9 years ago
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The Religious Right’s Full Page Denunciation of the United States Constitution
“We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.”
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http://www.politicususa.com
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An open letter to the Supreme Court from religious leaders across the USA
A statement of opposition and threat of civil disobedience to marriage equality from Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Frank Pavone, Don Wildmon, Jerry Boykin, Alveda King and Alan Keyes.
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Amazing how they can still find a way to play the victim.
It is indeed. I have gotten intensely sick of it quite frankly.
I agree, but unfortunately they won't go away on their own. We have to speak up and show people why they're wrong rather than trust people will be willing or able to distinguish between good speech and bad on their own.
Don't want to follow the laws of the land? Fine! No problem! Let the IRS drop tax exempt status on churches, then.
There is nothing at all about marriage in the constitution, it is out of the jurisdiction of the federal government.
Several hundred years of legal precedent disagrees with you. The government was never limited exclusively by the powers granted in the Constitution, even in the Founders' day.
That is one hell of an appeal to authority. You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning.
Oh wait, our politicians already do. That kind of thinking gets us the PATRIOT Act and the NSA spying and the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. If you're willing to admit that the federal government has the right to dictate to the entire country what a marriage constitutes, you're putting its foot in the door on the issue, and pendulums have a tendency to swing the other way.
That's pretty rich, accusing me of engaging in appeal to authority after you appeal to it first. I clarified the authority you appealed to, demonstrating it doesn't work the way you claim it does. If you want to live in your own laissez faire utopia feel free to create your own, but in the meanwhile let's not fix what isn't broken here.
Now, there are other aspects of the US government that are demonstrably broken. You'll get no argument from me. But the reason they're so broken is because people applied that same laissez faire thinking to politics: they put government up for sale to the highest bidder and never held anyone accountable for it. We've held our government accountable in the past and we can do it again. The problem here is not that the government is overreaching, but it's serving interests that are not in the interests of the general welfare as the Constitution requires.
I made a statement about the way our federal government is set up to work, and your refutation was that the government doesn't follow those rules. I was not making an appeal to authority, I was stating a fact. Just because the federal government rules on things outside its jurisdiction does not mean it should.
Nice. "If you don't like it, leave."
No, it's broken because it was given (or took) too much power to affect the lives of its people, and so it became profitable to buy that power. Take the power away from the government and the lobbyists will all lose their jobs.
Your claim was erroneous, and pointed out how. You then accused me of an appeal to authority, asserting that your interpretation is the correct one in spite of centuries of precedent to the contrary. Except anyone with a basic high school education in government knows that isn't how the Constitution works nor how it was written for us to govern ourselves. You are perhaps confusing the US Constitution with the US Articles of Confederation it replaced.
I'm pointing out that if you want to test your theory of government, do it with your own. Leave mine alone.
True, the lobbyists will lose their jobs because their jobs will become unnecessary. The business and religious interests who want to profit off the rest of us will have no barrier to their actions. That's not a world I want for my family.
My claim was not erroneous, it is an established fact that the Constitution is a document granting certain specific powers to the federal government. Again, you have used the fact that the federal government acts outside these powers as an argument that they should continue to do so.
My theory of government is following the Constitution. Why don't you move to another country, there are plenty that seem to have views more in line with your own.
Sure, they'll have lots of barriers, like losing customers or supporters. Can't make a profit or a sermon if no one is buying your stuff.
Your claim is neither supported by law nor the courts. It's how you claim the government is supposed to be bound, which it never has been. Just because you want it to work that way doesn't make it so.
And again, your theory is erroneous. You have nothing with which to support it, you're focusing on a few specific lines out of context and ignoring the rest of the document thoroughly outlined in papers and legal rulings. So yes, this is how our world works and I'm grateful your minority opinion isn't creating the power vacuum easily predicted.
Because captive markets are so good at finding competition.
My theory is not "erroneous", and it is very much supported by those whose wrote the Constitution. The federal government has simply chosen to rely on the judicial branch to "interpret" its way into more or less unlimited power. Again, your entire premise is an appeal to an authority that has ignored its charter and deigned to give itself whatever authority it sees fit. And again, this is why we have laws such as the Freedom Act.
Sadly, you are right, that is how the world works, which is why hundreds of Americans are killed every year enforcing the War on Drugs, why hundreds of thousands of Americans are imprisoned for the same, why millions of people have been killed or maimed in our overseas conflicts, why banks are allowed to commit fraud and then be bailed out by the people they defrauded, why government agencies can spy without restraint on every American citizen, why American citizens can be assassinated without due process. You might find this concentration of unlimited power appealing, but I don't, and I will fight it.
A free market would discourage a captive market, unless that captive market was already efficiently servicing the market.