Friday, July 27, 2018

I Told You So

Back in 2016 elections I warned you about what would happen if Trump was elected and sadly it is coming true.
The Religious Right Appears Intent On Criminalizing Gay Sex Again
Huffington Gay Voices
By Michelangelo Signorile
July 24, 2018

With Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings coming up, it’s important to underscore that some anti-LGBTQ leaders appear to be going for the brass ring, far beyond just dismantling marriage equality. They’re signaling they want to see the Supreme Court allow states to once again ban sodomy.

The reality of that may sound crazy and horrifying, but just a year and a half ago, many things sounded crazy and horrifying. The U.S. is separating children from their parents at the border (and dragging its feet on reuniting them, even under court order) and the president of the United States publicly sided with a longtime adversary over American intelligence, which he continues to attack. And it appears Roe v. Wade will be overturned.

So anything can happen.

Banning gay sex, as I noted in the lead-up to Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings, is something he likely believes is constitutional. Unlike Justice Anthony Kennedy, the leader on gay rights on the court, Gorsuch is, as the respected NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg and her colleague Lauren Russell described him, a “self-proclaimed disciple of [the late Justice] Antonin Scalia’s crusade” of originalism: taking the Constitution literally as those who wrote it in its time presumably intended.
[...]
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [was] the first major crack in the foundation of marriage and human sexuality,” Perkins claimed, referring to Bill Clinton’s deeply flawed 1993 compromise with Congress that allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the military as long as they remained closeted ― which opened many up to witch hunts, abuse and expulsion.

Perkins went on:
Then, the next biggest shoe would drop — Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Texas’s ban on sodomy. The late Justice Antonin Scalia warned where their mistake would lead: “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are ... called into question by today’s decision.”
Perkins called Scalia “prophetic,” railing against the Supreme Court for giving “the far-Left the only hammer they’d need to destroy thousands of years of human history” and lamenting the Obergefell marriage equality ruling.
So what is this “Originalism?”

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary,
: a legal philosophy that the words in documents and especially the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted as they were understood at the time they were written
  • Some judges believe the best way to interpret the Constitution … lies in an approach called originalism. The judges who follow this approach look to history to discover what those who wrote the Constitution most likely thought about the content and scope of a constitutional phrase, and they interpret the phrase accordingly. —Stephen Breyer
  • The main point of originalism, which has driven conservative legal theory for a generation, is that the Constitution does not evolve. —Garrett Epps
The opinion article by Michelangelo Signorile goes on to say,
Originalism was an obscure theory in the 1980s but has since become mainstreamed into the conservative movement. Linda Greenhouse, a veteran New York Times Supreme Court reporter, reminded us last year that Kennedy was nominated by President Ronald Reagan after the Senate voted down Judge Robert Bork, an originalist:
Judge Bork’s insistence that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the original understanding of its authors, a view Judge Gorsuch is said to share, was a fringe notion in 1987. [During his confirmation hearings] Justice Anthony M. Kennedy reassured the Senate by rejecting originalism; the Constitution’s framers had “made a covenant with the future,” he declared in his confirmation hearing.
The problem is as I see it Originalist think that the Constitution is not a living document and want to base their court rulings on thinking 229 years old. Back then a black person was only three fifths of a person and women didn’t even count as a person but rather as property of their husband.

The problem is that if you read the original letters between the constitutional delegates their thoughts are all over the place and you can Originalists will cherry pick the passages that they want just like they do with the Bible.

The Signorile goes on to write…
As Totenberg and Russell noted, it was Kennedy’s sound rejection of originalism that paved the way for his taking the lead on throwing out sodomy bans:

Disagreements [among conservative justices] were never more apparent than in a series of decisions about gay rights written by the usually conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy ... In a decision striking down a Texas law that criminalized private, consensual “homosexual conduct,” Kennedy asserted that the Founding Fathers did not specify all liberties because they expected that list to change [emphasis added].
So we are going down a steep slope and the ending doesn’t look good for us.

I see more “religious freedom” cases going against us, I see more cases where Title VII and Title IX rulings are against us, and I even see where the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is torn apart.

Will we go back to a time when government was peeking into our bedrooms? Will we go back to a time where we had to have three items of birth gender clothing on us?

Remember only you can prevent this from happening. VOTE.

If you do not vote in November than you are just as culpable as those who voted for this abomination.

No comments:

Post a Comment