>> Then file a freakin' lawsuit and make your case in court instead of this thread. <<
thankfully some have. let's all wish them good luck. in a california courtroom they're going to need it.
NEA: Protection or indoctrination?
worldnetdaily.com
I'm sure that sounds innocuous enough to the enlightened, but not to everyone. The Washington Times reports that a group of parents is suing a Novato, Calif., public school district "for allowing their children to see pro-homosexual plays at school without any prior notice or parental consent." The school's program is called "Cootie Shots": Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry."
The plays exposed second through sixth graders to skits pushing homosexual themes. In one, a boy wears a dress and discusses cross-dressing; in the other, a female becomes involved with a princess rather than a prince.
too bad we are going to have to battle the gay mafia in florida as well.
A similar bill, "Dignity for All Students Act," is pending before the Florida legislature. It, too, would ban harassment and bullying on the basis of many things – including "sexual orientation."
>> He doesn't - I guess he was just feeling hegemonistic. And you? Are you a citizen of the great, sovereign, religion establishing, within its rights under the constitution as they were reserved to it by the Framers, state of California? <<
that would be fine if the radical homosexuals all congregated with each other in california, but it's clear that the radical left wants to twist the constitution for their own purposes. it will start with california, but then they will seek to impose their twisted form of totalitarianism on all of us.
here's how:
Constitutional immunity from the Constitution?
worldnetdaily.com
This week the United States Supreme Court threw out a California law that establishes a two-tier welfare system in that state. California has been giving a higher level of payments to welfare recipients who are not new residents. Benefits for those just arriving in the state are limited for the first year to the rate which they were already receiving in their former state of residence. Obviously, this law is aimed at discouraging people from migrating to California just to get higher welfare benefits. This seems to be a fairly unobjectionable purpose, but the court struck it down.
Much more important than their rejection of this particular law, however, is the ground upon which their decision was reasoned. The court said the California law is unacceptable because it is an encroachment on the right of poor people to travel, and on their right generally to be treated like other residents of their new states. In arguing on this basis they have revived an interpretation of a clause in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which could be used to undermine and invalidate any law in a given state that sets conditions for activities of its citizens that are different from conditions set for those activities in other states. It is called the Privileges and Immunities Clause and it says, "The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states."
Understood the wrong way, this clause could be used to empower the federal government utterly to destroy the portion of sovereignty reserved to state government. This is one of the reasons the clause was interpreted very narrowly when it was originally added to the Constitution in the aftermath of the Civil War, because there was great wariness of its possible abuse. The Privileges and Immunities Clause was given a narrow interpretation precisely to ensure that it would not be used to destroy each state's ability to establish internal conditions reflecting the best judgment of its citizens.
This is not an arbitrarily restrictive reading of the clause. It reflects a principled understanding by our political predecessors of what such language must mean in light of the overall principles of our system of government. Whatever it means, the clause cannot be contradictory to the fundamental purposes of our federal system -- protecting our ability to set up communities within the states that are different from one another in various ways, reflecting the differences of attitude, belief, and background of the various people in various parts of the country.
So the narrow interpretation given to this clause in the 19th century arose from a principled resolve to be jealously protective of the prerogatives of the state governments, because this is the American way. In fact, if the court is so concerned with protecting the right to travel, it might recall that a very restricted reading of the Privileges and Immunities Clause is necessary if we are to preserve the differences among states that make the right to travel one of the anchors of liberty. America was not supposed to be a forcibly homogenized state. Rather, for two centuries, citizens who have not found the laws and customs of one state congenial to their own particular understanding of the good life have been free to look and move elsewhere. They have been able to take comfort and hope in the prospect of finding a new place to build their lives among people and laws that correspond more closely to their own vision.
The American "way of life" is a balance between the richly varied forms in which our citizens choose to live, and our commonly held principles of ordered liberty under God, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Because we are united in the principles of the Declaration, we are able to encourage the wonderful diversity of human life without fear of losing our national unity.
Of course, over the course of the last half century or so, we have had courts doing everything they could to consolidate power in their own hands, to assert control of our lives at every level -- state and local, and to use the authority of the Supreme Court as an instrument with which to bludgeon to death any moral viewpoints that contradict the leftist licentiousness that they believe ought to prevail uniformly in our society. The sudden willingness of the court to revive the Privileges and Immunities Clause and give it a broad interpretation now puts the Court in the position to use that broadened clause in the service of this agenda of the tyrannical depravity of leftist ideology.
I believe that they will use it to invalidate and defeat all efforts at the state level to stop the advance of homosexual marriage.
The Court probably could have found other grounds to rule against the two-tier welfare system. I think they revived the Privileges and Immunities Clause as a signal that is meant to go throughout the courts of the country so that as the homosexual marriage effort advances, it will advance into a federal court system in which the anti-federalist and expansive interpretation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause has been given new status. The clause will then be called on in order to invalidate any laws passed at the state level by which those states seek to immunize themselves against the requirement that they accept homosexual marriage, or for that matter any other new form of "marriage" -- group marriages, bestial marriages, pederastic marriages, you name it. The ultimate goal is to destroy the notion that there should be any social support for the authentic institution of marriage.
Let me say it clearly: The Supreme Court's rejection of the two-tier welfare system in California is not about welfare; it is about homosexual marriage and the war on heterosexual, monogamous marriage. It is about making sure that this nation is firmly grounded in the philosophy of evil now unfortunately prevalent on the socialist left in America. The effort is aimed at making sure that all of us are complicit in evil, and that we will not be able, at the state level, to reject this evil.
The scheme of the radical homosexuals is to get homosexual marriage accepted in one state, to move homosexual couples "married" in that state into all the other states, and then go to court in those states to challenge their refusal to recognize the marriages performed in the original state -- to demand, in other words, equal privileges. That is what the California welfare decision is about, as will become clear when the other pieces of the strategy fall into place.
In the last half of the 20th century we have seen a systematic and sustained assault on the prerogatives of the state governments. The comprehensive attempt to usurp local authority in schools is one of the clearest examples. The California decision opens a door for this assault to be carried to its ultimate conclusion, so that in areas which were still acknowledged to be within the province of the states we will see a more fundamental move toward usurpation by the federal courts. There are many such areas, including local policing arrangements, licensing of business activities, welfare policy and others. All of these things are suddenly on the table, and will be potentially subject to federal dictation from the courts on this new basis.
The vote in the California case was 7-2. Only Justices Thomas and Rehnquist took a position that is properly respectful of our federal system, and they were not joined by any of the other Republican nominees to the court. This is an ominous reminder that a shallow libertarianism has displaced real conservative principle in the minds of some supposedly conservative members of the Court. When the militant homosexual lobby asks the Supreme Court to enforce equal public status for same-sex unions and traditional marriages, and the court must decide whether it lies within the prerogative of the states to protect the traditional institution of marriage, it will be "touch and go" whether we get a principled outcome that respects the basic requirements of our civil life. At the end of the day, so-called "conservatives" who are in fact legal positivists without respect for the role of natural law in American jurisprudence will be unreliable on fundamentally important civic issues of this kind. And that is why the revival of the broad interpretation of this clause of the 14th Amendment is such a dangerous development.
The privileges and immunities brush is so broad that it is hard to see where it will stop. We may well soon be subjected to anything that judges want to enforce with its sweeping strokes. The result will be an enforced inability of the states to pass laws that reflect the principled judgment of their own citizens. The federal system, which requires this sort of diversity, will be dealt a deathblow over time by such a strategy. Its success will mean not only the end of federalism, but the end as well of the constitutional system based on the federalist principle of divided sovereignty. And as our Founders taught us so well, the end of divided sovereignty will be the end of liberty and the establishment of tyranny in America. |
