has been unwilling to even define “religion.”
• Churches must have the same exceptions as “essential” services.
• Exceptions to restrictions, even with a compelling interest (i.e., reducing COVID spread), must be no worse for religious practice and organizations than for comparable “secular” ones. (Really, such exceptions should be even greater for First Amendment protected classes. One might say that the U.S. Constitution has pre-determined them to be “essential.”)
• Limits on religious practices and institutions should require the least restrictive means possible, and that means should be rationally calculated to actually achieve the compelling state interest. This is a request to return completely to the strict scrutiny test.

In the more recent COVID cases, the majority signaled a potential return to the historic strict scrutiny standard (maximum Constitutional protection) for free exercise of religion, requiring that New York and California prove their regulations, which obviously target religion for differential treatment, are narrowly tailored to achieving a compelling government interest (reducing COVID spread).

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice;
but when a wicked man rules, the people groan. ~Proverbs 29:2

While the 6-3 majority coalition in Southbay is very fragmented, with five different opinions on the outcome (4 separate concurrences from the majority: Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, and one dissent by the usual liberal justices: Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer), it appears that 5 to 6 Justices may favor a return to the strict scrutiny standard. 

In this case, these new Justices have already established a desperately needed check upon the ultra-liberal extremist control in the executive and legislative branches.  Also encouraging is the Chief Justice’s affirmation of his loyalty to the Constitutional text in refusal to preside over a proceeding to remove a former president from his former office.

Nonetheless, all but two of the members of this same Court have also shown a willingness to punt the Constitution in the face of pressure in the Texas v. Pennsylvania election challenge.

The Governor, using Illinois taxpayer dollars (i.e., the Attorney General’s office – they should be defending the people) to defend his restriction of their rights, has stalled this case at every turn by:

• delaying response until the last possible deadline (i.e., at 10:00 p.m. on the night before the Supreme Court was to rule on Elim Pentecostal Church’s emergency appeal to open for Easter)
• not responding to Elim’s petition for Certiorari, until the Court ordered him to file a response
• re-using arguments of mootness already rejected by the Court in Roman Catholic Diocese (the Governor changed his Executive Order at the last moment and then responded that Elim was no longer being harmed).

There will no doubt be numerous other attacks, both philosophical and political, every step of the way, against this Court, with a majority who has expressed a philosophy of solid textual interpretation of the Constitution, compatible with this Nation’s historic religious heritage.

This is major progress, but there is yet a long way to go for a Court which has for the past 48 (out of 245) years enshrined a right to murder children before they are born.

We must, must, must constantly uphold them in prayer.

Pray every day that:

• God will change the hearts of those Justices who have been unwilling to protect and defend the broad freedom of religion clearly given in the First Amendment,
• He will influence changes of bad legal reasoning,
• He will give great courage to stand to those on the Court who already agree,
• Elim will become the ultimate Religious Freedom Restoration Act, correcting previous wrong denial of freedom by the Court, and
• Such a reversal will lead to other reversals of bad law, such as Roe v. Wade.

Please consider supporting the good work of Illinois Family Institute.

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

Written by Josh Hetzler

Mississippi has become the latest test case for determining parental rights of same-sex couples where one of the adults has no biological relation to the child. Nationwide, disputes are raging about what the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to impose its redefinition of marriage on all 50 states now means for designations of parenthood, which prior to its opinion, rested on a paradigm that recognized children as the biological creation of a male (i.e. “father”) and female (i.e. “mother”).

But now with the Court’s 2015 same-sex marriage opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, and even more recently with the Court’s decision in Pavan v. Smith (2017) requiring both adults in a same-sex marriage to be listed on birth certificates, that long-standing paradigm has necessarily shifted. The “logical” effects are unavoidable: To dispense with biology in the marital union is to upend it in matters of parenthood too.

Aside from the most glaring harm of intentionally and officially depriving countless children of either their father or their mother for a lifetime, we should not fail to recognize that the further we go down this road of separating parental rights from biological ties, the closer we move towards enabling the State to usurp parental rights altogether. It’s not rocket science. Once having removed the most sacred, significant, and objective measure of parenthood from its nature – biological procreation – the State by default will delegate authority and recognize rights of parenthood however and to whomever it pleases.

This of course means that while some people stand to gain in this newly constructed system of parenthood, many others will lose and lose big, since a biological connection to one’s child can no longer be afforded any special weight for parenthood determinations in a post-Obergefell society.

This also means that children, and therefore all people, will increasingly become subjects of the State rather than citizens in a free society. (Historical Note: We fought a revolution to untether ourselves from that very kind of tyranny.) There is just no way around it; when marriage and parenthood are defined ultimately by the State, the State naturally assumes the ultimate and unrestricted role of parens patriae.

Welcome to the world, little one. Meet your Parents, the State. (who will assign to you your designated “official parents”)

We’ve seen this before (just elsewhere), and we will be no exception unless we decide to reverse course. What we should have learned by now is that the extent to which the government intrudes upon the dominion of the family, we lose in equal measure the opportunity to govern ourselves. And when that happens, we cease to be free.

Even if, in the end, we were all theoretically okay with that arrangement, we should still know that the State can never be an effective parent for any child. Contrary to the oft-quoted adage, it really doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a mom and a dad. Knowing this to be true, as citizens in a free society (who wish to so remain), we owe it to every child and every parent to see that by all means – governmental and nongovernmental – they are ensured that opportunity.

This article was originally published at The Family Foundation blog.

Written by Pastor Scott Lively

What we call the pro-family movement is a component of the larger conservative movement and deals with matters of sexuality and the natural family. Its American roots are in the cultural backlash to the Marxist revolution of the 1960s that turned family-centered society on its head and swapped the Judeo-Christian morality of our founding for Soviet-style “political correctness.”

Before the 1960s there wasn’t any need for a “pro-family” movement because family values had been the overwhelming consensus of the western world for centuries. Indeed, so surprised were Americans about the cultural revolution that it took nearly twenty years for the conservatives to mount a truly effective response to it. That came under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The 60’s revolution was not grounded in the Marxist orthodoxy of Lenin and Stalin, but the Cultural Marxism of Herbert Marcuse’s Frankfort School, which envisioned sexual anarchy, not a “workers revolt,” as the key to dismantling Judeo-Christian civilization. The natural core constituency for this ideology was the underground “gay” movement whose dream of social acceptance was not possible without a complete transformation of American sexual morality. Thus, beginning in the late 1940s, Marxist organizer Harry Hay, so-called “father of the American gay movement” was also “father” of the (then hidden) army of “gay” activists most responsible for the “culture war” that exploded in the 60’s and continues today.

America’s Marxist revolution was therefore a “sexual revolution” whose overwhelming success vindicated Marcuse’s destructive vision and became the primary tool of the one-world government elites for softening resistance to their domination by breaking the family-centered society which is every nation’s greatest source of strength, stability and self-sufficiency.

Importantly, though primarily driven behind the scenes by “gays,” the first goal was not legitimization of homosexual sodomy but the normalization of heterosexual promiscuity. This was the motive and strategy that drove “closeted” 1940s and 50s homosexual activist Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent “science” attacking the marriage-based sexual ethic as “repressive” and socially harmful. It also drove the launch of the modern porn industry, beginning with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine (Hefner called himself “Kinsey’s pamphleteer”). It drove and defined the battles in the courts where sexual morality was systematically “reformed” by Cultural Marxist elites on the U.S. Supreme Court: contraception on demand to facilitate “fornication without consequences” (Griswold v Connecticut 1966), abortion on demand as the backup system to failed contraception (Roe v Wade 1973), and finally legalization of homosexual sodomy (Lawrence v Texas 2003).

Note the thirty year gap between Roe v Wade and Lawrence v Texas. That major delay in the Marxist agenda was achieved by the election of Ronald Reagan, under whom the pro-family movement became a major political force. That gap also highlights a critical fact: that “street activism” may be essential to any political cause but the real key to the culture war is the U.S. Supreme Court. By 1981 when Ronald Reagan took power the Marxists had nearly succeeded in collapsing the nation’s family and economic infrastructure and the LGBT juggernaut had come completely out of the shadows and taken its place at the head of the cultural blitzkrieg it had been steering from the beginning. Reagan stopped that juggernaut by putting Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, the lion of constitutional originalism who wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v Hardwick (1986) which affirmed (not created) the constitutional right of states to criminalize homosexual sodomy and other harmful sexual conduct in the public interest.

Reagan and Scalia stopped the sexual revolution in its tracks and made it possible for the pro-family movement to begin restoring family values in society, which we strove diligently to do. I got my start in Christian social activism in those heady days and served as State Communications Director for the No Special Rights Act in Oregon in 1992 which forbade the granting of civil rights minority status based on sexual conduct. We fell short in Oregon but a Colorado version of our bill passed the same year. We had in essence won the culture war with that victory given that the Supreme Court had previously ruled that minority status designation required three things: a history of discrimination, political powerlessness, and immutable (unchangeable) status (such as skin color). We had a slam-dunk win on at least two of the three criteria and it would have been just a matter of time before we passed the No Special Rights law from coast to coast.

However, Reagan had been prevented by the elites from putting a second Scalia on the court in the person of Robert Bork, and was forced by the unprecedented political “borking” of Mr. Bork to accept their man Anthony Kennedy to fill the seat instead. Just ten years later, Kennedy served his function by writing the majority opinion killing the Colorado law in Romer v Evans (1996), audaciously declaring that the court didn’t need to apply its three-part constitution test to the No Special Rights Act because it was motivated by “animus” (hate) and thus did not represent a legitimate exercise of the state’s regulatory authority. The ruling was all the more outrageous given that it was only possibly through a blatant abuse of the court’s own judicial authority. Kennedy’s “disapproval = hate” lie set the tone for the political left from that point forward.

In Lawrence v Texas, Kennedy delivered the coup-de-grace to Justice Scalia by striking down Bowers v Hardwick and brazenly ruling that “public morality” cannot be the basis for law. Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority in all five SCOTUS opinions that have, in essence, established homosexual cultural supremacy in America, including the infamous and utterly unconstitutional Obergefell v Hodges (2015) “gay marriage” decision. He is, in my opinion, the worst and most culturally destructive jurist in the history of the court: the culprit (among many villainous candidates) most responsible for the current dysfunctional state of the family in America.

So where’s the “bright future” amidst this lamentation? It’s in the promise made and so-far kept by President Donald Trump to appoint only constitutional originalists to the supreme court. It is in the pleasantly surprising discovery that his first pick, Neil Gorsuch, seems from his first comments as a “supreme” to be a perfect choice to fill the “Scalia seat” on the court. It is in the hopeful rumors that Anthony Kennedy is about to retire, and the simple fact that ultra-hard leftist Ruth Bader Ginsberg and leftist Steven Broyer are of an age that their seats could at any time be vacated by voluntary or involuntary retirement.

In short, the bright future of the pro-family movement is in the hands of the man we hired to drain the swamp in Washington DC, and who hasn’t yet backed down in that fight despite the remarkable scorched-earth campaign of destruction and discreditation being waged against him by the establishment elites of both parties, Hollywood and the media.

I must admit that after Obergefell I began to think that the pro-family movement had lost the culture war, but I now believe there is real hope, not just for reclaiming some lost ground, but possibly of reversing all of the “gains” of the hard left over the past half century. A solid majority of true constitutional originalists could actually restore the legal primacy of the natural family in America fairly quickly, and our cultural healing could quickly follow.

As the leftist elites and street activists continue their all-hands-on-deck attempted “borking” of President Trump, let’s not forget why they’re doing it. His political survival means the end of theirs. I can’t think of a brighter future than that for our nation.

This article was originally posted at ScottLively.net

Last time we covered two recent articles from Public Discourse — here are brief excerpts from three more.

The first is from Ryan T. Anderson — note the important introduction following the title:

How to Think About Discrimination: Race, Sex, and SOGI
Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) antidiscrimination laws are unjustified, but if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other.

Here is Anderson’s first paragraph:

In a new report for the Heritage Foundation, “How to Think About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policies and Religious Freedom,” I argue that current proposals to create new LGBT protections with varying types of religious exemptions will not result in what advocates claim is “Fairness for All.” Instead, they will penalize many Americans who believe that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other—convictions that the Supreme Court of the United States, in Obergefell v. Hodges, recognized are held “in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world.”

Mr. Anderson is a talent and conservatives benefit greatly from his work. However, like Victor Davis Hanson yesterday, I’m not sure he grasps how far “identity politics” goes. This series shows that it extends far beyond the relatively narrow “LGBT.” In fact, there is almost no end to the number of letters that can follow the “T.”

Here is the next article from Public Discourse — this one is by Scott Beauchamp. For the sake of space I’ll only list the title and its introductory sentence which says a lot:

The Kids Aren’t All Right: What the Gender-Identity Revolution Has in Common with 1960s’ Drug Culture
The LSD consciousness-expansion movement of the late sixties and today’s gender-identity fixation are both counterfeit revolutions. The two might initially appear very different, but they share similar intellectual assumptions and make analogous mistakes.

And lastly, from Emily Zinos:

Biology Isn’t Bigotry: Christians, Lesbians, and Radical Feminists Unite to Fight Gender Ideology
Public schools have a duty to serve all children, but a school cannot serve children and a totalitarian ideology all at once. For the sake of children’s well-being, Christian mothers are uniting with their radical feminist and lesbian sisters to reject the idea of “gender identity.”

Just three sentences from the article:

The belief that one’s internal sense of self determines maleness or femaleness and that subjective feelings take precedence over an objective physical reality constitutes a severing of mind from body. Our sex is who we are: it can’t be amputated from our body like a limb. But the true believers in gender ideology are hard at work, pulling in converts to this gnostic worldview that shuns the material that we humans are made of: the body.

I realize many readers are terribly anxious to learn about today’s paraphilia so let’s get to it. (Oh, and I’m sorry, TheOnion.com, you can’t have this one since it’s real and not satire.)

Once again we’re going to rely on trusty Wikipedia. As an aside, just so you know, I am fully aware of the problems with Wikipedia. If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, check out here how they duplicate the Oprah Winfrey “pregnant man” lunacy (spoiler alert: “Thomas,” formerly Tracey, was born a girl).(Would it be disrespectful at this point to include the letters ‘LOL’?)

So…here’s Wikipedia:

Autassassinophilia is a paraphilia in which a person is sexually aroused by the risk of being killed. The fetish may overlap with some other fetishes that risk one’s life, such as those involving drowning or choking. This does not necessarily mean the person must actually be in a life-threatening situation, for many are aroused from dreams and fantasies of such.

Be sure to click on this link to learn more — because you need to be ready when Nintendo bows to pressure and creates a video game which includes autassassinophilias. Your kids might need it explained — that is, if they haven’t gotten to that chapter in the diversity textbook at school.

Up next we’ll take a look at another example of the ways people experience “intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, situations, or individuals.” If America is to be truly free, shouldn’t all sexcentric-identified individuals be treated equally under the law?

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT Is Not a Color & Fetishism

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: ‘Public Discourse’ Weighs In & Bisexuality

Baseball season gets underway this week, a welcome distraction from the political battles in Washington.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate is warring over the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.  The Republicans say he’s a stellar nominee, a judicial umpire who calls balls and strikes as he sees them.  Democrats, led by New York’s Charles Schumer, however, say the judge is a creature of “special interests” who would slide into a base with spikes up and who deserves to be filibustered.

Who are those “special interests” you might ask? Well, they would be anyone who disagrees with progressives, which the November election indicated is at least half the country if not more.

The Republicans say Judge Gorsuch will help the Court return to constitutional principles.  Democrats claim that he will “undo the gains” made by decades of liberal jurisprudence.  We can only pray that they’re both right.

Over the years, federal courts – especially the U.S. Supreme Court – acquired an out-sized role in the nation’s affairs, especially during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.  Think of the federal government as a three-bodied creature, with one of the bodies in a black robe towering over the others with a giant Nancy Pelosi gavel.

Restraining the U.S. Supreme Court’s power, even slightly, has been a non-starter.  Congress is packed with lawyers who dream of serving on or before the highest bench someday.  It’s also an open secret that many politicians are relieved when hot button issues slide off their plates and directly onto the Court’s docket.

Nonetheless, given the Court’s near-omnipotence, the central question of what constitutes lawful authority will dominate public discussion in years to come, especially if there is a conservative majority.  Right now, “lawful authority” is in the eye of the beholder on many levels.

For example, progressives applauded a federal judge in Washington State in February for overruling President Trump’s order temporarily barring immigrants from seven terror-prone Muslim-majority nations.  The judge snapped his fingers, extending constitutional rights to foreigners not even in this country and accused Mr. Trump of racist motives for good measure.  Another judge in Hawaii piled on last week by ruling against Mr. Trump’s re-written order affecting six countries. Progressives again cheered.

On the other hand, when a federal judge in Texas ruled in 2015 that President Obama had usurped congressional authority with executive actions shielding five million illegal immigrants from deportation, progressives pledged resistance and urged people to take to the streets.

Progressives look with favor on the 500 or so “sanctuary” cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration laws and procedures.  Conscience, they say, overrides mere lawfulness.  Except, of course, when it comes to Christian bakers, florists, wedding planners and photographers. They must be forced by law to violate theirs.

Only a few months ago, progressives cheered an edict from the Obama Administration ordering all school systems in America to accommodate female-identified males in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms or risk losing federal funds.  Can’t these schools follow the rule of law?

And what about those scoundrels, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or Hobby Lobby and other Christian-owned businesses that don’t want to obey Obamacare’s abortifacient mandate?  What are they trying to do, provoke anarchy?

When the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United restored collective political free speech, President Obama pilloried the justices in person during the 2010 State of the Union address, badly misrepresenting the facts of the ruling.  Fellow progressives vowed to see the opinion overturned.

But when the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges invented a “right” to same-sex marriage in the penumbras of the Constitution in 2015, overriding state marriage laws – 31 of them constitutional amendments approved by voters – progressives instantly pronounced it “settled law.”

They said the same about the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that struck down abortion laws in every state – “settled law.”

If these examples leave you confused about what is actually lawful authority, don’t worry.  We have an omniscient media to explain it to us.  If they feature lots of people “hailing” a ruling or order, you can bet it’s about another judicial or executive demolition job on America’s heritage, the Constitution, founding values and genuine civil rights.  If they quote lots of people condemning the ruling or order as an abuse of authority, it’s a clear victory for constitutional governance.

To progressives and the lockstep media, legitimate authority means only advancing progressive causes.  If so, it’s no big deal for liberal presidents or judges to run outside the baselines when they need to score some runs.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

In June of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples could not be denied marriage licenses by states. However, on December 8, 2016, the Arkansas Supreme Court correctly ruled that the Obergefell decision should not be used to re-write all state laws relating to family, parenthood, and vital records, when they are unrelated to the issuance of marriage licenses.

The decision, in the case of Smith v. Pavan, overturned a lower court decision that had declared the Arkansas law governing birth registration unconstitutional. The statute in question says that in the absence of a court order or agreement by all parents and spouses involved,

“If the mother was married at the time of either conception or birth or between conception and birth the name of the husband shall be entered on the certificate as the father of the child.”

The law had been challenged by three lesbian couples. In all three cases, one of the women had borne a child who was conceived through artificial insemination involving an anonymous sperm donor as the father. When the children were born, the couples sought to have the names of both women listed on the birth certificate as the child’s parents. The Arkansas Department of Health (ADH) refused.

The legal principle involved has long been known as the “presumption of paternity.” If a married woman gives birth to a child, her husband is presumed to be the father of that child. Something which is factually true in the vast majority of cases is simply presumed to be true under the law.

Advocates of same-sex marriage and homosexual parenting, however, seek to convert the “presumption of paternity” into a gender-neutral “presumption of parentage.” Under this view, the legal spouse—regardless of sex—of a woman who gives birth is presumed to be the child’s other parent.

In other words, they would have the law go from presuming something that is almost always factually true to presuming something that cannot possibly be factually true—namely, that two women are both the biological mother of a newborn child.

Fortunately, the Arkansas Supreme Court rejected the absurd outcome of presuming the impossible.

In a model of judicial restraint, they interpreted the words of the statute by “giving the words their ordinary and usually accepted meaning in common language.” Noting that the dictionary definition of “husband” is “a married man,” and of “father” is “a man who has begotten a child,” they concluded that “the statute centers on the relationship of the biological mother and the biological father to the child, not on the marital relationship of husband and wife.”

The court’s opinion cited an affidavit by the ADH’s Vital Records State Registrar elaborating on the rationale for this approach:

The overarching purpose of the vital records system is to ensure that vital records, including birth certificates as well as death certificates and marriage certificates, are accurate regarding the vital events that they reflect…

Identification of biological parents through birth records is critical to ADH’s identification of public health trends, and it can be critical to an individual’s identification of personal health issues and genetic conditions.

To emphasize the significance of—and differences between—biological motherhood and biological fatherhood, the Arkansas Supreme Court also cited language from a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a question of citizenship for children born out of wedlock and outside the United States to one American parent. Ruling (in Nguyen v. INS) that Congress could treat children of American fathers differently from children of American mothers, the Court said,

[t]o fail to acknowledge even our most basic biological differences—such as the fact that a mother must be present at birth but the father need not be—risks making the guarantee of equal protection superficial, and so disserving it. Mechanistic classification of all our differences as stereotypes would operate to obscure those misconceptions and prejudices that are real… The difference between men and women in relation to the birth process is a real one, and the principle of equal protection does not forbid [legislative recognition of that fact].

Ironically, the author of the decision in Nguyen was Justice Anthony Kennedy—who also wrote the Obergefell decision on marriage.

LGBT activists, of course, will deplore the Arkansas decision. Perhaps, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, they and other liberals will even be tempted to lump it together with what they stereotype as other acts of “bigotry” committed by “angry white males.” Yet the Arkansas Supreme Court has a female majority—four women and three men. Three of the four women joined the majority opinion in the birth certificate case, while two of the three men dissented. And the opinion of the court was written by Associate Justice Josephine Linker Hart—a female pioneer in the legal profession in Arkansas, an Army veteran, and a woman with Cherokee ancestry.

The truth is that every child has both a mother and a father—even if the latter is only an anonymous sperm donor. The truth is that two women (or two men) alone can never conceive a new human life. The truth is that a birth certificate or registration is supposed to record the factual circumstances of a biological event—the birth of a child.

When the Obergefell decision was handed down, those celebrating it used a simple slogan: “Love Wins.” (The fallacy in that was the assumption that any and every relationship characterized by “love” is constitutionally entitled to be designated a “marriage.”)

Pro-family Americans can be grateful that, at least in the Arkansas Supreme Court, “Truth Wins.”

This article was originally posted at the FRC blog.

Written by Richard Wiley

Freedom of conscience is at risk, and the attack upon it has officially enveloped the field of medicine.

Remember the 11,588,500 word bill passed by Congress in 2010, accompanied by the hopeful promise of easy-access healthcare? The bill that continues to cause the closure of small businesses and price hikes in the insurance market? That’s right, the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) strikes again. Pointing back to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now using Obamacare to target the right to liberty of conscience.

Reminiscent of the rainbow colors projected on the White House after Obergefell v. Hodges, the HHS is doing everything it can to solidify its celebration and special treatment for those struggling with their sexuality. Pursuant to a final rule to become effective July 18th entitled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities,” every medical practice treating any patient who participates in HHS administered or funded health programs or in the health insurance marketplaces will be required to comply with Obamacare’s new “nondiscrimination protections”.

According to HHS, unlawful “discrimination” based on “sex” is not limited to choosing to operate on a female instead of a male simply because she’s a female and he’s a male; the new definition includes refusing to provide sex-reassignment surgery because you disagree with it as a matter of medical or moral judgment. The rule thus mandates that medical institutions provide sex reassignment surgeries to patients regardless of the religious interests of the institution or physician. Possible penalties for violating the rule include civil suits, fines, and criminal investigations.

It doesn’t stop with transgender conundrums, however; the new rule also includes those requesting abortions to the list of protected classes. Although the HHS declares that the rule (section 1557) does not replace the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act or other provisions pertaining to religion, it fails to articulate any means of seeking relief under religious exemptions and is silent as to which provisions would be lifted and which would be stayed, should any relief be requested. The rule simply states, “[i]nsofar as the application of any requirement under this part would violate applicable Federal statutory protections for religious freedom and conscience, such application shall not be required.” No other mention of religious exemption is provided, leaving further procedural steps in limbo to be determined on a case-by-case basis with no uniform application.

Regulations will typically lay out a section detailing which providers are exempt under which circumstances because not doing so produces nebulous interpretations of the law. The practice is more than a courtesy, and omitting such a provision is a telling action indeed.

In addition to breaking down the freedom of conscience and religion, the rule erodes doctors’ professional judgment regarding which procedures are necessary, effective, and plausible for their patients. It’s another case of micromanagement that will have additional economic and moral ramifications for the medical field.

In the end, it’s clear that the rule is a ruse. While the federal government brandishes the colorful flag of the downtrodden class of sexual revolutionaries in its hand, it tramples on the ashes of truth, proudly proclaiming its fidelity to the cause of the deceived. Ironically and tragically, the very thing that can cause healing, that can provide some long overdue stability to struggling families, is the very thing the government continues to deride: the truth.

This article was originally posted at the FamilyFoundation.org blog.

Written by Samuel Smith

[On Friday] in a 170-page ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion by issuing its own Judgment in favor of Liberty Counsel’s Petition for Mandamus. In the petition, Liberty Counsel demanded on behalf of its Alabama clients – Alabama Policy Institute (“API”) and Alabama Citizens Action Program (“ALCAP”) – that the state’s probate judges obey Alabama’s Constitution and laws. On March 4, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered the probate judges to immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

“The ruling last year by the Alabama Supreme Court was historic, and is one of the most researched and well-reasoned opinions on marriage to be issued by any court in the country. Today’s opinion by the Alabama Supreme Court calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion ‘illegitimate’ will be remembered in history like the ‘shot heard around the world,’” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Following the June 26, 2015, U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Obergefell opinion on marriage, the Alabama Supreme Court requested the parties to file additional briefs. [On Friday], the Alabama Supreme Court issued its final Judgment, thus affirming and implementing its March 4, 2015 opinion.

“The Alabama Supreme Court has openly rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 marriage opinion, labeling it ‘illegitimate’ and without legal or precedential authority. This is a clear victory for the rule of law and an historic decision by the Alabama Supreme Court. The Judgement makes permanent the Alabama Supreme Court’s order prohibiting probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Alabama Supreme Court has rejected the illegitimate opinion of five lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Staver.

Chief Justice Roy Moore and Justice Tom Parker issued concurring opinions openly criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court marriage opinion. Using Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert’s term of “five lawyers” when referring to the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell opinion, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote a blistering 105-page concurring opinion:

• Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court’s holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order.

• I agree with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts, and with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, that the majority opinion inObergefell has no basis in the law, history, or tradition of this country. Obergefell is an unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority that usurps the legislative prerogative of the states to regulate their own domestic policy. Additionally, Obergefell seriously jeopardizes the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

• Based upon arguments of “love,” “commitment,” and “equal dignity” for same-sex couples, five lawyers, as Chief Justice Roberts so aptly describes the Obergefell majority, have declared a new social policy for the entire country. As the Chief Justice and Associate Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito eloquently and accurately demonstrate in their dissents, the majority opinion in Obergefell is an act of raw power with no ascertainable foundation in the Constitution itself. The majority presumed to legislate for the entire country under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. 

• The Obergefell majority presumes to amend the United States Constitution to create a right stated nowhere therein. That is a lawless act. 

• I submit that our Founders knew a lot more about freedom than [Justice Kennedy’s opinion] indicates. They secured the freedoms we enjoy, not in judicial decrees of newly discovered rights, but in the Constitution and amendments thereto. That a majority of the Court may identify an “injustice” that merits constitutional correction does not dispense with the means the Constitution has provided in Article V for its own amendment.

• Although the Court could suggest that the Constitution would benefit from a particular amendment, the Court does not possess the authority to insert the amendment into the Constitution by the vehicle of a Court opinion and then to demand compliance with it. 

• Novel departures from the text of the Constitution by the Court are customarily accompanied by pretentious language employed to conceal the illegitimacy of its actions. Justice Scalia in hisObergefell dissent refers to this abandonment of “disciplined legal reasoning” as a descent into “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

• Some of the ostentatious phrases used in the majority opinion [are] more suitable to a romance novel.

• The majority seeks to invoke the grief, sorrow, and compassion associated with a Greek tragedy. Riding a tidal wave of emotion, the ensuing tears and pathos then suffice to fertilize a new constitutional right nowhere mentioned in the Constitution itself.

• Abandoning the role of interpreting the written Constitution, the majority has instead decided to become the supposed “voice” of the people, discerning the people’s sentiments and updating the document accordingly. The function of keeping the Constitution up with the times, however, has not been delegated to the Court — or to Congress or the President; that function is reserved to the states under Article V. 

• Historically, consummation of a marriage always involved an act of sexual intimacy that was dignified in the eyes of the law. An act of sexual intimacy between two men or two women, by contrast, was considered “an infamous crime against nature” and a “disgrace to human nature.”Homosexuals who seek the dignity of marriage must first forsake the sexual habits that disqualify them from admission to that hallowed institution. Surely more dignity attaches to participation in a fundamental institution on the terms it prescribes than to an attempt to wrest its definition to serve inordinate lusts that demean its historic dignity.

• A “disgrace to human nature” cannot be cured by stripping the institution of holy matrimony of its inherent dignity and redefining it to give social approval to behaviors unsuited to its high station. Sodomy has never been and never will be an act by which a marriage can be consummated.

• Government exists to secure that right. Because liberty is a gift of God, it must be exercised in conformity with the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

• Liberty in the American system of government is not the right to define one’s own reality in defiance of the Creator. . . . But the human being, as a dependent creature, is not at liberty to redefine reality; instead, as the Declaration of Independence states, a human being is bound to recognize that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are endowed by God. Those rights are not subject to a redefinition that rejects the natural order God has created.

• Citing Genesis 2:24 — The Obergefell majority’s false definition of marriage arises, in great part, from its false definition of liberty. Separating man from his Creator, the majority plunges the human soul into a wasteland of meaninglessness where every man defines his own anarchic reality. In that godless world nothing has meaning or consequence except as the human being desires. Man then becomes the creator of his own reality rather than a subject of the Creator of the Declaration.

• This false notion of liberty, which permeates the majority opinion in, is the ultimate fallacy upon which it rests. In a world with God left out, the moral boundaries of Scripture disappear, and man’s corrupt desires are given full rein. The end of this experiment in anarchic liberty is yet to be seen. The great sufferers will be the children — deprived of either a paternal or a maternal presence — who are raised in unnatural families that contradict the created order.

• The invocation of “equal dignity” to justify the invention of a heretofore unknown constitutional right is just another judicial mantra to rationalize the invalidation of state laws that offend the policy preferences of a five-person majority.

• The majority opinion in Obergefell represents the culmination of a change in our form of government from one of three separate-but-equal branches to one in which the judicial branch now exercises the power of the legislative branch.

• The Obergefell majority, presuming to know better than the people themselves how to order the fundamental domestic institution of society, has usurped the legislative prerogatives of the people contrary to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

• In short, the majority acts not as a court of law but as a band of social revolutionaries. The Chief Justice, amazed at this presumption, exclaims: “Just who do we think we are?”

• The Chief Justice’s quotation of Justice Curtis’s Dred Scott dissent merits serious consideration. If acquiescence to Obergefell indicates that “we have no longer a Constitution,” then the legitimacy of Obergefell is subject to grave doubt. If five Justices of the Supreme Court may at will redefine the Constitution according to their own policy preferences, the mechanism of judicial review, designed originally to protect the rights of the people from runaway legislatures, has morphed into the right of five lawyers to rule the people without their consent.

• Indeed, as the Chief Justice warns, the plenary power the majority asserts to redefine the fundamental institutions of society offers no assurance that it will not give birth to yet further attacks on the social order.

• If, as the Chief Justice asserts, the opinion of the majority is not based on the Constitution, do state judges have any obligation to obey that ruling? Does not their first duty lie to the Constitution? 

• The right to change the form of government in this country belongs to the people themselves through the amendment process, not to judicial oligarchs.

• These metaphors identify the essence of the majority’s actions: an illegal displacement and usurpation of the democratic process. Chief Justice Roberts accuses the majority of imposing “naked policy preferences” that have “no basis in the Constitution.” Accordingly, the majority’s “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy” is “dangerous for the rule of law.” The unmistakable theme that emerges from these critiques is lawlessness.

• Justice Scalia also emphasizes the revolutionary character of the majority’s assault on the social order — elevating the “crime against nature” into the equivalent of holy matrimony. This decision, “unabashedly not based on law,” represents a “social upheaval” and a “judicial Putsch.” Justice Alito sounds the same themes. The Court has not unwittingly tread into forbidden territory; instead, it has acted “far beyond the outer reaches” of its authority, boldly trampling the right of the people “to control their own destiny.” 

• For the last 50 years, the Supreme Court has consistently misused the Fourteenth Amendment to destroy state laws that protect the marital relation and its offspring. Obergefell is the latest fruit of this corrupt tree (refer to Matthew 7:17-18).

• Truly, the less basis the majority has for its innovations upon the Constitution, the grander is the language employed to justify them, as if high-blown rhetoric could compensate for the absence of constitutional substance. 

• Obergefell is but the latest example of the Court’s creation of constitutional rights out of thin air in service of the immorality of the sexual revolution. Like Roe, Obergefell is no more than “an exercise of raw judicial power … an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”

• Amendments to the Constitution are the business of the people pursuant to Article V; they are not the business of the Court under Article III. Truth may not always be clearly seen, but the majority’s reasoning should not blind us to the reality that the Court seems determined to alter this nation’s organic law. 

• The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has existed for millennia and has never been considered an “ill tendency.” By contrast, the Court’s attempt to redefine marriage is “a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty.” 

• The Obergefell majority, conspicuously overlooking the “essential and historic significance” of the connection between religious liberty and “supreme allegiance to the will of God,” failed to appreciate the seriousness of imposing a new sexual-revolution mandate that requires Alabama public officials to disobey the will of God. 

• Religious liberty, however, is about more than just “teaching” and “advocating” views of marriage. The majority condescendingly approves religious speech against same-sex marriage but not religious practice in conformity with those beliefs. As Chief Justice Roberts states in his dissent: “The First Amendment guarantees … the freedom to ‘exercise’ religion. Ominously, this is not a word the majority uses.”

• Obergefell promises to breach the legal protections that have shielded believers from participating in acts hostile to their faith. As Chief Justice Roberts points out, the Obergefellmajority piously declaims that people of faith may believe what they want and seek to persuade others, but it says nary a word about them practicing or exercising their faith as the Free Exercise Clause provides.

• The Free Exercise Clause, an express constitutional provision, logically takes precedence over a pretended constitutional right formulated from whole cloth by “five lawyers.”

• Foreseeing the dire consequences for religious freedom in the principle that same-sex marriage must be given equal stature with holy matrimony and foreseeing the inevitable pressure to compel religious institutions, businesses, and practitioners of professions to conform to that unreality, it would be imprudent to wait for the onset of these persecutions, to stand idle until Obergefell “usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.” Rather “the axe [must be] laid unto the root of the trees,” (refer to Matthew 3:10) and the consequence avoided by denying the principle. To allow a simple majority of the United States Supreme Court to “create” a constitutional right that destroys the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment violates not only common sense but also our duty to the Constitution. 

• I disagree with the conclusion that the “rule of law” requires judges to follow as the “law of the land” a precedent that is “a super-legislative imposition,” “a mockery,” “a legal fiction,” and “an utter travesty.”

• By the plain language of Article VI, state judges are bound to obedience to the Constitution, laws made in pursuance thereof, and treaties made under the authority of the United States, not to the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. 

• Thus, in the plainest terms and employing emphasis, Hamilton declared that acts of the federal government that invade the reserved rights of the states are “acts of usurpation” that deserve to be treated as such. Such acts “would not be the supreme law of the land, but an usurpation of power not granted by the Constitution.”

• The Supremacy Clause, quite obviously, by this chain of reasoning, does not give the United States Supreme Court or any other agency of the federal government the authority to make its every declaration by that very fact the supreme law of the land. If the Court’s edicts do not arise from powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, they are to be treated not as the supreme law of the land but as mere usurpation. 

• Thus, if precedents are “manifestly absurd or unjust,” “contrary to reason,” or “contrary to the divine law,” they are not to be followed.

• Applying Blackstone’s analysis, which is compatible with that of Hamilton, one must conclude that the Obergefell opinion is manifestly absurd and unjust, as demonstrated convincingly by the four dissenting Justices in Obergefell and the writings of two Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court in Costanza. Basing its opinion upon a supposed fundamental right that has no history or tradition in our country, the opinion of the Obergefell majority is “contrary to reason” as well as “contrary to the divine law.”

• The Obergefell opinion, being manifestly absurd and unjust and contrary to reason and divine law, is not entitled to precedential value. 

• If, as an individual who is sworn to uphold and support the United States Constitution, I were to place a court opinion that manifestly and palpably violates the United States Constitution above my loyalty to that Constitution, I would betray my oath and blatantly disregard the Constitution I am sworn to uphold. Acquiescence on my part to acts of “palpable illegality” would be an admission that we are governed by the rule of man and not by the rule of law. Simply put, the Justices of the Supreme Court, like every American soldier, are under the Constitution, not above it. 

• The general principle of blind adherence to United States Supreme Court opinions as “the law of the land” is a dangerous fallacy that is inconsistent with the United States Constitution. Labeling such opinions as “the rule of law” confuses the law itself — the Constitution — with an opinion that purports to interpret that document.

• Opinions of the Supreme Court that interpret the Constitution are, as Lincoln said, “entitled to very high respect and consideration,” but only insofar as they are faithful to that document. In a case like Obergefell, the “evil effects” Lincoln described should be confined to the unfortunate defendants in that case. We must protect the institution of marriage from judicial subversion and maintain loyalty to the principles upon which our nation was founded.

• Finally, we should reject the conversion of our republican form of government into an aristocracy of nine lawyers.

• Some contend, however, that Obergefell, by its mere existence, abrogates the March 2015 orders in this case. Those orders, of course, were not the subject of review in Obergefell. 

• The Court had no jurisdiction to order nonparties to Obergefell to obey its judgment for they have not had an opportunity to appear and defend.

• No Alabama probate judges were parties to Obergefell. Neither were they officers, agents, or servants of any of the defendants in those cases, or in active concert or participation with any of them. The Obergefell defendants were state officials in the four states in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, namely Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Needless to say, Alabama probate judges were not agents, servants, or employees of any of those state officials. Nor were they in “active concert or participation” with any of them.Thus, the judgment in Obergefell that reversed the Sixth Circuit’s judgment does not constitute an order to Alabama probate judges.

• The dissents of Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito provide ample justification to refuse to recognize Obergefell as a legitimate judicial judgment. Obergefellconstitutes an unlawful purported amendment of the Constitution by a judicial body that possesses no such authority. As Chief Justice Roberts stated: “The right [Obergefell] announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”

• Rather than limiting themselves to the judicial function of applying existing law to the facts and parties before them, the Obergefell majority violated “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” by purporting to rewrite the marriage laws of the several states to conform to their own view of marriage.

• Even more injurious to the rule of law, the Obergefell majority “overleap[ed] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people” as expressed in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The majority thus has jeopardized the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and the right to acknowledge God as the author and guarantor of true liberty. 

• By transgressing “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” and “overleap[ing] the great Barrier” which protects the rights of conscience, the Obergefell majority “exceed[s] the commission from which they derive their authority” and are “tyrants.” By submitting to that illegitimate authority, the people, as Madison stated, become slaves. Free government, rather than being preserved, is destroyed.

• Obergefell is completely without constitutional authority, a usurpation of state sovereignty, and an effort to impose the will of “five lawyers,” . . . on the people of this country. 

• In my legal opinion, Obergefell, like Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade that preceded it, is an immoral, unconstitutional, and tyrannical opinion. Its consequences for our society will be devastating, and its elevation of immorality to a special “right” enforced through civil penalties will be completely destructive of our religious liberty.

• Obergefell contradicts “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” that were invoked in the organic law upon which our country is founded. To invariably equate a Supreme Court decision that clearly contradicts the Constitution with “the rule of law” is to elevate the Supreme Court above the Constitution and to subject the American people to an autocracy foreign to our form of government. Supreme Court Justices are also subject to the Constitution. When “that eminent tribunal” unquestionably violates the limitations set forth in that document, lesser officials — equally bound by oath to the Constitution — have a duty to recognize that fact or become guilty of the same transgression.

In a separate concurring opinion, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Parker wrote:

• “Obergefell conclusively demonstrates that the rule of law is dead.”

• “Obergefell … trampled into the dust the last vestiges of the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court.”

• “Obergefell is not based on legal reasoning, history, tradition, the Court’s own rules, or the rule of law, but upon the empathetic feelings of the ‘five lawyers’ in the majority.”

• “[The Supreme Court] majority illegitimately imposed its will upon the American people. We now appear to be a government not of laws, but of ‘five lawyers.’”

• “Obergefell is ‘no judicial act at all’ because it is ‘without principled justification.’”

• “Obergefell is without legitimacy.”

• “This is not the rule of law, this is despotism and tyranny.”

• “Despotism and tyranny were evils identified in the Declaration of Independence as necessitating the break with King George and Great Britain.”

• “Obergefell is the latest example of judicial despotism.”

•  “As justices and judges on state courts around the nation, we have sworn and oath to uphold the United States Constitution. We have not sworn to blindly follow the unsubstantiated opinion of ‘five lawyers.’”

Justice Parker quotes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 abortion decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

[T]he Court cannot buy support for its decisions by spending money and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees. The Court’s power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands…. [A] decision without principled justification would be no judicial act at all…. The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decision on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make. Thus, the Court’s legitimacy depends on circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation.

“Justices and judges are bound to interpret the U.S. Constitution. When they write opinions that have no legal foundation, then their opinions lack legal legitimacy. That is what the five lawyers did on the U.S. Supreme Court in the marriage opinion. They ignored the Constitution, the Court’s precedents, and millennia of human history. Their opinion calls into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. When we the people lose trust in the Justices, the authority of the Supreme Court is undermined. If the people accept this 5-4 opinion, then we have transitioned to a despotic form of government. The people must now decide if we are governed by the rule of law or the whim of unelected judges,” concluded Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

Written by Mark. J. Fitzgibbons

The importance of Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away this past weekend, is based not just in what he said in his U.S. Supreme Court opinions, but how he said it.

Famous for his biting and even entertaining dissents, Scalia at times (and usually the right ones) expressed a common sense moral outrage at both his liberal and less consistent conservative colleagues. He was the ‘everyman’ in his outrage, saying what we might want to say about their departures from sound constitutional jurisprudence, but far more gifted with a legal genius shaped by an originalist view of the Constitution — and a wittiness that made conservatives smile and chuckle.

His flamboyant style of writing legal opinions made him what marketing guru Seth Godin calls a “purple cow.” He stood out in a field of more common brown cows. But more than that, it was the boldness of his style that made him an intellectual leader for originalism. In a city and system of institutions that tend to stifle and hold back the candid, he made candor about the original intent of the Constitution his brand.

He gave conservatives hope that the Constitution would not be lost for a lack of honesty or standing by principle, the shortage of which are trademarks of Washington and government.

Scalia understood that American constitutional law is based in the morality that civil society should be structured such that we should do no harm to others. The “we” includes government. The Constitution is structured to limit government’s harm to individuals and our God-given rights. Scalia understood the need for judicial fidelity to that structure.

This rule of law over government itself is a key to originalism, and creates a bright-line contrast with the progressive view that the ends of those in government are at least almost always what are best for the rest of us despite transgressing the Constitution. The Founders understood both the perpetual necessity and dangers of government, and therefore structured the governing law over government — the Constitution — to limit the dangers.

Scalia was criticized by liberals in the legal profession, particularly academicians, for his famously biting opinions. Some claimed Scalia’s ‘zingers’ created contempt for the courts. To the contrary, it was Scalia’s deep and passionate respect for the role of the courts in our constitutional structure that led to his judicial poking at how some judges have an inflated and faulty sense of their authority.

In his dissent to the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing a constitutional right to gay marriage, for example, he wrote this about the majority opinion: “I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of [founding-era Supreme Court Justices] John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Justice Scalia was certainly not above growing in his understanding of the Bill of Rights. Known to many as a law-and-order conservative, Scalia nevertheless wrote one of the most important decisions in recent decades about the protections guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment for searches and seizures.

His majority opinion in U.S. v. Jones from 2012 brought the Fourth Amendment back to its roots in concepts of “trespass.” His opinion countered a dangerous neglect of property rights by progressives who, not fond of property rights, favored a less comprehensive “privacy” focus, which had controlled Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for some decades to the exclusion of a property rights approach.

Scalia wrote,

[F]or most of our history the Fourth Amendment was understood to embody a particular concern for government trespass upon the areas (“persons, houses, papers, and effects”) it enumerates . . . But as we have discussed, the . . . reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test has been added to, not substituted for, the common-law trespassory test.

Scalia led for civil liberties by returning to this originalist understanding of the Fourth Amendment, which mentions property but not privacy. The common law concepts of trespass on our persons and property, and our rights in their security vis-a-vis others who seek to intrude on that security, are broader that mere privacy. Scalia recognized in this opinion that to prevent harm — but only after following basic procedures or protocols designed to limit abuses by government — may searches and seizures occur. When government neglects the notions of trespass inherent in the Fourth Amendment, even our privacy is threatened.

Scalia also became more of a First Amendment champion. His disappointing dissent in McIntryre v. Ohio Election Commission from 1995 about anonymous political speech was countered by Justice Clarence Thomas in a short treatise on the subject in the form of a concurring opinion.

Scalia would later become one of the most reliable justices on the First Amendment. In expressly targeting the “dangerous dissent” by Justice Stevens in the Citizens United case, Scalia exposed Stevens’ poor attempt to come across as using an originalist approach against the First Amendment. Stevens, no originalist, was throttled by Scalia’s scathing concurring opinion:

The Framers didn’t like corporations, the [Stevens] dissent concludes, and therefore it follows (as night the day) that corporations had no rights of free speech. Of course the Framers’ personal affection or disaffection for corporations is relevant only insofar as it can be thought to be reflected in the understood meaning of the text they enacted—not, as the dissent suggests, as a freestanding substitute for that text. But the dissent’s distortion of proper analysis is even worse than that. Though faced with a constitutional text that makes no distinction between types of speakers, the dissent feels no necessity to provide even an isolated statement from the founding era to the effect that corporations are not covered, but places the burden on petitioners to bring forward statements showing that they are (“there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the notion that anyone believed [the First Amendment ] would preclude regulatory distinctions based on the corporate form.”

As the life and work of Justice Scalia are honored and remembered, conservatives would do well to be grateful for his bold leadership on behalf of the originalist moorings of constitutional jurisprudence.

This article was originally posted at AmericanThinker.com

Written by Joe Rigney

A consensus appears to be developing among otherwise reasonable people that Kim Davis, of Rowan County fame, either needs to start issuing marriage licenses or quit her job.

For those just joining us, a county clerk in Kentucky is refusing to issue marriage licenses against her conscience and is also refusing to resign. Her name, which should be on a bronze plaque on the side of the courthouse, is Kim Davis. A federal judge has ordered her to appear in his courtroom Thursday to explain why Davis should not be held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses.

File this under sentiments which seem extreme at the time, but heroic when the danger is over, and you are reading them inscribed on the base of a polished marble memorial.

But there is a difference between contempt of court and seeing that the courts have become contemptible.

Now while florists and bakers and photographers enjoy a great deal of active support from the broader Christian world, the most people like Davis will get is a sympathetic lack of sympathy. It falls out this way because Christians generally understand the private sector — that’s where they live, after all — but they don’t understand the nature of government. They don’t understand the public sector and the relationship of God’s  Word to it. Their theology develops a distinct limp as soon as they step into the public square, but it is not the kind of limp you might acquire by wrestling with God at Peniel. It is more like what might happen if you dropped the Collected Works of Immanuel Kant on your foot. That results in quite a distinctive limp, one  you see everywhere.

Here is a quick sampling of that sympathetic lack of sympathy:

Carly Fiorina says the clerk needs to comply or move on. Ed Morrissey says the same. Ryan Anderson generally agrees with that, as does Rod Dreher. Note particularly the last comment in Dreher’s piece — that there are hills to die on, but that this is not it.

Update: After Ryan Anderson objected, I went back and reread him. His position is more nuanced than I let on, and so my apologies to him. I still have objections to his solution, but that will require a separate post.

So I want to begin by making an observation about that hill-to-die-on thing, but then move on to discuss the foundational principle that is at stake here. After that, I want to point out what it would look like if more government officials had the same understanding that Kim Davis is currently displaying — despite being opposed by all the intoleristas and also despite being abandoned by numerous Christians who admire her moxie but who don’t understand her moxie.

First, whenever we get to that elusive and ever-receding “hill to die on,” we will discover, upon our arrival there, that it only looked like a hill to die on from a distance. Up close, when the possible dying is also up close, it kind of looks like every other hill. All of a sudden it looks like a hill to stay alive on, covered over with topsoil that looks suspiciously like common ground.

So it turns out that surrendering hills is not the best way to train for defending the most important ones. Retreat is habit-forming.

This brings us to my second goal this morning, which is to highlight the principle. Pick some absurd issue — admittedly a dangerous thing to do in these times that defy the tender ministrations of satire — and that means that to be sufficiently absurd it would have to be an issue like legalized cannibalism. Now let us say that we live in a time, some weeks hence, when cannibalism can be practiced generally on established free market principles (Dahmer v. Illinois, 2023). But if you want to have a BBQ of that nature in a city park, on city property, then you are going to need a permit. Now say that you are Kim Davis’s granddaughter, and your office issues the permits for all activities in all the city parks. Do you issue the permit? Or do you arrange for a compromise? Find somebody in the office not nearly so squeamish as you are? “Hey, Queequeg! Can you handle this one?”

I interrupt this post to anticipate an objection to my choice of illustrations. “Are you saying, Wilson, that same sex marriage can be equated with cannibalism?” Well, no, they are very different sins. That said, they are both very wicked and God hates them both, and county clerks ought not give either one the sanction of law. But I am not trying to equate anything here — I am simply trying to illustrate how a believer’s conscience ought to work if he is employed by a government that tries to sin grievously through the instrumentality of a godly magistrate. This is just how I paint illustrations, with bright yellows and gaudy greens. I do that so that people can see them.

So, follow me closely here. Chesterton once said that art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. We have a set up where a line must be drawn at some point. And in the abstract all evangelical Christians would almost certainly agree that when that line was crossed, wherever it is, the revolt of the county clerks would be a good thing. With me?

Let me spell it out further. Back in the thirties, if a county clerk had refused a marriage license to a couple because they attended a church where the pastor baptized people with heads upstream, instead of her preferred way, with heads downstream, we would all agree that said clerk had gotten above himself. And if a county clerk expedited and stamped all the processing papers for trains full of Jews headed to Auschwitz, we would all have no problem with said clerk being prosecuted after the war. And when he was prosecuted, “it was entirely legal” would not be an adequate defense. Got that? Two positions, marked clearly on the map, and there is a line somewhere between them.

Where is that line? Why is that line there? By what standard do we make that determination? Who says? These questions cannot be answered apart from the law of God, and that is why we are having such trouble with them. We want a pagan society to respect our sentimental religiosity, and that is not going to happen any time soon.

The point here is not just private conscience. The right to liberty of conscience is at play with florists, bakers, and so on. But Kim Davis is not just keeping herself from sinning, she is preventing Rowan County from sinning. That is part of her job.

Every Christian elected official should be determining, within the scope of their duties, which lines they will not allow the state to cross. When they come to that line, they should refuse to cross it because “this is against the law of God.” They should do this as part of their official responsibilities. This is part of their job. It is one of the things they swear to do when they take office.

This is nothing less than Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrates (Institutes 4.20.22-32), which I would urge upon all and sundry as relevant reading material. And as Calvin points out, after Daniel — a Babylonian official — disobeyed the king’s impious edict, he denied that he had wronged the king in any way (Dan. 6:22-23).

Now this takes me to my citation of Jefferson above. Some might say that it is a shame that I, a staunch Calvinist, have taken to quoting a Deist on the relationship of righteousness to government. And I say that it is a shame that a 18th century Deist has a better grasp of the relationship of righteousness to government than do two and a half busloads of 21st century Reformed seminary professors. The striking inconsistency might have two possible causes, in other words.

If just ten governors treated Obergefell the same way Kim Davis is treating it, that entire unrighteous and despotic imposition would collapse and fall to the ground. And if they did so, they would not be sinning against the United States. Rather, they would be preventing the United States from sinning.

The end game here is not armed revolution. The end game is simply a refusal to cooperate with their revolution. Make them fire or impeach faithful officials. Once removed, such faithful officials should run for office again with a promise to continue to defy all forms of unrighteous despotism. As one friend of mine put it, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”

Some might ask what the good in that would be. Wouldn’t it just result in no Christians in such positions? Perhaps, but it would be far better to have godless results enforced by the godless than to insist that the godly do it for them. It would be far better to have the “no Christians in power results” when it was actually the case that no Christians were in power. I would rather have non-Christian clerks acting like non-Christian clerks than to have Christian clerks do it for them. I mean, right?

Don’t tell believers to stay engaged so that they can make a difference, and then, when they start making a difference, tell them that this is not a hill to die on. Make the bad guys reveal themselves. Make them crack down on evangelical county clerks, while continuing to wink at sanctuary cities and local defiance of federal pot laws. Why do they apply their “It’s the law! Bow down!” standard so inconsistently? Well, mostly it is because evangelicals are sweet and naive enough to let them get away with it.

So it is ironic that this valiant stand is being taken by a clerk, because those sidling away from her provide a standing example of our real problem — the trahison des clercs.

Article was originally posted at douglaswilson.com

Written by Dr. Frank Newport

The two major decisions recently handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court have very direct relationships to public opinion. One of the decisions fits well with majority public opinion. The other, in a broad sense, does not. The first corresponds to public opinion that has shifted significantly over the past several years, while the second relates to public opinion that has been more fixed. One of these is an issue that has very much been tethered to or anchored by Americans’ underlying religious beliefs; the other is a purely secular issue unrelated to the usual concerns based on religion. But it is the religiously tethered attitude that has seen the biggest change and that ends up more in line with the U.S. Supreme Court decision, while the secular attitude has remained unchanged and is more out of sync with the court’s ruling.

The first of these two major SCOTUS decisions, of course, is the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that in essence legalized same-sex marriage across the country. The second — albeit basically a ruling on a technicality — is the King v. Burwell decision that validated the continuation of the Affordable Care Act.

Obergefell falls in line with majority public opinion in the U.S. Americans’ attitudes toward legalizing same-sex marriage have shifted dramatically in recent years, as has been well-documented, with six in 10 in our latest Gallup reading (before the decision) in favor.

This dramatic change in attitudes has occurred despite the fact that the issue of same-sex marriage is one of a cluster of family and reproduction issues that traditionally are strongly connected to religious doctrine, and highly correlated with an individual’s religiosity. Given that religious beliefs are tethered to fundamental beliefs in a Supreme Being and in overall worldviews, one would thus hypothesize that religiously connected attitudes have a very fundamental anchor that would be resistant to change.

But that hasn’t been the case. In fact, attitudes concerning a list of moral behaviors and values traditionally linked to religious doctrines — including same-sex marriage — have shifted quite substantially in recent years, all toward acceptance of what may previously have been more negatively sanctioned behaviors. There are still marked religious differences in tolerance for these types of behaviors, but the shifts have occurred among segments that are both highly religious and not so religious. In short, attitudes connected to the type of family and reproduction issues most highly related to most religions’ normative structures have been the most labile.

We’ve seen relatively little change in terms of attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act, albeit over its fairly short existence and the brief period in which we have measured it. Less than half of Americans said that they approved of the Affordable Care Act in our latest measure, before the SCOTUS decision (we are updating this measure now). And there has been no rapid or significant change in those attitudes in recent years as the provisions of the healthcare law have become operational.

These attitudes about Obamacare are thus the ones that appear to be connected to an underlying anchor or foundation, certainly more so than is the case with same-sex marriage. (While attitudes about the Affordable Care Act are correlated with religiosity, I think that’s more of an artifact of the relationship between religion and politics than it is a representation of religiously driven attitudes.)

If it’s not religion, what is that anchor? One answer to that question is Americans’ fundamental attitudes toward government. It’s quite likely that the healthcare law has become symbolic of the role of government in people’s lives, and that in turn appears to be a very strong and apparently stable base issue in Americans’ minds.

Check out this trend on a core Gallup question asking Americans about their views of the role of government in Americans’ lives:

This trend graph does not show the same type of progressive change seen in moral attitudes since the mid-1990s. The one strong shift in the period immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks quickly dissipated, as attitudes fell back into the accustomed pattern shortly thereafter. If Obamacare is bound up with these fundamental underlying attitudes that are relatively stable and fixed, even though secular in nature, that could help explain why views toward Obamacare are not moving a lot. Government and its role in society, in other words, may be the type of bedrock or fundamental underlying attitude we traditionally associate with religion, while moral issues appear much more likely to be built on “shifting sand.”

There has been a good deal of discussion as to how the presidential candidates — particularly Republican candidates — will handle a changing environment in which their positions on moral issues and values are less mainstream than they were even just a few years ago. Many of the candidates will no doubt back off from a heavy focus on these issues, taking account of public opinion, unless they assume that the quickness with which attitudes changed in one direction means they could change back in the other just as fast — an unlikely possibility.

But a campaign focus on the Affordable Care Act is another matter. Unlike same-sex marriage, the healthcare law does not enjoy majority public opinion (unless that changes in new, post-decision measures). And the lack of a major shift in attitudes toward Obamacare or toward the underlying issue of the role of government in Americans’ lives suggests that these attitudes are strongly held.

Some commentators have assumed that expansion of the role of government is the simple and logical next step in the evolution of American society. Others still view government expansion as a strong evil. But if conservatives have the equivalent of a religious underpinning to their opposition to big government — and if liberals have just as strong an underpinning to their support for big government — then the debate has the potential to become a powerfully important fulcrum on which the election could turn.

If candidates on the left are going to focus on their conviction that the role of government needs to be expanded — say, in terms of intervening in the economic system to reduce inequality or create jobs by increased focus on infrastructure — they are going to have to try to understand why this provokes such a strong reaction from those who are more in the center or on the right. Similarly, if Republican candidates are going to focus on a call for reducing the role of government in Americans’ lives, they are going to have to try to understand why this is so strongly unacceptable to those more in the center or on the left.

I’ve pointed out before how these attitudes about government are two-pronged, involving both philosophic and practical concerns. Candidates are going to have to deal with both. The role of government — along with the usual suspects of the economy and international relations — could be the major playing field on which the coming election is played out. Moral issues and values may be less so.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well.

This article was originally posted at the Gallup.com website.