Domingo Halliburton
Handmade in USA
doesn't really address my point. my question is do you think they overstepped the 10th amendment.
Conservatives take another L this week; same sex marriage passes
- Thread starter smitty22
- Start date
doesn't really address my point. my question is do you think they overstepped the 10th amendment.
No, the Right to Marry has long been deemed a fundamental/natural right (see the Supreme Court decision to legalize interracial marriage). Fundamental/Natural rights are enforceable under the US Constitution, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government. The states don't get to decide which fundamental rights to enforce, whether or not the two people involved are of the same sex, the right to marry is FUNDAMENTAL. This decision has been a long time coming if you ask me
the next guy
Superstar
they must be fuming 
valet
The official Chaplain of the Coli
"Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else. #LoveWins. President Obama tweet.
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
Man...it has not been a good week for the conservative right wing of this country 
valet
The official Chaplain of the Coli
Justice Kennedy
Interesting that "love" is a major focus of same sex marriage. As well as Obama tweet. I know people hate the slippery slope argument but I see no good reasons why marriage can't be defined any type of way. If marriage is based on love.
The 10th amendment was not really at play here. It was the 14th amendment. The argument was whether there is a fundamental right to marry under the 14th amendment of the constitution. It was a natural extension of established 14th amendment jurisprudence.
It was basically the same thought process. Kennedy himself today,
Basically, the courts do not have to wait for the rest of society to catch up to protect fundamental rights. The guys who voted in Loving v. Virginia were probably not excited about interracial marriage.
It's funny, since a lot of the dissents try to make it seem like a 10th amendment issue. The first dissent was the only decent one. The others are filled with borderline laughable arguments.
Can you link the opinion?
Clarence Thomas: "Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect."
Scalia's dissent starts off by calling the Supreme Court a threat to democracy, lol.
I also like how he calls the majority opinion judges elitist East Coast and West Coast liberals and says they are not representative of America. Umm, 37 states recognize same-sex marriage.
I also like how he calls the majority opinion judges elitist East Coast and West Coast liberals and says they are not representative of America. Umm, 37 states recognize same-sex marriage.
he's so far gone that he says shyt like that without a hint of irony and if you give him aClarence Thomas: "Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect."
look he wouldn't get it. "why are you looking at me like that?"thurgod's replacement y'all.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Here we go folks
19 Hysterical Passages From Supreme Court Same-Sex Marriage Dissenters
BY ZACK FORD
& JUDD LEGUM
POSTED ON JUNE 26, 2015 AT 11:12 AM
CREDIT: AP/DYLAN PETROHILIOS
More ink was spilled dissenting today’s Supreme Court marriage equality decision than the majority’s opinion required. There were four different dissents, one by Chief Justice John Roberts (joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas), plus separate dissents from Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.
The opinions are rife with criticism for the majority, including claims that they have upended the reputation of the Court, paranoia about the consequences for religious objectors, and a rejection of the idea that the benefits of marriage even constitute a liberty. Here’s a look at some of the most hysterical reactions from the dissenting justices.
Roberts: No court should ever care about this issue.
Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be. The people who ratified the Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will but merely judgment.
Roberts: The debate on same-sex marriage has been shut down.
Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens — through the democratic process — to adopt their view. That ends today. Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law. Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept. […]
Indeed, however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were freshening at their backs.
ThinkProgress previously unpacked this argument.
Roberts: The decision invents a new concept of justice.
The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent. The majority expressly disclaims judicial “caution” and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice.”
Roberts: What about the Aztecs?
As a result, the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?
Roberts: Marriage is only about children (and the couples who can biologically have them).
The premises supporting this concept of marriage are so fundamental that they rarely require articulation. The human race must procreate to survive. Procreation occurs through sexual relations between a man and a woman. When sexual relations result in the conception of a child, that child’s prospects are generally better if the mother and father stay together rather than going their separate ways. Therefore, for the good of children and society, sexual relations that can lead to procreation should occur only between a man and a woman committed to a lasting bond.
Society has recognized that bond as marriage. And by bestowing a respected status and material benefits on married couples, society encourages men and women to conduct sexual relations within marriage rather than without. As one prominent scholar put it, “Marriage is a socially arranged solution for the problem of getting people to stay together and care for children that the mere desire for children, and the sex that makes children possible, does not solve.”
Roberts: The dictionary says so.
In his first American dictionary, Noah Webster defined marriage as “the legal union of a man and woman for life,” which served the purposes of “preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, . . . promoting domestic felicity, and . . . securing the maintenance and education of children.”
Roberts: It sure seems like this leads to legal polygamy.
I do not mean to equate marriage between same-sex couples with plural marriages in all respects. There may well be relevant differences that compel different legal analysis. But if there are, petitioners have not pointed to any. When asked about a plural marital union at oral argument, petitioners asserted that a State “doesn’t have such an institution.” But that is exactly the point: the States at issue here do not have an institution of same-sex marriage, either.
Roberts: The opinion isn’t very nice to opponents of same-sex marriage.
Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of today’s decision is the extent to which the majority feels compelled to sully those on the other side of the debate. The majority offers a cursory assurance that it does not intend to disparage people who, as a matter of conscience, cannot accept same- sex marriage.
By the majority’s account, Americans who did nothing more than follow the understanding of marriage that has existed for our entire history — in particular, the tens of millions of people who voted to reaffirm their States’ enduring definition of marriage — have acted to “lock . . . out,” “disparage,” “disrespect and subordinate,” and inflict “[d]ignitary wounds” upon their gay and lesbian neighbors. These apparent assaults on the character of fairminded people will have an effect, in society and in court.
Roberts: Have your fun, but you just soiled the Constitution.
If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.
Scalia: We just destroyed democracy.
A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
Scalia: The majority think they are smarter than everyone else.
They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds — minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly — could not.
Scalia: I’m not a bigot.
These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is
contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, 21 cannot possibly be supported by
anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.
Scalia: The majority are pretentious narcissists.
The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so. Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.
Scalia: The majority is trying to overthrow the government, similar to the Nazis in Germany.
But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003.
Thomas: Gay people already had it great!
Petitioners cannot claim, under the most plausible definition of “liberty,” that they have been imprisoned or physically restrained by the States for participating in same-sex relationships. To the contrary, they have been able to cohabitate and raise their children in peace. They have been able to hold civil marriage ceremonies in States that recognize same-sex marriages and private religious ceremonies in all States. They have been able to travel freely around the country, making their homes where they please. Far from being incarcerated or physically restrained, petitioners have been left alone to order their lives as they see fit.
Thomas: We have set up a war between religion and the government.
In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well. Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.
Thomas: The majority probably destroyed religious liberty.
Although our Constitution provides some protection against such governmental restrictions on religious practices, the People have long elected to afford broader protections than this Court’s constitutional precedents mandate. Had the majority allowed the definition of marriage to be left to the political process—as the Constitution requires—the People could have considered the religious liberty implications of deviating from the traditional definition as part of their deliberative process. Instead, the majority’s decision short-circuits that process, with potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.
Thomas: Gay people are fine without government recognition, just like slaves.
The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity)
because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied
governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
Alito: Opponents of marriage equality will be vilified.
It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.
I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.
By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/06/26/3674385/dissent-marriage-equality/
19 Hysterical Passages From Supreme Court Same-Sex Marriage Dissenters
BY ZACK FORD
& JUDD LEGUM
POSTED ON JUNE 26, 2015 AT 11:12 AMCREDIT: AP/DYLAN PETROHILIOS
More ink was spilled dissenting today’s Supreme Court marriage equality decision than the majority’s opinion required. There were four different dissents, one by Chief Justice John Roberts (joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas), plus separate dissents from Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.
The opinions are rife with criticism for the majority, including claims that they have upended the reputation of the Court, paranoia about the consequences for religious objectors, and a rejection of the idea that the benefits of marriage even constitute a liberty. Here’s a look at some of the most hysterical reactions from the dissenting justices.
Roberts: No court should ever care about this issue.
Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be. The people who ratified the Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will but merely judgment.
Roberts: The debate on same-sex marriage has been shut down.
Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens — through the democratic process — to adopt their view. That ends today. Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law. Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept. […]
Indeed, however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were freshening at their backs.
ThinkProgress previously unpacked this argument.
Roberts: The decision invents a new concept of justice.
The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent. The majority expressly disclaims judicial “caution” and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice.”
Roberts: What about the Aztecs?
As a result, the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?
Roberts: Marriage is only about children (and the couples who can biologically have them).
The premises supporting this concept of marriage are so fundamental that they rarely require articulation. The human race must procreate to survive. Procreation occurs through sexual relations between a man and a woman. When sexual relations result in the conception of a child, that child’s prospects are generally better if the mother and father stay together rather than going their separate ways. Therefore, for the good of children and society, sexual relations that can lead to procreation should occur only between a man and a woman committed to a lasting bond.
Society has recognized that bond as marriage. And by bestowing a respected status and material benefits on married couples, society encourages men and women to conduct sexual relations within marriage rather than without. As one prominent scholar put it, “Marriage is a socially arranged solution for the problem of getting people to stay together and care for children that the mere desire for children, and the sex that makes children possible, does not solve.”
Roberts: The dictionary says so.
In his first American dictionary, Noah Webster defined marriage as “the legal union of a man and woman for life,” which served the purposes of “preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, . . . promoting domestic felicity, and . . . securing the maintenance and education of children.”
Roberts: It sure seems like this leads to legal polygamy.
I do not mean to equate marriage between same-sex couples with plural marriages in all respects. There may well be relevant differences that compel different legal analysis. But if there are, petitioners have not pointed to any. When asked about a plural marital union at oral argument, petitioners asserted that a State “doesn’t have such an institution.” But that is exactly the point: the States at issue here do not have an institution of same-sex marriage, either.
Roberts: The opinion isn’t very nice to opponents of same-sex marriage.
Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of today’s decision is the extent to which the majority feels compelled to sully those on the other side of the debate. The majority offers a cursory assurance that it does not intend to disparage people who, as a matter of conscience, cannot accept same- sex marriage.
By the majority’s account, Americans who did nothing more than follow the understanding of marriage that has existed for our entire history — in particular, the tens of millions of people who voted to reaffirm their States’ enduring definition of marriage — have acted to “lock . . . out,” “disparage,” “disrespect and subordinate,” and inflict “[d]ignitary wounds” upon their gay and lesbian neighbors. These apparent assaults on the character of fairminded people will have an effect, in society and in court.
Roberts: Have your fun, but you just soiled the Constitution.
If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.
Scalia: We just destroyed democracy.
A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
Scalia: The majority think they are smarter than everyone else.
They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds — minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly — could not.
Scalia: I’m not a bigot.
These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is
contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, 21 cannot possibly be supported by
anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.
Scalia: The majority are pretentious narcissists.
The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so. Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.
Scalia: The majority is trying to overthrow the government, similar to the Nazis in Germany.
But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003.
Thomas: Gay people already had it great!
Petitioners cannot claim, under the most plausible definition of “liberty,” that they have been imprisoned or physically restrained by the States for participating in same-sex relationships. To the contrary, they have been able to cohabitate and raise their children in peace. They have been able to hold civil marriage ceremonies in States that recognize same-sex marriages and private religious ceremonies in all States. They have been able to travel freely around the country, making their homes where they please. Far from being incarcerated or physically restrained, petitioners have been left alone to order their lives as they see fit.
Thomas: We have set up a war between religion and the government.
In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well. Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.
Thomas: The majority probably destroyed religious liberty.
Although our Constitution provides some protection against such governmental restrictions on religious practices, the People have long elected to afford broader protections than this Court’s constitutional precedents mandate. Had the majority allowed the definition of marriage to be left to the political process—as the Constitution requires—the People could have considered the religious liberty implications of deviating from the traditional definition as part of their deliberative process. Instead, the majority’s decision short-circuits that process, with potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.
Thomas: Gay people are fine without government recognition, just like slaves.
The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity)
because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied
governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
Alito: Opponents of marriage equality will be vilified.
It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.
I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.
By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/06/26/3674385/dissent-marriage-equality/
NZA
LOL
GOP 