What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Men in Black
Men in Black, the title of a new book by Mark R. Levin, is a good introduction to the Supreme Court appointment battles likely to occur within the second Bush administration. President Bush has determined to appoint originalists, that is, Justices who respect the words and the limits of the Constitution and do not impose their own ideology on the nation by legislating from the bench.
Levin cites as an example of legislating from the bench the current interpretation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The Court according to Chief Justice William Rehnquist “bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.” The rationale for its hostility is a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson to some Baptist ministers where he uses the expression “a wall of separation between church and State.” The words appear nowhere in the Constitution. The words that do appear are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Its purpose was to prevent the federal government from establishing a national church. It was not even intended to keep the states from establishing state churches. At the time of the adoption of the First Amendment there were established churches in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Connecticut. James Madison the primary author of the Bill of Rights “apprehended the meaning of the words to be, that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.”
The framers of the Constitution never envisioned a situation where the mention of God in the public square would be controversial, let alone illegal. Two weeks after the ratification of the First Amendment George Washington proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving to God. Far from feeling hostility to religion, President Jefferson in a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians provided annual cash support for the tribe’s Roman Catholic priest and church. Two days after writing his famous “wall of separation” letter Jefferson attended church services held in the House of Representatives and continued to do so during his term of office. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, “The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.” Nowadays thanks to the Court the non-existent right of the nonreligious not to feel uncomfortable at a public expression of religion trumps the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion.
The abuse of the First Amendment is but one of the aberrations mentioned by Levin. In the past Justices have imposed slavery in free territories and segregation on a private railroad company. In 1944 the Court approved the internment of Japanese-American citizens without Constitutional warrant.
By far the worst case of judicial activism was the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that abrogated all state laws against abortion. This was based on a non-existent right of privacy. Here is a case in which the Court rewrote the Constitution by pretending to uphold it. Justice William O. Douglas wrote “that specific guarantees in he Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” Levin remarks that the Constitution has no generalized right to privacy for the simple reason that criminal and evil acts can be committed in private, e.g., possession or use of controlled substances. Government can invade privacy unless prohibited by some constitutional prohibition. Not finding any constitutional grounds for the decision in Roe except in mysterious “penumbras” and “emanations” the Court in effect wrote a new federal statute. Writing statutes is the province of the legislature and not the courts. It was an exercise in raw judicial power which effectively undermines the Constitution. Evel Knievel is not a legal expert but he expresses the situation succinctly: “What good is law in the United States of America if five or six ******* bimbos are going to rule against it?” Justice Blackmun decided that an unborn child is not a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment and thus had no equal protection rights. Ironically Blackmun was opposed to capital punishment for the guilty but not for millions of innocent unborn children killed as a result of Roe. He said that it was not possible or necessary to decide the beginning of life and then contradicted himself by making it begin at birth.
In 1986 the Supreme Court decided that homosexual sodomy is not a fundamental right. In 2003 the Court reversed this by declaring that the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade denial of “liberty” without due process of law, made homosexual sodomy a constitutional right. The State, the Court argued, could not support a law based on morality alone. Justice Anthony Scalia wrote in dissent, “If…the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, [no law against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity] can survive rational-basis review.” The Justices feel bound neither by the Constitution nor by their own precedents.
Although the Fourteenth Amendment about equal treatment under the law has been used to create all sort of new rights by the Court it has also been used to justify discrimination. In the name of diversity, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, the Court has allowed race-based discrimination against whites in order to guarantee college admissions for minorities—in effect, reverse discrimination. Past discrimination is not corrected by new Court authorized discrimination. That undercuts the wrongness of the prior discrimination.
The Court has usurped the exclusive authority of Congress relative to immigration. Surely Congress and not the Court is the body to determine the sorts of benefits to which aliens are entitled. The Court made the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment apply to aliens whether legal or illegal because of their physical presence in this country. Would that it had made the same determination for unborn babies present in this country.
Although the First Amendment does not allow Congress to abridge freedom of speech the Court has decided that virtual pornography is permissible but not political speech at certain times before elections. It is legal to burn the American flag but not to pass out pro-life literature within 100 feet of an abortuary.
Levin cites many other instances of Supreme Court decisions that have done great harm to society. The common thread in them all is that they are usurpations of authority that is invested in Congress, which is answerable to the people. Legislators, unlike Justices, are subject to recall. The Courts have made rulings without foundation in the Constitution and in effect have become the ultimate legislators accountable only to their ideological predilections. In that scheme the people are deprived of power. The Court can deprive anyone of his rights just as easily as it did the right to life of the unborn. It has already limited free political speech, free expression of religion in public, and may soon embark on judicial murder if the court orders removal of the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo because her estranged husband wants her dead. Levin’s book is recommended reading for understanding the stakes in the battle for the Supreme Court and for the need to insist on appointment of originalists to the Court.
(Published March, 2005)
