Criminals and LEFTIST Judges

Criminals understand that they are at war with society. But many of those whose jobs it is to protect society do not want to treat criminals like mortal enemies. Somewhere out there in the affluent suburbs, there is a white liberal judge who feels good about himself because he gave a ghetto youth another chance. The price of his moral vanity is paid in blood—by others.

Thomas Sowell

"Soft-on-Crime" Policies Increase Crime

it’s striking how quickly soft-on-crime policies at the state and local level destroy your day-to-day sense of safety. Progressive criminal justice “reforms,” such as defunding the police, ending cash bail, refusing to prosecute misdemeanors, letting thousands of convicted felons out of prison early, and slashing the prison population, are the most obvious contributors to the escalating violent crime problem in blue cities.

Lawlessness Is a Choice, by Miranda Devine. Imprimis, 10/25, Volume 54/Issue 10

Counter Arguments to Same Sex "Marriage"

Let’s consider some counter-arguments [to same-sex “marriage”]:

1. Homosexuals can’t fulfill the most basic purpose of marriage – procreation and childrearing. There are heterosexual couples that don’t want children and those that can’t have children. But same-sex couples, by their very nature, are incapable of having children. The couples who are doing society’s vital work – mothers and fathers joined by faith and tradition, raising the next generation in love – deserve the status reserved for them alone from time immemorial.

2. Children need a father and a mother – A woman who was raised from birth by two lesbians said that, even as an adult, “I have still felt an empty space in my life, the lack of a father, and no matter the love I have had from both of my ‘mothers’ … There is a balance that comes from a mother and a father that can create the most lasting and stable family. I would not keep the blessings a father can give from any child.”

3. With gay marriage in the United States, adoption agencies are being forced to place children with homosexual couples. In Massachusetts, the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, Catholic Charities stopped offering adoption services for that reason.

4. There is no comparison between this and natural marriage. Most homosexual liaisons are of short duration. Even those that are called “committed relationships” are rarely monogamous. According to the National Center for Health Research, in 2001, even in the age of no-fault divorce, 66% of first marriages in the U.S. lasted longer than 10 years; 50% lasted longer than 20 years. Another study described the average homosexual relationship as “transactional” – lasting less than 6 months.

5. In a study of gay men by the Journal of Sex Research, the average number of lifetime partners was 755, with some reporting more than 1,000. How can the term “marriage” be applied to what amounts to a revolving bedroom door?

6. Legalizing homosexual marriage inevitably leads to public school indoctrination and religious persecution. In the United States, photographers, florists and bakers have been fined huge sums (and, in some cases, ordered to undergo what amounts to therapy) for refusing to participate in same-sex ceremonies. Ultimately, sexual radicals would force churches to perform these ceremonies or lose their tax-exempt status.

7. On Father’s Day, the U.S. Department of Education had a fatherhood conference that included the heads of Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, two well-respected organizations doing vital work. “Outrageous” said LGBT groups. Because FRC and Focus oppose gay marriage, they are “hateful.” Thus the movement works tirelessly to stigmatize and marginalize conservative Christians.

8. In the Canadian province of Alberta, a local school board ordered a Christian school to stop reading or studying “any scripture that could be offensive to any individual.” Presumably, this includes those that condemn homosexuality, adultery, idolatry and witchcraft.

9. The sexual revolution is an insatiable beast. Nothing is ever enough. First there were anti-discrimination laws, then hate-crimes legislation, then marriage-deconstruction. Now, it’s on to what’s called “transgenderism” – which has absolutely no scientific basis. It demands that men who “feel” like women be treated like women – including using the bathrooms and showers/changing rooms of those who actually are women and girls – regardless of considerations of safety and modesty. If we don’t hold the line on marriage, who knows what will come next.

10. Same-sex marriage must be seen not in isolation, but as part of a continuum. In the United States, we went from no-fault divorce, to abortion on demand and sex education which amounts to indoctrination, to public schools distributing condoms to minors without parental knowledge or consent. Along with Bible-believers, the left has targeted the family as the chief obstacle to achieving its utopian agenda. It understands that anything which weakens the family strengthens its cause.

11. Almost 100 years ago, Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian intellectual considered one of the fathers of Cultural Marxism, wrote that traditional culture must be destroyed for the workers’ paradise to emerge. Lukacs observed: “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch…Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.” By the “old values,” he meant faith and family.

Without marriage, we will enter a brave new world of atomistic individualism – one where individuals live by and for themselves and social arrangements are transitory and utilitarian. Procreation will be increasingly rare.

We need to return to our roots – especially the Bible.

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948, when most UN members were democracies) calls the family based on marriage, “the natural and fundamental group unit of society and (as such) entitled to protection by society and the state.”

To say the family is “the… fundamental group unit of society,” means it’s the foundation. Demolish the foundation, and the entire structure collapses. Survivors will buried in the rubble.

Don Feder, Marriage is the Foundation of Social Order

Justice Will Be a Thing of the Past

We have become professionals without morals and judges apart from being lawful.  Our courtrooms have become theatrical performances where arguments risk the lives of people and countries, and reasoning has become rationalization for the most debased acts.  With God denied and evil necessarily gone, justice will soon be a thing of the past, as the very generation that cries out for justice has empowered legions of thugs to behave unjustly when their own desires are jeopardized.  This is a society without moral moorings.  Such are the shenanigans we play in the name of reason.

Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Secular Gods, pg.47

Legal vs Lawful

We are always near the breaking point, when we care only for what is legal, and nothing for what is lawful.  Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exemptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.

G. K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying, pg.267

The Courts Should NOT Add to the Constitution

This Court, limited in function . . . , does not serve its high purpose when it exceeds its authority, even to satisfy justified impatience with the slow workings of the political process.  For when, in the name of constitutional interpretation, the Court adds something to the Constitution that was deliberately excluded from it, the Court in reality substitutes its view of what should be so for the amending process.

Justice John M. Harlan, Dissent in Reynolds v. Sims, 1964

Unhappy Childhood Is NOT an Excuse

Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults. The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers “another chance” are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies.

Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered.

Thomas Sowell, Backward-Looking “Progressives”

Judges Ignore Law and Rule on Sympathies

In the 20th century, it has become commonplace for courts to listen to or read vast quantities of evidence, much of it irrelevant by almost any standard, before making rulings.  Judges are invited to make their decisions on the basis of tendentious materials rather than attending to law and precedent.  Virtually overwhelmed by factual details, they are invited to rule on the basis of their sympathies.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 4: The Growth of America 1878-1928, pg.101

Children Suffer with Same-Sex Parents

While children in straight families are allowed to “express unhappiness about something going on in their home,” the same is not true for children in gay families.  They are “warned that they are guilty of homophobia if they are unhappy with their home life or, alternatively, told always to direct blame at external homophobia and exonerate their parents’ decisions.”

For all of Justice Kennedy’s concern about concern about conferring the “dignity” of marriage on same-sex couples, there’s little concern about conferring suffering on the children raised in such relationships.  A relentless focus on adult desire has left us astonishingly calloused.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.172

Blacks Are the Main Victims of Lawlessness

Among the nation’s most dangerous cities are Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Newark, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. These once-thriving cities are in steep decline.

What these cities have in common is that they have large black populations. Also, they have been run by Democrats for nearly a half-century, with blacks having significant political power. Other characteristics these cities share are poorly performing and unsafe schools, poor quality city services, and declining populations.

Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are murdered. That’s a number greater than white and Hispanic murder victims combined. Blacks of all ages are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.

According to the FBI, the police kill about 400 people a year; blacks are roughly one-third of that number. In Chicago alone, so far this year, over 2,000 people have been shot, leaving over 320 dead. It’s a similar tale of mayhem in other predominantly black cities. …

The primary victims of lawlessness are black people. To address this problem and most others, black people should ignore the liberal agenda. If civil authorities will not do their job of creating a safe environment, then black people should take the initiative. ...

Black residents of crime-infested neighborhoods should set up patrols—armed if necessary—to challenge thugs, gangs, drug dealers, and other miscreants, and make black neighborhoods safe and respectable.

No one should have to live in daily fear for his life and safety. Most Americans have no idea of—and wouldn’t begin to tolerate—the climate of fear and intimidation under which so many black people live.

Without self-initiative, there is not much that can be done about the high crime rate in black neighborhoods. Black and white liberals and their allies in the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as many libertarians, will not countenance the kind of tools needed to bring about civility. … 

Black people have the capacity to run the criminals out of their neighborhoods. Let me put the issue another way. Suppose it were the Ku Klux Klan riding through black neighborhoods, murdering 7,000 blacks year after year. How many black people would be willing to wait for the Klansmen to behave themselves or accept political promises and wait for a government program?

Walter E. Williams, “The Primary Victims of Lawlessness Are Black People”

A Government Without God

Where theistic religion grows weak, that is where religion related to God grows weak, justice will weaken.  Crimes, then, are defined as antisocial activity which, in turn, then is merely what the majority says it is. Then punishments seem to be the result of the majority's ganging up on the minority. This, in turn, seems inconsistent with democratic feelings.

The result is a decline in uniform application of penalties for crime, resultant miscarriages of justice, trampling on the rights of law-abiding people, together with an increase in what ought to be called crime.

Robert D. Culver, Civil Government: A Biblical View, pg.78

H/T Doug Evans

Bizarre SCOTUS Rationale

The Supreme Court in its landmark Miranda decision…argued that to fail to give everyone the same information already possessed by the more sophisticated would be to “take advantage of the poor, the ignorant, and the distracted.”  Note what this taking advantage consists of: a failure to provide grater means of escaping punishment for crimes committed by criminals who fall below the state of the art in criminal evasions of the law.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," pg.193

Ramifications of Roe V. Wade

Today’s quote is quite lengthy, but entirely necessary if the reader is to get the full depth of understanding of the subject.

[The Supreme Court ruling on abortion] is not only arbitrary medically but legally.  The ruling set up an arbitrary absolute by disregarding the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.  Quoting Professor [Joseph P.] Witherspoon:

Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it.  Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn, from the time of their conception.

Supreme Court Justice White in his dissent to the Court’s action stated, “As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”  Upon this arbitrary ruling medically and legally, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on this subject of abortion of almost every one of the states in the union.

Further, this arbitrary decision is at complete variance with the past Christian consensus.  In the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was freely practiced, but Christians took a stand against it.  In 314 the Council of Ancyra barred from taking of the Lord’s Supper for ten years all who procured abortions or made drugs to further abortions.  Previously the Synod of Elvira (305-306) had specified excommunication till the deathbed for these offenses.  The arbitrary absolutes of the Supreme Court are accepted against the previous consensus of centuries, as well as against past law.  And (taking abortion as an example) if this arbitrary absolute by law is accepted by most modern people, bred with the concept of no absolutes but rather relativity, why wouldn’t arbitrary absolutes in regard to such matters as authoritarian limitations on freedom be equally accepted as long as they were thought to be sociologically helpful?  We are left with sociological law without any certainty of limitation.  

By the ruling of the Supreme Court, the unborn baby is not counted as a person.  In our day, quite rightly, there has been a hue and cry against some of our ancestors’ cruel viewing of the black slave as a non-person.  This was horrible indeed—an act of hypocrisy as well as cruelty.  But now, by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow, millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared non-persons.  Surely this, too, must be seen as an act of hypocrisy.

The door is open.  In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated “aliveness” from “personhood,” and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged?  So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable.  And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of the so-called neo-morts (persons in whom the brain wave is flat) to harvest from them body parts and blood, when the polls show that this has become acceptable to the majority?  Dr. Willard Gaylin (1925- ) discussed this possibility in Harper’s (September 1974) under the title, “Harvesting the Dead.”  Law has become a matter of averages, just as the culture’s sexual mores have become only a matter of averages.  

As the Christian consensus dies, there are not many sociological alternatives.  One possibility is hedonism, in which every man does his own thing.  Trying to build a society on hedonism leads to chaos.  One man can live on a desert island and do as he wishes within the limits of the form of the universe, but as soon as two men live on the island, if they are to live in peace, they cannot both do simply as they please.  …

A second possibility is the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote.  In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge.  There was an absolute for both morals and law.  Bu to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force.  Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support.  On this basis, law and morals become a matter of averages.  And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become “right” to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane—and other groups could be declared non-persons.  No voice could be raised against it. . . .

Here is a simple but profound rule:  If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, p.221-224 (1976) (emphasis in the original)

Supreme Court Reigns?

"The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . .  the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."


Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, as cited by Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.318

"Affirmative Action" is Unfair

Sometimes preferential policies are justified as a form of reparations for a past history of discrimination.  That would make sense, however, only if we ignore individuals and think of races as undifferentiated blocs whose members live forever.  The individual beneficiaries and victims of past discrimination are now almost entirely unknowable.  It is hardly sensible to prefer a person who has not suffered discrimination because a member of the same race or sex suffered it thirty years ago.  Whatever happened in the past, in the present the policy does harm to guiltless individuals and benefits those who have suffered no harm.  At some point, history must be accepted for what it is, history.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.238

Commerce Clause Abused by SCOTUS

Ever wonder how a federal law can prevent carrying a gun near a school?  Commerce clause.  Yep, a convoluted trail leading to the law being valid under the commerce clause of the Constitution.  Thomas Sowell cites Justice Stephen Breyer (on p.256 of “Intellectuals and Society”):

Possession of guns in schools means violence, and violence means poor education.  Poor education means an unproductive, noncompetitive workforce.  And that kind of workforce negatively affects not just one state but all states.  School violence, of which guns are a part, arguably presents a national problem warranting a national solution.

As Sowell points out, activist judges first decide WHAT they want to accomplish, and then wrangle the Constitution to accomplish their goals.

Activist Judges Make the U.S.A an Oligarchy

While there are many controversies over particular aspects of the law, the most fundamental controversy has long been over who should control the law and who should change the law.  American intellectuals, since at least the middle of the twentieth century, have overwhelmingly favored expansion of the role of judges, beyond that of applying laws created by others, to themselves remaking the law to “fit the times” - which is to say, making the law fit the prevailing vision of the times, the vision of the anointed intellectuals.

Where the Constitution of the United States is a barrier to this expanded role of judges, then judges have been urged to “interpret” the Constitution as a set of values to be applied as judges choose, or updated as they think appropriate, rather than as a set of specific instructions to be followed.  That is what “judicial activism” means, though verbal virtuosity has managed to confuse that meaning with other meanings.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.254

Victimhood in the Courts

Courtroom depictions of human beings as the mere products of their biology or environment help reshape how we view ourselves.  Even if such portrayals ultimately fail to secure acquittals, they contribute to a new cultural understanding of humans as victims of their biology and environment, rather than as morally accountable agents who are responsible for their choices.

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p. 78

Get the Courts Under Control!

There appears to be only one means by which the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, can be brought back to constitutional legitimacy.  That would be a constitutional amendment making any federal or state court decision subject to begin overruled by a majority vote of each House of Congress.  The mere suggestion of such a remedy is certain to bring down cries that this would endanger our freedoms.  To the contrary, as already noted, it is the courts that are not merely endangering our freedoms but actually depriving us of them, particularly our most precious freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves democratically unless the Constitution actually says otherwise.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.117