Tag Archives: Supreme Court

News

Supreme Court hears arguments on whether to allow Christian campus groups

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Story from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court dueled verbally over whether a student religious group has a constitutional right to receive state college funds while excluding homosexuals and others who violate its beliefs.

The case, argued Monday, stems from San Francisco, where the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law says its policy requires that student groups seeking benefits such as school funding or preferred access to meeting rooms admit any interested student.

Hastings refused to accept the Christian Legal Society as a registered student group because, starting in 2004, the organization has held members to a “statement of faith” prohibiting “fornication, adultery and homosexual conduct.”

The society sued, contending that the Hastings antidiscrimination policy violated its First Amendment right to associate with those it chooses and to select members and officers committed to promoting its beliefs. Lower courts agreed with Hastings, setting up a Supreme Court argument with both sides represented by lawyers who gained prominence during the administration of President George W. Bush.

[…]The student group was represented by Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who has challenged prevailing views requiring a rigid separation between church and state. President Bush appointed him to a federal appeals court, but Mr. McConnell stepped down last year to head a center at Stanford Law School and litigate cases like this one.

“If Hastings is correct, a student who does not even believe in the Bible is entitled to demand to lead a Christian Bible study,” Mr. McConnell told the Supreme Court. While the school could bar discrimination based on “status”—such as race—it could not stop a student group from limiting membership to those who pledge fealty to its beliefs, he said.

And what about the wise Latina, who was appointed by Barack Obama, and hailed as a moderate?

Liberal justices said Hastings’s policy reflected a wish to avoid parsing the specific form of discrimination each student group might employ. Outside groups could still use campus facilities even if not officially registered, they said.

“Your group is not being excluded or ostracized completely,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “You can meet in the cafeteria, you can meet in open spaces in the school.”

Elections have consequences.

Now I guess that there were apparently some people who thought that voting for Obama was consistent with authentic Christian faith. But look at how Obama’s judges like up on the issue compared to Bush’s judges. Real Christians are having their fundamental rights attacked by the secular left on campus, and the judges on the Supreme Court and going to decide what happens to those real Christians. University campuses are run by secular humanists who have no reason at all in their worldview to care about protecting anyone else’s rights – morality on naturalism is survival of the fittest and might makes right. They have no principles.

I vividly remember having a talk with two “Christians” who were heavily into NBA basketball and memorizing movie dialog in the parking lot of our office prior to the 2008 election. They assured me that all that was necessary to be a Christian was to attend church and to have a good time at church. They would not listen to a word I said about policies that were consistent with the Christian worldview – not even on abortion or traditional marriage. Obama had the right color of skin, and that’s all there was to it. And now we see the results of their voting. What will happen when they meet the authentic Christians they helped to persecute in Heaven?

In addition, let this be a lesson to Christians who are interested in making a difference in the world – we need more experts in the law like McConnell who have top tier credentials. Don’t waste your life – think about the most effective thing you think you might be able to do, and do that thing. It’s not meant to make you happy, it’s self-sacrificial service.

You can read more about McConnell here.

Commentary

Tom Sowell on gun control and judicial activism

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Thomas Sowell

His latest column is here.

Excerpt:

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect?

Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn’t be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.

[…]If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.

There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn’t happen very often doesn’t mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.

When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended 4 times in 8 years, from 1913 through 1920.

The whole point of strict gun control or lax gun control is to reduce violent crime rates. All we have to do is look and see whether stricter gun control, like the UK handgun ban of 1997, raises or lowers violent crime rates. It’s not for judges to make that assessment – it’s for the people, and their legislators, to decide. I used to be a judicial activist supporter when I was younger. But not after I read Tom Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions” book.

This point about judges interpreting the law also applies to businesses and capitalism. If judges can change the rules that businesses operate under arbitrarily, then fewer people will start businesses. It’s bad enough that they have to put up with so many taxes and regulations. If one loopy judge can take away everything you own by legislating from the bench, then what is the point of even trying to start a business?

If you want jobs, you need small business. If you want small business, you need strict constructionist judges. If you want strict constructionist judges, you vote Republican. (And you get pro-life and pro-marriage for FREE!)

Thomas Sowell is my #1 favorite economist.

UPDATE: Hot Air wonders how the liberal SCOTUS guys can oppose the clear meaning of the Constitution so openly.

Commentary

The case against Elena Kagan, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee

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From the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

We know she cut corners in order to preserve partial-birth abortions. Vast majorities of the American public oppose partial-birth abortion, which involves crushing the skull of a partially born baby and which the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan characterized as, for all intents and purposes, open “infanticide.” Yet when serving as a legal adviser to former President Bill Clinton, Ms. Kagan deliberately withheld from the president a finding by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that partial-birth abortion is virtually never “the least risky, let alone the ‘necessary,’ approach.” As accurately summarized by the National Right to Life Committee, the result was this: “Ms. Kagan played a key role in keeping the brutal partial-birth abortion method legal for an additional decade.”

We know she is willing to undercut First Amendment free speech for political purposes. Ms. Kagan argued before the Supreme Court that the law should be read to allow the government to prohibit the publication of political pamphlets. In a nation stirred to its own founding by political pamphlets such as “Common Sense” and “The Federalist Papers,” this is an extremely disturbing position. Ms. Kagan also has written of the benefits of “redistribution of expression,” and has written that speech rights are to be “dol[ed] out” as a “favor” from government rather than being pre-existing rights that government cannot take away. She has argued that government would be justified in “disfavoring [an] idea [to] ‘unskew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.”

Read the whole thing.

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