With the retirement of Supreme court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Left in this country has been very downcast, and understandably so. But today I want to talk about 2 reasons why this should never have been the case. There really shouldn’t be any reason to fear the retirement of a Justice of a different political persuasion if the checks and balances in this country’s government are allowed to work properly.
They haven’t been allowed to for decades, especially with regards to the Supreme Court. I’m going to highlight 2 of these, but both can be summed up in this one statement; the power you grab will be used against you.
Jack Phillips and the Masterpiece Cakeshop won the day in the Supreme Court. The news articles called it “narrow”, but they weren’t talking about the 7-2 vote; they were referring to how narrowly the ruling itself was. The Supremes basically said that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission treated Jack’s religious views in a way incompatible with how government should; with contempt rather than dispassionately. What does this mean for the future of the ruling?
And the White House recently released a list of 60 promises that President Trump has kept in his first 500 days in office. Most of the items are simply reporting statistics that show how good things have been going; there are more objective milestones mentioned than subjective goals. But if you’ve not heard about them, that’s understandable. The media aren’t really into giving credit where credit is due these days. I wonder why.
Oh, and Bill Clinton still thinks he was the victim in the Lewinsky scandal. Really.
What did ObamaCare really do to our insurance premiums?
When given examples of people whose health insurance premiums have greatly increased after the poorly-named “Affordable Care Act”, ACA advocates have been able to respond that those are cherry-picked cases, or that premiums were increasing before the ACA and would have increased anyway.
That was then, this is now.
Bermuda has paved the way in the same-sex marriage debate, starting with government that is actually representative of the people.
Consumer confidence is up. Way up. How much? Take a listen.
May a dress designer refuse to do business with Melania Trump? May a baker refuse to create a cake with a racist message? May that same baker also refuse to create a cake celebrating a same-sex marriage?
The answers, in the liberal culture of the day, are inconsistent. Apparently, the government forcing you to violate your conscience is appropriate when the Left deems it so. Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop has been taken to court over that last question, and his case has made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Arguments will be heard on December 5th.
In this episode, I give the background of this case, and explain how the framing of this issue by the ACLU and the Left is completely dishonest (and why we should all hope Jack wins).
The Georgia State Legislature passed something of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act in the latest session of the General Assembly. Now, in spite of what you may have heard in the news, or in press releases from critics, this bill was quite modest. Nonetheless, the cry of “Discrimination!” went up from the hallowed halls of the state capitol in Atlanta.
Why all the hoopla over the Georgia bill? It certainly is not, as I will demonstrate, a discriminatory piece of legislation, nothing like the LGBT groups said it was. The threatened boycotts don’t demonstrate any sort of closely-held principles of the corporations that said they would leave. The entire opposition to the bill was based on lies and misinformation. What was the point?
Listen in and find out what I think was happening.
Ireland stripping religious rights now? (Getty Images)
The Irish approved a referendum to allow same-sex marriage in that country a few weeks ago. Because, you know, gays just want equal rights; they don’t want to take away anyone else’s rights, right? Wrong.
While reading through Twitter while the San Bernardino mass shooting incident was still happening, one “Twitterer” suggested that gun control is the answer because no citizen has ever stopped a mass shooting. Well, while that may be true, I prefer it when citizens stop a mass shooting before it starts, and a good case can be made that it happens a lot more often than the public is aware of.
Kim Davis, the county clerk for Rowan Count, Kentucky, got the media and the Left in a frenzy when she asked, like others in similar situations, for an accommodation for her religious beliefs. In other circumstances, she may have received it, but there are just some political issues on the Left that trump First Amendment rights.
Is what she did within the bounds of religious freedom, or is she grandstanding? Do oaths of office mean something, or does something supersede them? And what of other government officials who have decided which laws they will comply with? Why aren’t they in jail? These and other questions are addresses in this episode
In June of 2013, the Supreme Court’s liberals declared that the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, was unconstitutional, because, as they said, the power of the individual state in defining marriage is “of central relevance”, and the decision to grant same-sex couples the right to marry is “of immense import.” Basically, it’s the state, and not the federal government, which should determine what marriage is and license accordingly.
Two years to the day later, those same liberals overrode those immensely important marriage laws in 14 states and proclaimed same-sex marriage from the federal bench.
If you celebrate these rulings, and if you’ve ever been a proponent of power to the people, or you’ve ever put forth the idea that every vote should count, you either have not been paying attention, or have no idea at all what those phrases even mean.
I’m talking about marriage this time, but I’m coming at it from 3 very different angles.
What do state lines mean when it comes to recognizing certain marriages? According to one judge, not much.
Is it discrimination to not allow a guy to marry his computer? Even if he loves pornography more than real women? Sounds silly, until you hear how he makes his argument.
And while we’re throwing out the whole idea of man-woman marriage, why not throw out the whole monogamy thing as well? The New Republic makes the case.
Back in episode 73, I mentioned the case of Brendan Eich, the new CEO of a technology company, who was drummed out of his job because he had the audacity to give money to a cause he believed in. It wasn’t politically correct, however, and he paid for it with his job.
This time out, I have yet another example of folks who would describe themselves as “tolerant” unwilling to tolerate dissenting opinions, even, as with Eich, those opinions have nothing at all to do with the job at hand. But they lost their job because of the oxymoronic “Tolerance Police”.
And a commenter on my Google+ page has an interesting point to make on this subject. Can you be against an agenda without being against the people pushing that agenda?
