We Have an Oligarchy

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.

Abraham Lincoln

SCOTUS and the Abortion Decision Fraud

Justice Blackmun wrote the majority opinion in Roe vs. Wade in 1973.  This was judicial activism of the boldest kind (though technically it only nullified state laws) and for many Americans ranks as the most notorious of all decisions by the high court.  It was the decision by which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional laws in 46 states which prohibited various sorts of elective abortions in the first six months of pregnancy.  Justice Blackmun claimed that the question of abortion was covered under an alleged “right of personal privacy” of the mother to dispose of what was allegedly a part of her body.  He admitted that “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.:”  But, “In a line of decisions . . . , the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy does exist under the Constitution. . . .”  Moreover, this “right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”  That a state was intruding upon a woman’s right to privacy when it prohibited elective abortions in early stages of pregnancies was apparently clear enough to Blackmun and his majority.

It me be supposed that the prohibitions against the taking of life without due process of law would have brought the Supreme Court down on the side of the state laws prohibiting abortion.  But no, according to Blackmun’s view, this matter of whether or not an unborn infant was such a “life,” entitled to constitutional protection, was too muddled to decide.  Blackmun wrote, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.  When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, Philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not is a position to speculate as to the answer.”  Instead of tackling head-on the issue of when life begins, Blackmun retreated to a doctrine of stages of the development of the embryo.  These were divided into three, with each corresponding period of pregnancy labeled as a “trimester.”  During the first “trimester,” the Supreme Court solemnly announced, the state could not interfere with the “right” of the female to abort her child-in-embryo.  This “right” extended through the second “trimester” as well, though the state might do such things  prescribe who might perform abortions.  During the third “trimester” a state was free to prohibit abortions.  The distinction the Court relied on was that after the sixth month, the infant could frequently survive if separated from his or her mother. . . . 

The propagandized and indoctrinated American people—taught to believe that every utterance of the Supreme Court was the “law of the land”—were slow to mobilize against this newest assault upon their ways.  Nor did they have any ready means at hand to state their horror and to deal with the perpetrators of it.  The liberal-dominated media accepted the decision as another victory for women’s rights.  A further decision in 1976 made this aspect of it decision even clearer.  The Court held “that states could not require either the consent of the husband, or—if the woman was an unmarried minor—the consent of her parents, as a condition for terminating pregnancy in the first trimester.”  In short, any child who became pregnant could dispose of it as she chose during the early months.  Liberals generally tried to keep such debate over the abortion issue as occurred publicly in the austere framework of “women’s rights,” and lectured opponents against introduction emotion.  Even so, resistance to elective abortion has become increasingly vocal over the years, and there is good reason to expect that it will eventually bear fruit in legal changes.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.293-294

SCOTUS vs the Constitution

The high standing of the Supreme Court rests on its position as the court of last resort in defending the Constitution.  The respect in which the Constitution has been held is the foundation of the Court’s authority.  To the extent that the high court deviates from the written Constitution and relies on its own assertions to that same extent it is undermining the base of its authority.  . . . Pronouncements by the Court without Constitutional backing have no popular base.

To the extent that the Supreme Court rules by its own will, it is rule by an oligarchy.  That is, it is a rule by a few men—nine to be exact—over the rest.  That the court had become exactly that was frequently charged in the 1960s.  Indeed, one writer reasoned, with sound logic, that “If it is true that a construction of the Constitution by the Supreme Court . . . is . . . ‘the law of the land’ . . . ; if it is true that a ‘constitutional right’ can come into being merely on the Court’s say . . . , then, where in all candor, are we?  If a judicial interpretation of the Constitution is, by definition, the Constitution, why then we are in the grips of judicial despotism!  That is the meaning of despotism.  An unchallengeable authority can be benign, or malevolent, but it is a despotism if the rest of the commonwealth has not practical alternative to succumbing to its will.”

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.233-234

Do Not Usurp the Constitution

If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.  But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.  The precedent must always greatly over-balance in permanent evil any transient or partial benefit which the use can at any time yield.

George Washington.  Cited by  Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.232

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

Real Marriage Equality

Obama and five U.S. Supreme Court Justices did not win marriage “equality.” They imposed a radical revision of the legal definition of marriage on the entire country. Equality demands that like things be treated alike. Equality does not demand that we treat unlike things as if they were alike. An intrinsically sterile union of two people of the same sex is as different from a union composed of two people of different sexes as men are from women (which is a difference that even homosexuals acknowledge is real, substantive, and profound). 

Homosexuals have always been free to marry. They’ve been as free to marry as polyamorists have been. They weren’t fighting for a right they were denied. They were fighting for the unilateral right to revise the legal definition of marriage.

Laurie Higgiins, The Audacity of Obama

Who Does SCOTUS Think They Are?!?

[T]he 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?

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges

Roe v. Wade Unconstitutional

Roe v. Wade is the worst decision ever made by the Supreme Court.  It is the worst in terms of moral theory for obvious reasons.  The Court held that killing children in the name of freedom for women was more important than the freedom of the baby to live.  This decision is the worst in terms of constitutional theory as well.  The Justices really made a legislative decision, not a constitutional decision.  In order to make a constitutional decision, the Court has to base its decision on something written down in the Constitution.  There is nothing written in the Constitution which relates at all to a woman’s so-called “right to an abortion.”  Since the Court could not base its decision on any written provision in the Constitution, it is fair to conclude that seven Justices simply decided that abortion laws were bad laws.  Just as we believe the Bible (God’s written law) should guide our moral decision, so the written words of the Constitution should guide our Constitutional decisions and opinions.

Michael Farris, Esq., Constitutional Law for Christian Students, p.114

Comment:  This was written in 1995, but the Court’s ruling that same-sex fake marriage is a Constitutional right is just as much of a travesty as Roe v. Wade insofar as its destruction of society and for all the same reasons as Roe V. Wade.

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