While U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pretends to be quaking in her Jimmy Choo stilettos about alleged homegrown domestic terrorists, she doesn’t seem to know who they are. Pelosi faux-frets about tragic school shootings and an imagined insurrection, while ignoring the human slaughter she openly supports and the terrorist threats and actions she secretly supports. And she’s not alone on the left, which is why the legacy press and most leftist collaborators remain electively mute as Jane’s Revenge seeks vengeance against any organization that tries to protect the unborn.

Jane’s Revenge, an anonymous anarcho-feminist collective with apparently multiple terrorist cells around the country, has claimed responsibility for the bombing of several crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations and warns via blood-red graffiti that more violence is coming:

If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.

Abortions were quite safe for women by the 1960s and remain wildly unsafe for tiny humans in the womb today. In fact, abortions are lethal for most—though not all—gestating humans.

In the first communiqué from Jane’s Revenge, titled “NIGHT OF RAGE: AN AUTONOMOUS CALL TO ACTION AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY,” the vengeful urge women to be ferocious in the service of a nonexistent constitutional right to slaughter the unborn:

Why is it that we are so afraid to unleash hell upon those who are destroying us? … Your anger has been stolen from you. To this we say: no more. We need to get angry. We need the state to feel our full wrath. We need to express this madness fully and with ferocity. We need to quit containing ourselves. We need them to be afraid of us.

Just what America needs right now: More wrathful leftist women with babies in their sights.

We already know the pro-human slaughter movement is intellectually and morally bankrupt, but this part of Jane’s Revenge’s manifesto makes clear they’re also lunatics:

Last week, an evil creature slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in their classroom in Texas. While some may call this horrific act “senseless” or “random,” we know that’s not the case. We know that this was an act of male domination and patriarchal violence, meant to make women, children and teachers live in fear. We know it is deeply connected to the reproductive violence about to be unleashed on this land by an illegitimate institution founded in white male supremacy.

Say what? The Uvalde shooting is connected to the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization? Allowing states to restrict human slaughter is “reproductive violence“? On what basis do the vengeful Janes make those claims?

(As an aside, I wonder if Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought the Supreme Court is an illegitimate institution.)

Leftists—including women—refuse to arm teachers, refuse to keep criminals in jail, refuse to support the police, refuse to safeguard our borders, and refuse to acknowledge the critical need of children for their fathers. And then the leftist Janes ironically allege the patriarchy (i.e., conservatives) cause harm to children.

Leftists—including women—celebrate the experimental chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minor children in the service of an arguable, anti-science, metaphysical superstition and then claim to care about children.

A lone male killer mowed down 19 children, while an army of matriarchal murderesses march in our blood-soaked streets fighting for the legal right of women to mow down close to 900,000 humans in the womb annually.

Leftists shout their voluntary slaughter of their own children and call it “reproductive health care” and freedom.

Jane’s Revenge was named after the Jane Collective (or just Jane), a group of seven young women in Chicago who arranged and sometimes performed illegal abortions in the years 1969-1974, after which their wicked services were no longer needed.

In an HBO documentary titled The Janes, the now elderly Janes claim they were saving women’s lives. What is not mentioned is that, according to the pro-human slaughter Guttmacher Institute, by “1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200.” Compare that to the million deaths of human beings in the womb every year since 1973–half of whom are girls and all of whom were denied any choice about being aborted.

Jane’s Revenge has more plans for oppressed “people who can get pregnant” (Sane people call people who can get pregnant “women.”), the first step of which is for women to feel their “fury”:

The next step is carrying that anger out into the world and expressing it physically. … On the night the final ruling [i.e., Dobbs v. Jackson] is issued … we are asking for courageous hearts to come out after dark. Whoever you are and wherever you are, we are asking for you to do what you can to make your anger known. We have selected a time of 8pm for actions nationwide to begin.

Sounds to me like a call for domestic terrorism—er, I mean mostly peaceful protests.

The second communiqué from the terrorist organization Jane’s Revenge includes a threat directed to crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations:

You’ve read the communiqués from the various cells, you’ve seen the proliferating messages in graffiti and elsewhere, and you know that we are serious.

We were unsurprised to see thirty days come and thirty days pass with no sign of consilience or even bare-minimum self-reflection from you who impersonate healthcare providers in order to harm the vulnerable. …

Your thirty days expired yesterday. We offered an honourable way out. You could have walked away. Now the leash is off. And we will make it as hard as possible for your campaign of oppression to continue. We have demonstrated in the past month how easy and fun it is to attack. We are versatile, we are mercurial, and we answer to no one but ourselves. We promised to take increasingly drastic measures against oppressive infrastructures. Rest assured that we will, and those measures may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti. Sometimes you will see what we do, and you will know that it is us. Sometimes you will think you merely are unlucky, because you cannot see the ways which we interfere in your affairs. But your pointless attempts to control others, and make life more difficult, will not be met passively. Eventually your insurance companies, and your financial backers will realize you are a bad investment.

From here forward, any anti-choice group who closes their doors, and stops operating will no longer be a target. But until you do, it’s open season, and we know where your operations are. The infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. We will never stop, back down, slow down, or retreat.

What was the “honourable way out” that Jane’s Revenge offered pro-life activists? Complete submission to the vengeful Janes’s pernicious will.

Jane’s harpies seem ignorant of the irony in griping about alleged oppression while threatening retaliation if fellow women refuse to sanction the slaughter of the least among us.

Maybe Biden can squeeze in some time between creating Ministries of Truth and spying on wayward parents to investigate Jane’s Revenge who are actually threatening Americans.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Who-Are-Americas-Domestic-Terrorists-B.mp3

Following the unprecedented leak of the entire U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion on the controversial abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, morally and emotionally unhinged, pro-human slaughter women and their collaborators became apoplectic. Next, U.S. Senate leftists terrified at the possibility that diverse citizens in diverse states will pass diverse laws to protect prenatal humans began clamoring for the elimination of the filibuster, so they—Senate leftists—can codify human slaughter in federal law. So much for diversity and federalism.

The self-identifying Catholic Joe Biden said, “If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose [to have her offspring offed]. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice [i.e., pro-human slaughter] officials this November.” And yet, Biden is unwilling to wait to see who voters choose or what state levels of government will do. Leftists like Biden don’t care what the great unwashed masses want. Nor do they care what the Constitution says. Leftists want to impose their will, ideology, and desires by any unethical and unconstitutional means they can dream up.

Biden is justified in fearing that states may pass laws to protect incipient lives. In contrast to the leftist claim that most Americans support Roe v. Wade, recent Rasmussen polling shows that most Americans would like to see it overturned:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters would approve of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade …. Forty-five percent (45%) would disapprove of overturning Roe v. Wade ….

…

In his draft opinion, Justice Alito declared that the Roe v. Wade decision “was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.” Forty-seven percent (47%) of voters agree with Justice Alito’s statement…. Forty-six percent (46%) disagree with Alito.

Biden and his U.S. Senate co-conspirators want to rob citizens and states of the right to decide whether humans in the womb can be killed by more powerful humans (i.e., oppressors). According to the website “Equal Access to Abortion Everywhere,” the federal law Biden frantically seeks to pass before Dobbs is decided and before Americans can exercise their right to govern themselves would,

eliminate all existing state restrictions including “six-week bans, 20-week bans, mandatory ultrasounds … counseling, waiting periods, and requirements that providers obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals.

Abortion without restrictions would be legal in every state throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy for any or no reason if the Women’s Health Protection Act is passed.

In attempting to rationalize the censorship of conservative ideas, “diversity”- and “tolerance”-loving leftists have claimed society has no obligation to tolerate conservative speech on topics related to sexuality because such speech may lead to violence. This raises a thorny question for leftists: Should society tolerate bloodthirsty banshees shrieking in the streets about their right to destroy the bodies of their offspring and threatening the lives of those who oppose human slaughter? Might such banshee speech lead to violence?

U.S. Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Neil Gorsuch have had their homes and lives targeted.

Lacie Wooten-Holway, an unneighborly neighbor of Brett Kavanaugh revealed his home address and organized a protest in front of his home, declaring that “We’re about to get doomsday … so I’m not going to be civil to that man at all.”

A Molotov cocktail set ablaze the office of a conservative public policy organization in Wisconsin and graffitied it with the threat, “If abortions aren’t safe, then neither are you.” Sounds like a threat of violence to me.

A Catholic church in Fort Collins, Colorado was spraypainted with the words “My body my choice” and the symbol for anarchism.

Three churches in Texas were vandalized.

In an interview with Salon magazine, an anonymous representative of the anti-life group Ruth Sent Us said “that some members of the network have privately discussed not just disrupting Mass but burning the Eucharist.” Might that lead to violence?

Clearly banshee speech may lead to violence, and yet as of this writing, neither the Biden administration nor the DOJ has condemned the doxing of six U.S. Supreme Court Justices, the illegal efforts to influence the decision of these justices, the torching of conservative non-profit organizations, or the protests in front of Supreme Court Justices private homes.

Instead (and as usual), Biden finds this a good time to blame the “Maga crowd”:

What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this Maga crowd is really the most extreme political organization that exists in American history.

This is about a lot more than abortion… What happens if you have a state change the law, saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children? Is that legit?

Biden’s claim is either a bizarre non sequitur or a wildly fallacious slippery slope argument with no causal or logical link between a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Dobbs case and an absurd hypothetical state law banning “LGBTQ” students from the classroom.

Is the “Maga crowd” an organization? Who’s in it? Everyone who voted for Trump? Are all the Americans who voted for Trump members of a political organization more extreme than BLM, Antifa, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Panthers, or eco-terrorist organizations?

Perhaps the cognitively impaired Biden isn’t aware that many liberal legal scholars who support abortion argue that nowhere in the text or history of the Constitution can a right to abortion be found, and hence, Roe v. Wade was an atrocious decision.

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) made an equally bizarre statement:

This is 50 years of rights in a leaked opinion where Justice Alito is literally not just taking us back to the 1950s, he’s taking us back to 1850s. He actually cites the fact that abortion was criminalized back when the 14th Amendment was adopted.

If Klobuchar thinks 49 years imparts immunity from being overturned to a lousy U.S. Supreme Court decision, then she must still be enraged about the de facto overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson, which stood legally unmolested for 58 years.

Klobuchar’s disdain for Alito “taking us back to the 1850s” is perplexing. One would expect a member of the U.S. Senate to have deep respect for much that was written in the 1800s and even the 1700s.

California Governor Gavin Newsom tripped all over leftist “logic” when talking about the draft opinion:

If men could get pregnant, this wouldn’t even be a conversation.

That’s both embarrassingly cliché and politically un-woke. Surely, the good leftist Newsom has heard the news from the world of pseudo-science: Men can get pregnant. Or maybe he has heard the news, but he’s caught in the sticky, tangled web of ideological mayhem that leftists have woven to deceive.

For decades, unhinged women committed to child sacrifice have tried to claim that humans in the womb were just clumps of cells or tumor-like masses. When that nonsensical claim failed, they admitted that, sure, the product of conception between two humans is a human but it’s not fully developed, or it’s imperfect, or it will suffer, or it’s parasitic, or it’s father is a criminal, or it’s mother is poor, or it’s mother doesn’t want it, or it’s mother is not ready to care for it. If those arguments were applied consistently to all humans, we would have a murderous society unsafe for every human.

So, then came the next lie: Morally unhinged women proclaimed that sure, womb-dwellers are human, but they’re not persons. But why, inquiring minds wanted to know, are these humans with human DNA, many of whose human body parts are sold to scientists to find cures for human diseases, not persons?

Philosopher Francis Beckwith offers a definition of personhood that abortion cheerleaders will definitely not like:

[W]hat is crucial morally is the being of a person, not his or her functioning. A human person does not come into existence when human function arises, but rather, a human person is an entity who has the natural inherent capacity to give rise to human functions, whether or not those functions are ever attained. And since the unborn human being has this natural inherent capacity from the moment it comes into existence, she is a person as long as she exists.

…

A human person who lacks the ability to think rationally (either because she is too young or she suffers from a disability) is still a human person because of her nature. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of a human being’s lack if and only if she is an actual person.

Questions of personhood and unalienable rights are metaphysical questions on which there will never be agreement. Rational, reasonable, compassionate people argue that if we can’t agree on something as momentous as when life begins or when a human becomes a person deserving of the right not to be murdered, the prudent and ethical response would be to err on the side of not killing humans that may, indeed, be persons.

But liberals are not concerned about the injustice of killing human fetuses. Liberal concerns are directed toward the self.

Nathanael Blake, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, illuminates the self-serving political philosophy of the secular left:

The liberal project seeks to provide, to the extent possible, freedom from unchosen constraints, duties, and loyalties in life.

This is why liberalism naturally favors a broad welfare state. The purpose of this welfare state is both to protect those who are dependent, and to protect those who do not want to be depended on.

Thus, liberalism professionalizes care from childhood to old age. The animating vision is a society in which everyone is taken care of, but no one has a private obligation to care for anyone else; no one has to sacrifice ambition, career, or personal freedom to care for children or parents or a sick relative.

But this liberal ideal is unrealizable with children, especially those in utero. …

This is why liberals are complaining about “forced birth” — they really are horrified at the idea of an unchosen obligation to care for another person. … Liberalism cannot tolerate that sort of involuntary duty, and so it requires the opt-out of abortion on demand.

Thus, a political philosophy that begins by claiming to protect the weak and dependent, and to liberate us from the unfairness of the givenness of life, ends by asserting an absolute right to take the lives of the weak and dependent — precisely because they are dependent.

Human life developing in the womb can offer nothing but need; to respond to that need with violence is to assail human dependence in its purest form. This bloodshed lays bare how liberalism has become a revolt against our humanity.

It’s also a revolt against God, which explains why leftists who want the freedom to sacrifice their children target Christianity. Jesus teaches us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses daily. He teaches that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” He teaches that God is the Author of life who creates the inmost being of children in their mothers’ wombs. And he teaches that every life unjustly snuffed out by fallen humans was fearfully and wonderfully made by God.

Take ACTION: Sponsored by left-wing U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal [D-CT], the Women’s Health Protection Act (S. 4132) would nullify any existing state pro-life laws protecting the life of the unborn, if signed into law. Both U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth are co-sponsors of this radical bill which would also force doctors and healthcare workers to violate their consciences. Click HERE to let them know that this legislation is absolutely unacceptable and offensive to you. Urge them to protect innocent pre-born human life.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Schemes-of-Fallen-Humans-to-Destroy-Life.mp3

Read more:

Fact Sheet by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Democrats’ National Abortion Bill Replaces Word ‘Woman’ With ‘Person’ (The Daily Signal)

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson has provided sufficient evidence for the U.S. Senate to vote against her nomination to fill Justice Stephen Breyer’s seat following the full-court press he received from leftists to abdicate his lifelong seat before the 2024 election. That evidence includes her stupefying claim that she is unable to define “woman” because she’s not a biologist. The press has profligately identified Jackson as a “woman.” Has anyone confirmed that with a biologist?

Jackson’s claim was made in response to a line of questioning by U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who began by citing the U.S. Supreme Court Case United States v. Virginia in which the buttinsky U.S. government sued the state of Virginia and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) claiming that the policy limiting VMI admissions to males violated the U.S. Constitution. Blackburn cited Ruth Bader Ginsburg who voted with the majority in overturning VMI’s male-only admission policy:

Supposed inherent differences are no longer accepted as a grounds for race or national origins classifications. Physical differences, however, are enduring. The two sexes are not fungible. A community made up exclusively of one sex is different from a community composed of both.

Blackburn then asked Jackson, “Do you agree with Justice Ginsburg that there are physical differences between men and women that are enduring?”

Jackson, looking like the proverbial headlight-blinded deer, took an awkward beat and then stammered,

Um, Senator, respectfully, I am not familiar with that particular quote or case, so it’s hard for me to comment as to whether or not …

This was a half-truth. While it likely was “hard” for Jackson to comment on the now-incendiary topic of whether there are enduring physical differences between men and women, the reason for that difficulty is not Jackson’s ignorance about the VMI case.

The reason it is hard for her to acknowledge the obvious truth that even children know is that Jackson didn’t want to offend either the rational members of the U.S. Senate who will vote for or agin her nomination or to offend the “trans” cult, which wields inordinate political power in service of their reality-denying disorder.

Blackburn tried again:

Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of “men” and “women” as “male” and “female”?

And again, Jackson bobbed and weaved:

And again, because I don’t know the case, I don’t know how to interpret it. I’d have to read the whole thing.

Surely, the third time would be a charm, particularly because Blackburn omitted reference to the VMI court case. Blackburn asked,

Can you provide a definition of “woman”?

Here came Jackson’s whopper. She replied confidently,

No. I can’t.

Incredulous, Blackburn asked,

You can’t?

Jackson chuckled and responded,

Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.

Surely Jackson knows how biologists define woman. Biologists defined “woman” long before cross-dressers decided to goose-step in their stiletto-accoutered jackboots through America’s institutions trying to convince Americans that biologists know nothing about the phenomena of man and woman.

Transtopians are baffled at the notion that biologists could know what a woman is because in Transtopia, “man” and “woman” have nothing to do with hard science, anatomy, physiology, genetics, or reproduction. Transtopians believe in pseudoscience and metaphysical alchemy.

Transtopia is a solipsistic Wonderland where words mean whatever Transtopians say words mean and where nothing exists outside each individual’s mind—including minds beclouded by sin, confusion, delusion, and deviant desires. If there’s a mismatch between a Transtopian’s mind/feelings and their anatomically healthy, properly functioning bodies, they just know the error is with their healthy, properly functioning bodies. “Treatment,” therefore, means artificially disrupting normal, properly functioning biological processes and excising normal, healthy anatomical parts as if they’re malignant tumors.

For Transtopians, nothing matters but the subjective feelings of the self, and that’s why Transtopians demand everyone ask every person they meet what their pronouns are. While weeping about being “mis-gendered,” they tyrannically demand compulsory mis-sexing.

Transtopians exalt subjective feelings, except for the subjective feelings of those who live and move and have their being outside of Transtopia. Their feelings, beliefs, and values mean nothing in Transtopia. Transtopians hate anyone who refuses to move body, mind, heart, and soul to Transtopia, ironically labeling dissenters hateful, intolerant, bigoted, and non-inclusive.

Jackson’s expansive ignorance of biology accounts too for why she doesn’t know when life begins or when a baby in the womb is viable. Maybe if she spent less time cozying up with Planned Parenthood, she would free up some time to read a basic biology text. Presumably, her husband—a doctor—or the Internet could help her find out the answers to those not-so-vexing questions.

But perhaps Jackson’s most troubling statement was this:

I have a religious view that I set aside when I am ruling on cases.

That claim drips with the anti-constitutional view that a Supreme Court Justice must sever her religious faith from the exercise of her duties. That view, however, is at odds with the spirit and text of the Constitution which prohibits religious tests for holding office and which guarantees the free exercise of religion. For true Christians, their religious faith inheres every aspect of their lives. It shapes their ethics; morality; political values; and their views of government, human nature, and liberty.

To paraphrase Richard John Neuhaus, that which is political is moral and that which is moral, for religious people, is religious. It is no less legitimate to have political or judicial decisions shaped by religion than by psychology, philosophy, “gender ideology,” or self-serving personal desire.

A democratic republic cannot exist without objective normative ethics that render legitimate the preservation or circumscription of individual rights. Historically, the sources of the absolute, transcendent, objective, universal truths that render legitimate our legal system have been “the institutions of religion that make claims of ultimate or transcendent meaning.” Neuhaus explains that this “does not represent an imposition of the private into the public spheres, but rather an expansion or transformation or recollection of what is public.” He argues that when religion is utterly privatized and eliminated as a “source or transcendence that gives legitimate and juridical direction and form, something else will necessarily fill the void, and that force will be the state.”

While Ketanji Brown Jackson may view her silly non-answers as canny political stratagems, many people view them as dishonest, foolish, and cowardly.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/SCOTUS-Nominee-Jacksons-Stupefying-Answers.mp3

Written by Liberty McArtor

Proponents of court-packing argue that adding more judges to our nation’s judiciary is the magical solution to urgent problems, and even paint the picture that doing so is an act of goodwill. But far from being a necessity, court-packing is a brazen power-grab by one political party to fix the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices or federal judges to get the political results they want.

And when we look at the history of court-packing across the world, there’s no way around it: Court-packing is a dangerous scheme with severe implications that would erase freedom and rights for future generations and destroy America’s constitutional order.

To equip you—and all Americans—in exposing the lie and the radical plan to overthrow America’s court system, here are four common (or rather, bogus) court-packing claims debunked with facts and logic.

1. Myth: The Supreme Court has been stolen.

Fact: The U.S. Supreme Court currently has nine highly qualified, legitimately appointed and confirmed justices. The far Left just doesn’t like some of them.

The reason court-packing advocates say the U.S. Supreme Court was “stolen” is because they disagree with the political party and the president who appointed the latest three justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett). For instance, they claimed that Justice Barrett’s confirmation happened too quickly. But as First Liberty President and CEO Kelly Shackelford has noted, justices have been confirmed in the same fashion nearly thirty (30) times. In fact, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom Justice Barrett replaced, was confirmed in a similar time frame.

Ironically, stealing the U.S. Supreme Court is exactly what would happen if the coup attempt to add two, four or even six more justices were to succeed.

2. Myth: Court-packing has popular support.

Fact: Court-packing is widely unpopular—and historically has been within both parties. 

Polls conducted in the last few years show the majority of Americans oppose court-packing.

• In 2020, a New York Times-Siena College poll found that fifty-eight percent (58%) of likely voters opposed packing the U.S. Supreme Court.
  
• In 2019, Rasmussen polls found that only twenty-seven percent (27%) of Americans favor packing the U.S> Supreme Court with additional justices.

What’s more, opposition to court-packing is prevalent across the political spectrum.

Here are some quotes from several politicians and prominent figures on both sides of the political aisle, starting with the current president:

• President Joe Biden (D):

In 1983: “President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate and the United States Congress a proposal to pack the court. … But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make.”

In 2020: “I’m not a fan of court packing.”

• Ted Cruz (R-TX)

In 2020: “Packing the Court means one very specific thing: expanding the number of justices to achieve a political outcome. It is wrong. It is an abuse of power.”

• Joe Manchin (D-WV)

In 2020: “I want to allay those fears, I want to rest those fears for you right now because when they talk about whether it be packing the courts, or ending the filibuster, I will not vote to do that.”

• Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

In 2020: “I can’t think of a more destabilizing event for America than changing the number of [justices] on the Supreme Court every election cycle, because it becomes a winner take all for the Court.”

• Jon Ossoff (D-GA):

In 2020: “We shouldn’t expand the Supreme Court just because a justice may be confirmed with whom we disagree on policy.”

• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933 – 2020):

In 2019: “If anything would make the court look partisan…it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”

The truth is both parties have long opposed court-packing, and the sudden flip by a select group of elites on the Democratic side on this issue exposes this scheme for what it really is: a barefaced power grab.

3. Myth: Court-packing is a routine procedure.

Fact: Changes to the size of the U.S. Supreme Court are very rare in America’s history, and the few partisan attempts at court-packing have been failures.

Congress has changed the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices only a total of seven times in American history. The radical Left distorts this fact to make you think court-packing is normal. But in nearly 250 years and 120 Congresses, the seven prior changes (many of them due to workloads and the addition of states to the Republic) do not offer a justification for packing the Court today. On the contrary, the seven changes show how rare court-packing is in America. What’s more, the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices hasn’t changed at all since 1869—that’s over 150 years!

4. Myth: Court-packing will save democracy.

Fact: Court packing will crush civil liberties by making the U.S. Supreme Court a partisan tool of whoever holds power.  

Using a baseball metaphor, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts once said of a judge’s role, “It’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

What would happen if several partisan justices were added to the U.S. Supreme Court—justices who were instructed to “pitch” and “bat” for the team that appointed them? The U.S. Supreme Court would become an extension of the party currently in power. The fundamental principle of the “separation of powers” would be destroyed.

If more and more partisan judges are added to courts every election cycle, those in the minority—people who don’t agree with the current ruling party—would have their freedom squashed under the weight of a rigged judiciary. Civil liberties like religious freedom would have no stable protection.

Far from saving the principles of our democratic republic, court-packing would lead to the demolition of constitutional rights—just like it happened in other nations, such as Venezuela and Argentina.

This article was originally published at FirstLiberty.org.

Written by Calley Mangum

Last Saturday, President Trump nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett, 48, has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since October 2017. While there may be much dissent across political lines over the confirmation of Judge Barrett for the U.S. Supreme Court, the facts of her extensive qualifications speak for themselves.

Amy Coney Barrett is a married mother of seven children, five biological and two adopted from Haiti. She grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and graduated from Rhodes College magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She then attended Notre Dame Law School, where she was the executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review. Barrett graduated summa cum laude in 1997, and she clerked from 1998-99 for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

“That is trial by fire,” Barrett said in an interview with The Heritage Foundation. “The way Justice Scalia ran his chambers is we all had to be prepared to discuss all the cases […] Justice Scalia, obviously very quick witted, brilliant, and he didn’t want you to agree with him. He wanted you to say what you thought. And so disagreeing with him as I sometimes did and pushing back with someone like Justice Scalia really taught me a lot.”

After clerking for Justice Scalia, Barrett worked a few years in private practice before returning to Notre Dame Law School in 2002 to teach. She remained at Notre Dame until President Trump nominated her for the 7^th Circuit in 2017. When she was nominated, every clerk who served with Barrett at the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998-99 wrote a letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee recommending Barrett for the 7^th Circuit seat.

During her 7th Circuit confirmation hearing, Barrett was subjected to continued questions regarding her Catholic faith and its influence on her role as a judge, questions that many argue violated the U.S. Constitution’s No Religious Tests Clause.

“I don’t think that faith should influence the way a judge decides cases at all,” said Barrett in her interview with Heritage. And she said the same to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee during her hearing. “Somehow people seem to think that I said the opposite of what I said, but I think that one of the most important responsibilities of a judge is to put their personal preferences and their personal beliefs aside because our responsibility is to adhere to the rule of law.”

Barrett’s record while on the 7^th Circuit reflects this dedication to the law, including the U.S. Constitution. (Read Heritage’s article for more details on Barrett’s rulings while on the 7^th Circuit.) Barrett has said her judicial approach falls under “original public meaning originalism,” or that “the meaning of the words at the time they were ratified is the same as their meaning today.”

The confirmation hearings for Judge Barrett in the U.S. Senate are scheduled to start Monday, October 12.

This article was originally published by NCFamily.org.

Written by Rick Claybrook, Esq.

The U.S. Supreme Court fall term begins this month, and, as of now, it does not appear to be as action-packed for religious liberty as this past term. However, at least one important case is in the hopper, and several are in the pipeline.  And, of course, all is overshadowed by the presumed replacement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

The case in the hopper is Fulton v. Philadelphia, dealing with whether Philadelphia can stop contracting with Catholic Social Services to perform foster care services because CSS refuses to place children with same-sex couples due to its religious beliefs. The case presents many interesting angles: practical, philosophical, personal.

a.) It is set to be argued on November 4.  Will Judge Barrett be confirmed by then?  If not, and there is a 4-4 split, will it be reargued?

b.) One issue presented is whether Employment Division v. Smith, Justice Scalia’s most notorious decision among many religious freedom advocates, should be overruled. Will Judge Barrett, a self-described Scalia acolyte, be inclined to overrule Smith?

c.) Of course, as we argued in our Fulton amicus merits brief, it is also quite possible to decide in favor of CSS without overruling Smith by taking the path of “hybrid” rights, i.e., that more fundamental rights are at stake than just free exercise.

d.) The city in its briefs before the Supreme Court has also shifted the focus of its defense, now principally arguing that there is much less religious freedom when the government is handing out contracts for a function for which it has primary responsibility.

A few petitions filed last term seem to have been held awaiting what the Court does with Smith in Fulton (if anything).  Foremost among them is Arlene’s Flowers (19-333), which involves a Christian florist who refused to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex “marriage” ceremony. This case has already been “gvr’d” (granted, vacated, and remanded) once for reconsideration in light of Masterpiece Cakeshop, and we argued in our amicus brief in support of the petition that, by requiring the florist to contribute to the ceremony on pain of penalty, she was being unconstitutionally compelled to speak and assemble in a ceremony to which she had religious objection.

Tensions between SOGI discrimination laws and religious freedom are also at play in several other cases in the pipeline. The petition in Patients for Privacy v. Barr (20-62) raises whether a school’s forced inclusion of opposite-sex identifying (“trans”) students in locker rooms violates other children’s bodily privacy rights and associated parental rights. Several lower courts have recently applied Bostock’s reading of sex to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in Title VII (employment) to Title IX (school sports). This issue was specifically reserved by Justice Neil Gorsuch in his Bostock majority opinion, and it would give an interesting read on a freshly minted Justice Barrett.

Several cases are in the pipeline that could raise whether one of Justice Ginsburg’s most notorious decisions, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, should be reconsidered and overruled. That 5-4 decision held that an “all comers” policy at a public university could trump a religious organization’s restrictions on its leadership. Putting to one side that there really is no such thing as a consistently enforced “all comers” policy at any public university (which almost all have fraternities and sororities, for example), the decision has received substantial criticism for violating the association/assembly rights protected by the First Amendment.  A Justice Barrett could provide the vote to overrule this precedent.

Another case that has been to the Court before and may shortly be back is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which involves a Washington state high school firing a football coach because he refused to stop kneeling at the center of the field with head bowed, by himself, after football games. The Court refused to consider the case in a preliminary injunction context, with a concurring opinion expressing sympathy for the coach but saying that the record needed to be further developed. He has now lost again, on a full record, at the Ninth Circuit. If en banc consideration is not granted, it will almost undoubtedly be the subject of another petition at the Court. If granted, it may provide a first opportunity for a Justice Barrett to indicate her reading of the scope of the Establishment Clause and its interplay with the Free Exercise Clause.

Covid 19 has put the Free Exercise Clause to the test in many cases challenging restrictions on in-person religious services.  The decisions so far have been presented in a preliminary injunction context, and the churches have lost, 5-4, with Justice Ginsburg always in the majority, on the issue of whether churches have been treated in a non-discriminatory fashion. Cases will likely be subject to petition soon that are past the preliminary injunction stage and may present other issues. For example, a Romanian Orthodox church just lost in the Seventh Circuit its challenge to Illinois’s 10-person maximum for indoor services, despite its meeting space holding thousands. Is a one-size-fits-all requirement irrational, especially when free exercise rights are involved? And California in many counties has prohibited in-person religious services entirely. Would a confirmed Justice Barrett tip the scales 5-4 in favor of the churches?

Of course, the primary focus on Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearings, whether expressly or implicitly, will be her likely vote on abortion cases. Several cases are in the lower courts that could be the subject of successful petitions during the term, as states have had laws enjoined that, for example, move back the latest gestation date by which abortions can take place and prohibit abortion due to sex or disability. One pending petition (20-93) raises the issue of whether an unborn child is entitled to equal protection, which does not seem likely to be granted.

Until his retirement from his partnership in Crowell & Moring LLP, one of the country’s premier government contracts firms, Rick Claybrook specialized in bid protest and claims litigation. Throughout the 40+ years of his career, Mr. Claybrook has been active in pro bono matters involving religious liberty and life issues. His experiences in this area have been broad and varied, from hearings before a zoning board to defend a small house church to filing multiple amicus briefs in the United States Supreme Court and other state and federal appellate and trial courts. For over a decade, he has been a member of the supervising committee of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom, which is the advocacy arm of the Christian Legal Society. 

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In a shocking U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch voted with the axis of evil—that is, with Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the axis of evil decided that in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the word “sex” includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”—both subjectively constituted conditions. As a result, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” now prohibits employers from firing employees who self-identify as homosexual or as the sex they are not and never can be.

The crux of the argument goes something like this: If a company that allows a woman who gets breast implants and wears lipstick, stilettos, and dresses to work fires a man who gets breast implants and wears lipstick, stilettos, and dresses to work, the company has discriminated against him based on his sex and, therefore, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Not only are “trans”-cultists eradicating all public accommodation of real sex differences, but they’re also eradicating every cultural convention that recognizes, honors, and reinforces sex differences. They’re saying that not only are they permitted to reject cultural conventions regarding hairstyles, jewelry, clothing, and makeup, but everyone else must. Further, even biological reality as a signifier of biological sex must be rejected by everyone. So, as the very liberal author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, has learned, no one may say that only women menstruate.

The tyrannical Supremacist Court of the United States has declared from on its high horse that no employer with over 15 employees may fire an employee who decides to cross-dress at work. For those who remain blissfully unaware, there are efforts afoot to make such a view apply to companies with fewer than 15 employees too.

What if the owner of an independent toy store with three locations in neighboring towns employs 15 people and one of those employees announces he will henceforth “identify” as a woman. Now he cannot be fired—not even if the store where the cross-dressing man works will be destroyed because parents will no longer bring their toddlers and young children to an establishment that will require them to explain perversion to children who are too young to understand it and may be disturbed by it.

Many obstetrician-gynecologists staff their offices with only women—including only women nurses. Now imagine that one of those nurses announces she will be socially, chemically, and surgically “transitioning” and hopes to look like this biological woman one day (yes, this is a woman):

Is it just for doctors to be prohibited from firing her?

In their dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito issued a stinging rebuke of the hubris of the majority opinion:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on any of five specified grounds: “race, color, religion, sex, [and] national origin.” … Neither “sexual orientation” nor “gender identity” appears on that list. For the past 45 years, bills have been introduced in Congress to add “sexual orientation” to the list, and in recent years, bills have included “gender identity” as well. But to date, none has passed both Houses. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would amend Title VII by defining sex discrimination to include both “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” … This bill remains before a House Subcommittee.

Because no such amendment of Title VII has been enacted in accordance with the requirements in the Constitution … Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination because of “sex” still means what it has always  meant. But the Court is not deterred by these constitutional niceties. Usurping the constitutional authority of the other branches, the Court has essentially taken H. R. 5’s provision on employment discrimination and issued it under the guise of statutory interpretation. A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall.

The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous. Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of “sex” is different from discrimination because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” And in any event, our duty is to interpret statutory terms to “mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.”

Alito and Thomas preview the deleterious effects this decision will have on American life and liberty:

As the briefing in these cases has warned, the position that the Court now adopts will threaten freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and personal privacy and safety. No one should think that the Court’s decision represents an unalloyed victory for individual liberty.

While churches and other religious organizations, including religious schools, will probably be allowed what is called a “ministerial exception”—at least for a time—for those involved in teaching the tenets of their faith, it is unlikely that exemption will apply to those employed in other positions. For example, a private Christian school will be prohibited from firing any math, science, Spanish, or P.E. teacher, secretary, custodian, cafeteria worker, playground supervisor, or crossing guard who decides to identify as the opposite sex, cross-dress, take cross-sex hormones, and surgically disguise his or her sex.

For those churches, Christian schools, and parachurch organizations that reassure themselves that such events are unlikely, just remember what’s happened to Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who has been relentlessly sued by “LGBT” persons. Sexual subversives are going to specifically target Christian institutions.

Alito and Thomas warn that this pernicious SCOTUS decision will likely be used force the sexual integration of bathrooms, locker rooms, and women’s shelters; to force people to use “gender” obliterators’ “preferred pronouns”; to force employers to cover “costly sex reassignment surgery”; and to force colleges to assign dorm rooms based on the sex students wish they were rather than the sex they are.

This pernicious decision will be used too as a precedent when challenges to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 appear before the U.S. Supreme Court. How could the Court now conclude any way other than that the word “sex” in Title IX includes “gender identity.” When the axis of evil decides that, women’s sports are destroyed, and eventually all women’s records from high school, college, the Olympics, and professional sports will be broken by men.

Good job feminist supporters of the “trans” cult.

In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s separate dissent, he emphasizes the violation of the separation of powers that the decision represents:

Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, the responsibility to amend Title VII belongs to Congress and the President in the legislative process, not to this Court. … [W]e are judges, not Members of Congress. And in Alexander Hamilton’s words, federal judges exercise “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.”… If judges could rewrite laws based on their own policy views, or based on their own assessments of likely future legislative action, the critical distinction between legislative authority and judicial authority that undergirds the Constitution’s separation of powers would collapse, thereby threatening the impartial rule of law and individual liberty. …

Both common parlance and common legal usage treat sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination as two distinct categories of discrimination—back in 1964 and still today. As to common parlance, few in 1964 (or today) would describe a firing because of sexual orientation as a firing because of sex. As commonly understood, sexual orientation discrimination is distinct from, and not a form of, sex discrimination. The majority opinion acknowledges the common understanding, noting that the plaintiffs here probably did not tell their friends that they were fired because of their sex. That observation is clearly correct. In common parlance, Bostock and Zarda were fired because they were gay, not because they were men. …

Who likes this SCOTUS decision? The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), that’s who. GLSEN’s raison d’être, is to use schools to normalize sexual deviance, which, of course, means eradicating theologically orthodox views on sexuality. GLSEN tweeted,

[T]oday’s landmark SCOTUS ruling will help to protect the many LGBTQ educators in K-12 schools who have faced harassment or job loss for simply being who they are. It also underscores the need for Congress to pass the Equality Act.

“Who they are” is a convenient bit of Newspeak to conceal what “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” really are. According to cultural regressives, “sexual orientation” is constituted by subjective, internal romantic and erotic feelings and volitional erotic acts. “Gender identity” is constituted by subjective, internal feelings about one’s maleness and/or femaleness or lack thereof. Now that SCOTUS includes conditions constituted—not by any objective criteria—but by subjective sexual feelings, all that remains is for sexual anarchists allied with other anarchists to expand the definition of “sexual orientation” and the job of sexual wokesters will be done. #CultureDestroyed.

So, in the service of “inclusivity,” they will work like the Devil and for the Devil to include polyamory, Genetic Sexual Attraction (i.e., consensual, adult incest), Minor Attraction (i.e., pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia), infantilism, zoophilia (i.e., bestiality), and every other sexual philia in the list of sexual orientations.

Then once that is accomplished, laws will protect celebrants of sexual disorder from being fired and schools will teacher kindergartners that love is love. Poly “love” will be called good. “Love” between two adult brothers will be deemed equivalent to interracial love. And teaching that “love” between humans and animals is wrong will be condemned as ignorant bigotry based on the hateful ideology of speciesism.

By the way, those naively depending on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to protect their religious liberty can forget about it. The Equality Act, which eventually will pass, explicitly guts RFRA.

This SCOTUS decision is not a victory for the country or for freedom. It’s another tragic defeat for the constitutional separation of powers, self-government, morality, truth, speech rights, and religious liberty. Conservative Christians, you’ve been warned—again.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Shocking-SCOTUS-Decision-Shockingly-Written-by-Gorsuch.mp3

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Written by Trevor Thomas

If death—anyone’s death—brings you joy, you should intently re-examine your worldview. Even the just execution of a mass murderer—which I support in every case—should not bring anyone joy. As a Christian, I often find myself opposed—spiritually, politically, and otherwise—to those outside of my faith. However, I take no joy in anyone’s death, especially those outside of my faith. Christianity teaches that “each one of us will give an account of himself to God.” Any death that results in eternal separation from God is always particularly tragic.

However, for those who have put their faith in the things of this world, who are determined to rule their own world, death usually has no such significance. Thus, for such people, like the death of an “inconvenient” child, the death of an enemy is often something to celebrate. The most recent case in point is the death of the wealthy philanthropist David Koch. After Mr. Koch died, many on the left again found themselves in a celebratory mood. We shouldn’t be surprised that those who engage in or promote the evil “shout-your-abortion!” movement would celebrate the death of a political enemy.

Nor should we be surprised that the hate-filled American left would promise political—and perhaps other forms of—apocalypse if President Trump gets the opportunity to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone who will actually follow the U.S. Constitution. Liberals dancing with joy over the death of Mr. Koch were soon brought back to earth with the same-day news that Justice Ginsburg underwent a fresh round of treatment for a cancerous tumor on her pancreas.

Despite our political, legal, and moral differences, I admire Justice Ginsburg for her strength and determination to do her job. As another recently noted, she has survived pancreatic cancer twice, lung cancer once, and colon cancer once. And she’s 86 years old. Many Americans—no matter their political stripes—would be very interested in getting the names of her oncologists.

In an interesting bit of irony probably lost on Justice Ginsburg and her like-minded ideologues, if the U.S. had Medicare-for-all, or some other version of single-payer healthcare—a dream of the American left—almost certainly Mrs. Ginsburg would’ve long ago departed this world. Thank God for the U.S. medical industry, right libs? (The U.S. has the world’s best cancer survival rates.)

In their foolish efforts to create “heaven on earth”—Utopia—modern liberals have often relied on the courts to give them what they could not otherwise gain by actually winning elections and passing legislation. Of course, this is why the left in the mainstream media—I repeat myself—and the U.S. Senate engaged in media malpractice and political treachery in their evil efforts to derail the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

Many have implied that if President Trump has the opportunity to name Ginsburg’s replacement, the battle that would erupt would make the Kavanaugh confirmation look like the Mayberry City Council debate on whether to hold a Founder’s Day parade. This shouldn’t be the case—because, as long as U.S. Senate Republicans have his back, there is simply nothing Democrats can do to stop President Trump from nominating and having confirmed any judge he wishes.

However, today’s Democrat Party is as far from rational as they are from moral—which is totally unsurprising as those two extremes often go hand-in-hand. Even more so than the vengeful tweets over a dead philanthropist or the angry threats over a potential U.S. Supreme Court vacancy, few things illustrate this as well as the gender debate the modern left insists we have.

After (frequently) pointing out—and being far from alone—that the stupid, evil notion of “gender fluidity” most harms females—including young girls—I keep thinking that the left will soon abandon this wickedness. Silly me. I forget how blindly stupid those corrupted by evil can be.

Recently the GOP candidate in Louisiana’s governor’s race, Ralph Abraham, made headlines—headlines!—because he ran a 30 second ad that included the phrase “as a doctor, I can assure you, there are only two genders.” They were so aghast at MSNBC that host Chris Jansing declared that Abraham’s comments were “incendiary.” According to Newsbusters, Jansing’s guest—because, of course, the left must have their “experts” explain to us why there are not only two genders—went even further and said that to declare that there are only two genders is now “despicable” and “un-American.”

In other words, a statement that, just a few years ago, the vast majority of us would’ve considered so obvious that it was patronizing is now “incendiary” and “despicable.” Orwell was indeed a prophet.

Thus, it should come as little surprise that those who can’t tell the difference between who is a male and who is a female would choose to fight crime with euphemisms, still believes that “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” really happened, still thinks that man-made climate change is a real problem with a political solution, believes that widespread institutional racism still exists in America, and would conclude that “Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs.”

The latter bit of editorial “brilliance” was recently proffered by The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff. I guess Kristoff missed the fact that Seattle is Dying largely because of rampant drug abuse (and because, of course, “liberalism is killing it”). If he truly didn’t know this before, he does now because many of the 1300+ comments following his piece told him as much. Many of the comments were from Seattle residents.

SKM from Seattle wrote,

I live here and you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Downtown Seattle is a classic example of when inmates run the asylum. Downtown Seattle frequently feels like “Night of the Living Dead.” Quality of life issues here are outright dismissed, all in an effort to help drug addicted zombies that walk our streets. Sleeping in doorways, public defecation/urination, shooting up right in the open, blatant drug dealing w/ out any fear of incrimination, verbal abuse, etc. I can more easily get a summons for jaywalking here than dealing Fentanyl.

Another Seattle resident, “robofaust,” added,

As a 26 year resident of Seattle (and a x2 time voter for Ralph Nader and Obama), I couldn’t disagree more. This city is littered with homeless drug addicts. Seattle’s choice to “decriminalize homelessness” is just another term for enabling the self-destruction of thousands of people…

Every few days I come across people who are passed out, or worse yet, who are actively shooting up, at the foot of my home. Petty crime is rampant, and it is no longer possible to get the police to respond to a stolen bicycle or smashed car windows…

The city’s drug addicts live in a parallel subculture that is disconnected from the lives of the locals who tolerate it in the name of social virtue. This subculture is a law unto itself, and is rife with predators who prey on the weak with violence, theft, and sexual abuse…

There will be political reckoning in the city for this, sooner or later. Mr. Kristof’s analysis is deeply flawed.

In not just Seattle, but all over America, liberals have become “a law unto themselves.” Thus, the nastiness in Seattle is only the tip of the iceberg. Liberals think that Seattle is doing a good job with criminal drug users, that there are more than two genders, that marriage is whatever we define it to be, that killing the unborn is merely a “choice,” and so on, because the left in America long ago abandoned the idea that some things are settled for all time.

I certainly hope there is soon a political reckoning. There will certainly be a spiritual one.

This article was originally published at TrevorGrantThomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America

Allowing just three states to impose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution
that even proponents admitted died in 1982 is a moral fraud and a constitutional farce.

Written by Robert G. Marshall

Proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) want to create a constitutional Frankenstein by breathing life into its corpse some 36 years after its ratification was defeated, in large part thanks to Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum.

The ERA Congress sent to the states in 1972 stated: “Equality of rights under law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

This simplistic language hid a radical progressive social agenda. Amendments were rejected to exempt women from frontline ground combat duty, to require husbands to support their children, to keep certain sexual assaults as crimes, to neutralize ERA’s effect on abortion, to exempt private schools from the ERA, to protect tax-exempt status of churches that have male-only clergy, to permit different insurance rates for men and women, and to deny men access to women’s private facilities and vice versa.

In 1972 Congress imposed a seven-year limit for states to ratify the ERA, as it established for all but two constitutional amendments since 1918. But when the amendment stalled in 1977 with the support of 35 states — three states short of the three-fourths needed for ratification — ERA advocates lobbied Congress to extend ratification seven more years.

Major ERA proponents said the amendment would die without an “extension.”

• National Organization of Women President Eleanor Smeal said, “We believe the life of the equal rights amendment is indeed in peril.”
• Marjorie Bell, American Association of University Women President noted: “Failure to extend now the time limit for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment would terminate … what Congress initiated six years ago.”
• Barbara Jordan said if the extension failed, “… the time will have expired for that resolution and I do not feel that would be a viable issue for consideration by the Congress because the resolution would, for all intents and purposes, be dead.”
• Then Professor, now Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said that if the original ratification time passes, “and Congress says nothing, it is unlikely that a State, given no green light by the national legislature, would nonetheless come forward and ratify.”
• President Jimmy Carter wrote to Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino in July 1978, “I am hopeful that ERA will be ratified before the present deadline expires.”

Congress eventually extended the ratification deadline to June 30, 1982. (The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The New Republic all supported the ERA, but opposed the time extension.)

The ERA extension resolution did not recognize withdrawal of previous ERA ratifications from Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky, and South Dakota even though North Dakota’s rescission of the Presidential Disability Amendment was recognized in 1967 by the U.S. Secretary of State, who then tallied records.

Even with the unprecedented extension, the ERA fell three states short of the 38 needed for ratification. ERA advocates recognized their 1982 loss and re-introduced the amendment to Congress in 1983, but failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed for it to pass the U.S. House of Representatives.

ERA proponents now claim they need only add three more states to the original 35 which ratified by 1982 (ignoring the five states rescinding approval), to reach the 38 states required to add the ERA to “their” Constitution!

Their novel claim derives from the adoption of the 27^th Amendment limiting congressional pay increases from taking place without an intervening election. This amendment passed Congress in 1789 without a ratification deadline. When 38 states finally approved it in 1992 — more than 200 years later — Congress declared it part of the Constitution, ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1921 finding that Congress could require contemporaneous approval of amendments.

Democratic Rep. Don Edwards, who supported the ERA extension and the Pay Amendment noted, “It should be clear that this [Pay Amendment] is an exception, not a precedent.”

Liberals are counting the actions by Nevada’s legislature (2017), and Illinois’ legislature (2018) allegedly ratifying the non-pending ERA as two of the three states they contend will bring them to the 38 state requirement.

Congressional joint resolutions from Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) proclaim that whenever 38 states “ratify” the version of the ERA submitted to the states on March 22, 1972, the ERA will be added to the Constitution. The resolutions do not mention the failed ERA time extension. Speier’s resolution has 165 cosponsors and Cardin’s has 36 cosponsors.

Cardin tweeted approval of the Illinois vote. “Most Americans are shocked to find out that the U.S. Constitution still lacks a provision ensuring gender equality. … We need just ONE more state to ratify and we need Congress to do its part by passing S. J. Res. 5, which would immediately remove the arbitrary and unnecessary deadline for states to ratify the #ERA.”

The words “Gender Equality,” mentioned in Cardin’s Tweet are not in the 1972 ERA, but hint at what liberals hope to achieve under their bogus ERA scheme. Opposition to “making women part of the Constitution” will invite the label of “bigot” or “hater.”

If one more state “votes” for the ERA, progressives are set to pressure Congress to declare the ERA approved. Possibly the Archivist of the United States, who initially certified the Pay Amendment before Congress did, will relieve Congress of its role.  This would duck the ruling in Idaho vs. Freeman (1981), in which a federal district court ruled states could rescind approvals and Congress could not extend the ratification time.

“Approval” of the ERA will legitimize other amendments still “floating around,” including one that increases the House of Representatives from 435 Congressmen to 6,400 (one for every 50,000 persons). Allowing just three states to impose a dead ERA on the Constitution, when even proponents admitted it died in 1982 is a moral fraud and a constitutional farce.

The passion of Leftists’ for their Utopia must be met with forthrightness from conservatives for constitutional government.  Find out today if your congressman and senators would affirm that only three states need to approve the ERA. If so, vote them out of office in November.

This article was originally published at The Federalist.

On Tuesday [March 20th], the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for NIFLA vs. Becerra, the case which focuses on the “law that requires pregnancy centers to notify women that the state offers subsidies for abortion.” In other words, pro-life pregnancy centers, which exist to offer women alternatives to abortion, would be required by law to tell their clients that the state can subsidize their abortions. But that hardly tells the story of how absurd this law is.

Certainly, it’s bad enough that the state thought it had the right to require pro-life pregnancy centers to inform their clients about abortion opportunities. The whole reason for the existence of these centers, many (or almost all?) of which are faith-based, is to tell pregnant women that they don’t have to kill their babies. To talk to them about the humanity of that child in the womb. To inform them about adoption. To share stories with them about other women who chose not to abort.

How on earth can anyone require them to say as well, “However, in case you’re interested, the state will help you terminate your pregnancy and snuff out that precious life in your womb.”

But, to repeat, that is only part of the story.

As became evident when the justices questioned the California attorneys, the law goes far beyond that simple requirement. Instead, it mandates that equal space be given to advertise the pro-abortion language. What’s more, it mandates that the pro-abortion announcement be made in 13 languages to be sure that all bases were covered.

Hank Berrien explains that the “law was adopted in California in 2015, and forced the pregnancy centers to post a prominent notice if they had ‘no licensed medical provider’ available. If the centers were licensed, they were forced to notify clients that the state offers ‘free or low-cost’ contraception, prenatal care and abortion.”

And, what, exactly would this look like?

The requirement would be so absurd that even ultra-liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a problem with it. As Berrien notes, “After Michael P. Farris, a lawyer for the centers, said advertisements, including billboards, would have to offer the information in large print and in 13 languages, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turned to the lawyer for California and stated, ‘If you have to say that, those two sentences in 13 different languages, it can be very burdensome,’ she said.”

And exactly how “burdensome” is “very burdensome”? The Los Angeles Times reports this enlightening dialogue:

“What would happen if an unlicensed center just had a billboard that said, ‘Choose Life.’ Would they have to make the disclosure?” [Justice Anthony] Kennedy asked.

“Yes, your honor,” Farris replied.

“It would be 29 words, in the same size font as ‘Choose Life’?” Kennedy continued.

Yes, Farris said, “and in the number of languages required by that county.”

Kennedy said he had heard all he needed to hear. “It seems to me that means that this is an undue burden. And that should suffice to invalidate the statute,” he said.

Kennedy, of course, is absolutely right, although calling this requirement “an undue burden” would be the equivalent of saying that it would be “an undue burden” to require a man to carry an elephant on his back.

In practical terms (and using hypothetical language, not even as cumbersome as what California requires), a billboard ad would look like this (relying on Google translate, and just sampling some of the state’s top 12 foreign languages):

Yes, this is what California required, as completely ridiculous as it seems. (And note again: This was not the 29-word announcement that Justice Kennedy referenced, nor did I post it in 13 languages.) And what message would get out most to the public? “Choose life” or, “The state is here to help pay for your abortions”?

For many reasons, this ridiculous law is not only burdensome. It is not only an infringement of individual and corporate freedoms. It is the imposition of state-endorsed speech, in strict violation of the conscience of many of its citizens. In short, it is an absolute outrage.

That’s why major media outlets, like the Los Angeles Times, stated that, “The Supreme Court sounded ready Tuesday to strike down a California disclosure law that requires pregnancy centers — including those that are faith-based — to notify women that the state offers subsidies for abortion.”

It’s about time to push back against some of California’s craziness.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com

Like Medusa, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has reared its chthonic head again, and this time it’s wearing a silly pink hat over all those snakes.

Here’s what the ERA actually says:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Since the ERA says precisely nothing about women, why do feminists continue to claim that it’s all about women’s rights? In fact, the harm the ERA will cause will redound primarily to women.

What the ERA will do is prohibit the public recognition of sexual differentiation, and we all know who really wants to pretend that biological sex has no meaning.

Moreover, of which basic rights are women now deprived? The right to vote, assemble, associate, speak, petition their government, exercise their religion? Nope, we’ve got all those.

So, let’s peek under those pink hats and see what snakes are writhing about, restive and eager to emerge and strike:

• The ERA would be used to nullify or invalidate laws that restrict tax-funded abortion. In Doe v. Maher, the Connecticut Supreme Court stated, “Since only women become pregnant, discrimination against pregnancy by not funding abortions…is sex-oriented discrimination…The Court concludes that the regulation that restricts the funding of abortions…violates Connecticut’s Equal Rights Amendment.”The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) explains that multiple legal experts, including state supreme courts, have argued that the language of the ERA “makes it unconstitutional for…Medicaid programs to refuse to fund ‘medically necessary’ abortions (which just means abortions performed by licensed medical professionals) if procedures sought by men (e.g., prostate surgery) are funded.”

A New Mexico Supreme Court judge wrote that “there is no comparable restriction on medically necessary services relating to physical characteristics or conditions that are unique to men. Indeed, we can find no provision in the Department’s regulations that disfavor any comparable, medically necessary procedure unique to the male anatomy… [the restriction on funding abortions] undoubtedly singles out for less favorable treatment a gender-linked condition that is unique to women.” This judge neglected to mention the inconvenient presence of preborn babies that render abortion wholly different from any “medical procedure unique to the male anatomy.” Treating different conditions differently does not violate any commitment to equality, fairness, or justice.

• The ERA would be used to eliminate state laws that restrict abortion. The NRLC writes that “This same analysis—that limits on abortion are by definition a form of sex discrimination and therefore impermissible under ERA—will be used to invalidate laws requiring parental notification or consent for minors’ abortions; any federal or state restrictions even on partial-birth abortions or third-trimester abortions; and federal and state ‘conscience laws,’ which allow government-supported medical facilities and personnel—including religiously affiliated hospitals—to refuse to participate in abortions.”The ACLU writes, “Hundreds of bills that place limitations and restrictions on vital reproductive health care services [i.e., abortion] have been passed by Congress and state legislatures. The Equal Rights Amendment would provide another important weapon in the battle to resist this legislative onslaught aimed at destroying women’s rights to make their own reproductive decisions.”

• It would be used to grant unrestricted access to opposite-sex spaces and activities to men and women who pretend to be the sex they are not. Single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, shelters, semi-private hospital rooms, nursing home rooms, dormitories, colleges, athletic teams, fraternities, sororities, clubs, and organizations would become co-ed or risk federal lawsuits. Even mother-daughter/father-son/father-daughter events at public schools would be eradicated.

• It would be used to force women to register for the Selective Service and if the day should ever come when the draft is reinstated, to be drafted.

• It would give enormous new powers to the federal government that now belong to the states. Section II of the ERA states that “The Congress shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article.” The ERA would give Congress the power to legislate on all those areas of law which include traditional differences of treatment on account of sex: marriage, property laws, divorce and alimony, child custody, adoptions, prison regulations, and insurance.For example, the Social Security System pays full-time homemaker “wives” 50 percent of their husband’s benefits over and above the check he receives. Upon their husbands’ deaths, widows receive the full benefits that their husbands had been receiving.  (The law also gives this benefit to a dependent husband, but nearly all dependent spouses are women.)
  
  Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her 1977 book “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code” that the concept of “dependent women, whose primary responsibility is to care for children and household … must be eliminated from the code if it is reflect the equality principle.”

Ratification history

To ratify this proposed amendment, “progressives” are attempting to circumvent deadlines that expired over three decades ago on the supposedly moribund ERA. The ERA, first introduced in 1972, had a seven-year deadline for ratification, which, by a congressional resolution was extended another three years.

The proposed Equal Rights Amendment needs 38 states for passage. By its final deadline in 1982, it had the approval of only 35 states, so supporters developed the “three-state strategy” which seeks to avoid returning the issue to all 50 states. In effect, Leftist lawmakers claim that since the ERA was extended once, deadlines can be extended in perpetuity. In other words, to Leftists legal deadlines, like other laws, can be ignored at their whim.

Leftist lawmakers defend their strategy to pass the ERA by comparing it to the passage of the Twenty-seventh amendment to the U.S. Constitution 203 years after it was proposed. They fail to mention, however, that the Twenty-seventh Amendment, unlike the ERA, did not have a ratification deadline.

Proponents of the ERA also argue that because the ERA ratification deadline was in the preamble rather than the body of the ERA, it’s essentially irrelevant and non-binding. But the Congressional Research Service explains the following:

In the case of the 18th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd Amendments, the “sunset” ratification provision was incorporated in the body of the amendment itself. For subsequent amendments, however, Congress determined that inclusion of the time limit within its body “cluttered up” the proposal. Consequently, all but one of the subsequently proposed amendments proposed later (the 23rd, 24th, 25th and 26th, and the ERA) placed the limit in the preamble, rather than in the body of the amendment itself.

It’s important to note that prior to the ratification deadline, five states had sought to rescind their approval of the ERA. The Supreme Court of the United States was poised to take up their cases when the deadline took effect at which point the Court held that their cases were moot. If the deadline is now rendered moot by liberal lawmakers, one would assume that those states that sought to rescind their approval would be able to proceed with their pursuit of “rescission of acts of ratification.” In other words, it would seem that those states that wished to rescind their approval of the ERA would be able to pursue that effort because their pursuit ended based on the legal legitimacy of the ratification deadline.

Leftists have yet another effective weapon in their arsenal to crush culture: Just add the word “rights” to any legislation they want and presto change-o, they’ve got themselves a go-to soundbite.

Anyone who opposes co-ed restrooms becomes “anti-‘trans’ rights.” Just ignore the fact that objectively immutably biologically male persons have no right to access women’s private facilities.

Anyone who believes marriage has a nature central to which is sexual differentiation becomes “anti-‘gay’ rights.” Just ignore the fact that those who are erotically attracted to persons of their same sex have no intrinsic right to unilaterally redefine marriage by stripping it of its central constituent and most enduring, cross-cultural feature.

And anyone who opposes a wholly unnecessary amendment to the Constitution becomes “anti-women’s rights.” Just ignore the facts that the amendment doesn’t mention women and that there is not a single right of which women are deprived. Oh, and please ignore those snakes writhing under Medusa’s silly pink hat.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to email your state senator to urge him/her to oppose the ERA, SJRCA 4.

Listen to Laurie read this article in this podcast:

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Read more here, here and here.

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“boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy” in Illinois.

In an astonishing act of hubris, abrogation of local control over education, and obsequiousness to Barack Obama, Obama-handmaiden Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed a “friend of the court” brief” (i.e., an amicus curiae brief) begging for Illinois to be subject to Obama’s illegal command that public schools allow boys in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms and vice versa.

Following the “guidance” from Obama’s Department of Education via the Office for Civil Rights to integrate sexually all restrooms and locker rooms in government schools, eleven states led by Texas filed a lawsuit in late May requesting that an injunction be issued to stop the implementation of Obama’s “guidance.” This lawsuit includes a 1975 quote from current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said that “‘[s]eparate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy.’”

Then leftist attorneys general stepped in on behalf of not only their own states but all 50 states to insist on having the federal government rob citizens in every state of their right to decide if they want their local schools to have coed, sex-integrated restrooms and showers for children and teens.

The brief Madigan signed describes concerns of those states opposed to Obama’s diktat as “speculative and inaccurate claims of harm,” adding that “respecting the civil rights of transgender individuals will cause Plaintiffs no harm. Their allegations of safety risks are unsupported hyperbole.”

The sex of humans cannot change. Boys who wish they were girls remain unalterably boys no matter what chemical, surgical, or sartorial changes they make. And boys have no “civil right” to invade the private spaces of girls.

The suggestion by Madigan et al. that claims of harm are “speculative and inaccurate” requires a definition of “harm.” If “harm” is defined solely as physical assault, the risk is low and posed primarily by boys pretending to be girls. But certainly when boys have easy access to girls’ private facilities the risk is not nil.

Under the Obama diktat, all that’s required for a boy to use girls’ private facilities is his claim to be “transgender.” No parental confirmation needed. No medical diagnosis required. No treatment of any kind required. All that’s required is for a boy to claim that he is “trans” or “bi-gendered” or “gender-fluid,” which I guess means he can float fluidly between those binarily fixed facilities until such time as leftists complete their revolution to destroy all public recognition and accommodation of sex differences. On that day, all restrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and hospital rooms will be coed—and not just for those who reject their sex.

Moreover, not even a “medical” diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” surgical mutilation, and cross-sex hormone doping can turn a boy into a girl or vice versa. And none of these alchemical protocols justify allowing objectively male or female students into opposite-sex facilities.

But harm is not limited merely to physical assault. Included in the concept of “harm” is the violation of modesty and privacy that takes place when unrelated persons of the opposite sex intrude into restrooms and locker rooms. It is likely that Orthodox Jews, Muslims, theologically orthodox Christians, and even some secularists would find these experiences harmful. For those who know that biological sex per se has profound meaning and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy, seeing unrelated persons of the opposite sex partially or fully unclothed as well as being seen partially or fully unclothed by unrelated persons of the opposite sex constitutes harm.

Though it’s incomprehensible to morally deadened leftists, many—perhaps most—men and women prefer not to urinate or defecate in stalls with unrelated persons of the opposite sex doing the same in the stall next to them. These feelings of modesty derived from sex differences are the very reason we have separate restrooms in the first place. What possible difference should it make to girls if the boy in the stall next to them wishes he were a girl or not? Being forced to do their business with unrelated persons of the opposite sex in the neighboring stall also constitutes harm.

Madigan et al. are justifiably concerned about the safety of cross-dressing boys using sex-appropriate restrooms. Now that parents and administrators allow boys to wear lipstick, dresses, and Victoria Secret lingerie with their penises taped down to school, they have put these boys at risk in boys’ locker rooms and restrooms. But the solution to the problem leftist created must not include allowing these boys into girls’ restrooms or locker rooms, or to room with girls on overnight school-sponsored functions as Obama’s diktat requires.

The only reasonable accommodation of such tragically disordered thinking (or egregious rebellion) is single-occupancy facilities. If boys who wish they were girls have the purported right to use facilities with only girls, then surely girls have that right.

The federal government—largely controlled by liberals—has been gobbling up vast swaths of American cultural life, including the education of our children. In so doing, leftists are imposing their subjective and arguable assumptions about, among other things, sexuality on other people’s children as well as violating the 10th Amendment which makes clear that public education is the purview of states—not the federal government:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Liberals make the specious argument that federal intrusion with regard to sex-integrated restrooms and locker rooms is warranted just as it was warranted with regard to racial integration of schools. But that comparison is based on the absurd comparison of the behaviorally neutral condition of race to the disordered subjective desire to be the opposite sex accompanied by futile behavioral choices in the service of pretending to be the opposite sex. For an analogy to be sound, there must be points of correspondence between the analogues. What precisely are the points of correspondence between race and sex-rejection?

In order to impose his radical sexual revolution on our nation’s children, Obama—master violator of the Constitution and the separation of powers—is attempting to unilaterally and illegally change the definition of the word “sex” in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include the rhetorical contrivance “gender identity” (i.e., subjective feelings about one’s sex). And apparatchik Lisa Madigan is helping.

Parents, notify your school administrators and your children’s teachers that under no circumstances may your child or teen use restrooms or locker rooms with persons of the opposite sex, and under no circumstance is your child or teen to be required to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to any student, staff, or faculty member.

A conservative legal organization is calling for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to recuse herself from deciding the marriage case now before the court.

“A judge should avoid the appearance of impropriety as much as possible,” says Roger Gannam, senior counsel with Liberty Counsel.

Ginsburg, a far-left justice, had conducted five same-sex marriage ceremonies before the high court heard the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges in April. A ruling is coming in June.

More recently, Ginsburg presided over the so-called marriage of two men in Washington, D.C., reportedly emphasizing the word “Constitution” in the ceremony to the delight of  ttendees.

Gannam complains that Ginsburg is an “activist” for same-sex marriage rather than an impartial justice while the Supreme Court, he points out, is weighing the future legal definition of marriage in the United States.

He also points to statements Ginsburg made last February to the press on the subject.

“She basically said she thinks America is ready for same-sex marriage,” says the attorney, “and what she doesn’t seem to understand, or at least respect, is that it’s not the job – it’s not the role of the U.S. Supreme Court – to decide what America is ready for.”

OneNewsNow reported last September that Ginsburg praised the “genius of the Constitution” for allowing her to preside over her first homosexual ceremony in 2013.

That praise apparently only goes so far. A year before that ceremony, Ginsburg told Egyptian legal scholars that they should pattern that country’s constitution on others around the world, not the one in the United States she would later describe as “genius.”

Many of us have wondered how long it would be before a prominent official proclaimed that rogue federal judges, like the proverbial emperor, have no clothes and thus no authority to make up laws.

That’s what Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore did this past week in a letter to Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, in which he began by asserting that “the recent ruling of Judge Callie Granade … has raised serious, legitimate concerns about the propriety of federal court jurisdiction over the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment.”

In 2006, Alabama voters approved the marriage measure by 81 percent to 19 percent. On January 23, Judge Granade, a George W. Bush appointee at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, became the latest federal judge to join the lemming brigade and leap off the Cliffs of Insanity to find a previously unknown constitutional “right” to marriages lacking a bride or a groom.

She ruled that Alabama’s clear and timeless definition violated the 14thAmendment’s guarantee of equal protection and due process. Then she issued a two-week stay of her ruling, perhaps so that Alabamans can ponder their loss of meaningful citizenship in a self-governing republic.

When the 14th Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868 to afford the nation’s freed slaves the protection of the law found in the Fifth Amendment, one can only imagine a typical discussion on the assembly floor of various statehouses, including Alabama’s:

“Tell me again why Rhett can’t marry Barney? I know that’s where the Founders were really going when they ratified the Bill of Rights in 1791. I say, it was quite clever of them to foresee using freed slaves someday as a pretext.”

In his letter, Judge Moore reminded the governor that, “As you know, nothing in the United States Constitution grants the federal government the authority to redefine the institution of marriage.”

After citing Alabama’s Constitution and court cases, Judge Moore quoted from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. Ramsey (1885) that required Utah to prohibit legalized polygamy in order to join the union. He wrote:

“Even the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that the basic foundation of marriage and family upon which our Country rests is ‘the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.’”

Noting that “44 federal courts have imposed by judicial fiat same-sex marriages in 21 states of the Union, overturning the express will of the people in those states,” Moore went on to praise the Alabama Probate Judges Association, “which has advised probate judges to follow Alabama law in refusing to license marriages between two members of the same sex.”

Judge Moore knows a little about bucking the system. In 1995, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued to remove a wooden Ten Commandments plaque that he kept on his courtroom wall. They lost. In 2001, as Alabama’s Chief Justice, he had a large Ten Commandments monument installed in the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. After he refused to enforce an order by a federal judge to remove the monument, he himself was removed from office in November 2003 by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. He unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2006 and 2010, but was re-elected as Alabama Chief Justice in 2012.

If only for the purpose of confounding the media, which love to portray Alabama and the rest of the South as a hotbed of drooling, racist homophobes out of the film Deliverance, it would have been nice to see this kind of forthright courage coming out of a northern or western state.

After all, scenes of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor’s men using fire hoses and nightsticks on peaceful demonstrators back in 1963 are as vivid as the latest civil rights documentary. And the movie Selma is a fresh reminder of the epic struggle to overcome resistance to integration.

Judge Moore risks being equated with Bull Connor, because that’s part of the left’s game plan of intimidation. But he’s a principled jurist who swore an oath to defend the Constitution, not to genuflect to lawless federal judges who are raining legal havoc on the nation. For all the moral-laden language they use, these emperors without clothes are hell-bent on casting aside the moral restraints that allow society to flourish.

Speaking of restraints, is anyone in authority going to suggest that Associate Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, both of whom have actually officiated at same-sex ceremonies, recuse themselves from the monumental marriage case that the Court will hear this spring?

They’ve abandoned any pretext of objectivity and are practically daring someone to call them on it.

Congressional leaders? Presidential candidates? Chief Justice John Roberts? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

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