The Day the 10th Amendment Died

Today, June 26th, 2015 is the date that officially will mark the death of the United States of America as a federal republic. The states are no longer independent entities that are allowed to experiment, or not, with different aspects of self rule. The Supreme Court, in both of the major decisions that were handed down this week, totally and completely gutted the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The twisted argument the 5 vote majority signed on to was based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Since there is no right to marry codified in federal law and each state was, in the past, able to establish their own laws based upon the needs and wants of its citizens, the court made this up out of whole cloth. The protections of the 14th Amendment were created to deal with issues related to slavery and ensuring freed slaves the rights of any other citizen. While the criminalization of homosexual relations was wrong, those laws have been struck from the books. No one can be jailed for being homosexual any longer and that is good and proper. This "right" to marry was made up out of thin air. This is the same argument used in the Roe v. Wade decision. There is no "right" to "privacy" in the Constitution or subsequent amendments. The right against illegal search and seizure is not privacy, but a protection against government overreach. 

The rub comes here. The 10th Amendment was written to give each state autonomy over their own affairs except when engaging in trade and commerce with another state. Read the simplest of all amendments.

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.

This was made irrelevant today. Following this logic, how far can we be from totally ignoring other parts of the Constitution. When a church that believes in the Biblical view of marriage turns away a gay couple who wish to "marry" (undoubtedly, the couple is there to make examples of the church in the first place) and they sue said church, the first right codified in the Bill of Rights with be the next to be pushed aside. Don't doubt me.

 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The usurpation of the 1st Amendment has been going on for years, with free speech zones and lawsuits against bakers, florists and wedding venue operators, and all this new found "right" to marry anyone, anywhere, has done is add precedent to those that argue against the ability of churches to follow their Biblically informed conscience. Many people doubt me on this but the progressive left will never quit on their imposition of an amoral, immoral statist agenda. As Edmund Burke said, " The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."  We are doing little to nothing right now to push back against the statist agenda because people of conscious are deathly afraid of being labeled as racists, bigots, sexists, or homophobes. The time to get over the fear of being labelled something by your enemy is over. The left is the enemy to self government and has to be stopped. Undoubtedly, what we are experiencing in the country right now is the rise of tyrannical government. We fought wars to destroy collectivist, fascist and Marxist ideologies in the past and now the country is on its own path to the same type of government that we so strongly opposed.

The LGBTQZRDESATRP mafia will not like what I have to say next, but they have been fighting for a "right" that was actually put in place to keep whites and blacks from marrying. Marriage license laws didn't exist in this country until the advent of Jim Crow laws and the dark, Separate but Equal phase of our history. The license requirements were put in place as a sort of "poll tax" on marriage to keep people apart that the segregationist Democrats didn't want having children together. The federal government then took the idea that they could encourage people to have children with IRS incentives for married people in order to help replace the tax paying population after the advent of Social Security and welfare programs that depended on new income tax revenue. Just in case you flunked biology, homosexual couples can't bear children. The correct fight would have been to abolish marriage licenses and the federal government's recognition of those currently married. Just because two people are married before God or who ever they decide to pray to(Mother Earth, in the case of the green crowd), the federal government need not see them any differently than any other person that is not married. What this case actually will result in will be the marginalization of all that don't tow the progressive line.

To put this all in a more elemental light, the left and the Gay Mafia have been saying that this issue is like modern day equivalent of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. That could not be any further from the truth. Unless a genetic link to homosexuality is discovered, there is no basis in fact to support that argument. A black child can no more select their race than can they select whether they are born with girl parts or boy parts. To make this argument makes a mockery of the work of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work. I guess what I'm saying is if being gay isn't inborn, it is a personal preference. Love has nothing to do with law. Unfortunately, feelings have now become a positive defense when arguing a case before the Supreme Court. Frankly, feelings shouldn't matter in the eyes of the law.

Another argument that I would like to see put before the Supreme Court that would illustrate to the leftists that were pushing for the abolition of states rights that states rights actually matter. Since most states have "must issue" rather than "may issue" conceal carry permit laws on the books already, shouldn't all other states recognize that and also issue conceal carry permits to anyone that is eligible to have one? Shouldn't one state's concealed carry permit be valid everywhere in the country? The logic is the same. What if I love my gun and want to carry it with me everywhere? Who's to say that I shouldn't be able to do that.

The past few days of Supreme Court decisions show that words no longer mean ANYTHING. If I was a defense lawyer, I'd be licking my chops. Now that all laws are open to interpretation and plain language no longer matters, why not challenge every single law on the books in the same fashion. Laws and amendments only mean what the Court says that the writers wanted them to mean, not what they actually say. 

I leave you with the excerpts from the dissent of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.

The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.

Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

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