May 16, 2008
Can I re-define "taxpayer" to exclude me?
From Justice Baxter's opinion (Quoted by Hugh Hewitt) on the California Supreme Court's
...History confirms the importance of the judiciary’s constitutional role as a check against majoritarian abuse. Still, courts must use caution when exercising the potentially transformative authority to articulate constitutional rights. Otherwise, judges with limited accountability risk infringing upon our society’s most basic shared premise — the People’s general right, directly or through their chosen legislators, to decide fundamental issues of public policy for themselves.
Judicial restraint is particularly appropriate where, as here, the claimed constitutional entitlement is of recent conception and challenges the most fundamental assumption about a basic social institution.
The majority has violated these principles. It simply does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice...
If judges can simply re-define marriage at their whim, then what can't they re-define?
The real issue here is that leftists hate democracy, and work tirelessly to circumvent it. They used to hate it because they were socialists, and no people, knowing what they are getting into, will ever vote for socialism. Now they are nihilists, and their only goal is to worship themselves, and feel good about themselves. But the result is the same. They feel good about themselves because of their supposed superiority, and so they need to circumvent democracy, and impose their superior ideas on people who would never vote for them.
And ALL the lefty whims work in one way or another to destroy those institutions and cultures (such as families, churches, traditional morality) that stand between the individual and the state. To atomize society, so that the state (staffed almost entirely by liberals) will have supreme power. So the end that's being worked-toward is still......socialism!
Update: It is very ironic here that the twisted and racist accusations of Jeremiah Wright---that whites have invented AIDS, or have introduced cocaine in order to kill blacks---are partly true. White middle-class liberals have worked tirelessly to legalize and legitimize drug use, with devastating effects on black communities. And they've done everything they can to legitimize and popularize the suicidal promiscuity of the gay community. And promiscuity in general. So gays and drug-using minorities are destroyed by AIDS, while the Prius-driving crowd continues to feel superior to all those red-neck conservatives who are so horribly "intolerant" of gays or drug use.
Jeremiah Wright is correct--whites are trying to destroy blacks. White liberals, that is. Like Barack Obama.
Posted by John Weidner at May 16, 2008 06:55 AMAyup. Just like liberals worked tirelessly during the 1920s to legalize and legitimize alcohol use, the better to destroy communities.
Oh, wait a minute, the violence and misery in communities actually decreased when alcohol was made lawful again in 1933.
[/sarcasm]
Sorry, John, but you're stomping on my toes really hard with this post. I'm no liberal, as you well know, but I'm all in favor of making illicit drugs lawful again. Why? Because I live on the outskirts of a battlefield on our country's utterly insane War on (Some) Drugs, and it's killing my city-- literally.
Thanks to the perverse incentives engendered by the War on (Some) Drugs:
-Baltimore is in contention for "Murder Capital of the USA" because of all the people dying in property disputes relating to drugs. These disputes are deadly because, thanks to the War on (Some) Drugs, the disputants don't have access to the police and courts to settle their disputes, and so they have to resort to violence. Such genius on the part of our leaders. Feh.
-Worse still, some of those deaths are of people who have nothing to do with the dispute, but are caught in the crossfire, either literally, or even figuratively as they are gunned down in retaliation for some slight, real or imagined.
-Youngsters, growing up in such circumstances, come to see that the way to "get ahead", if only for a short while until they die in some deal gone bad, is to imitate the dealers and pushers, in order to become a "bad ass dude" and get some of that "bling", hot women, and fancy cars they see on display.
-Resources, both municipal and personal, that could be used to promote good things (like parks, schools, "quality time" with one's children, church attendance, etc.) instead get wasted on measures (like more police, more guards, more jails, more prosecutors, curtailed liberties, discouragement of responsibililty for oneself and one's children through expansion of the welfare and police state) that don't do one damned thing to improve the situation.
John, contemptible as the socialists are, as deserving as they are of the stomping you're giving them, could you please be a *little* more careful with where you plant your baseball spikes?
It's not that I can't forgive you (like I know you in person, ha) or will stop visting your site (it's always interesting to read, and often enlightening) but you're making your allies wince.
Posted by: Hale Adams at May 16, 2008 11:13 AMSo, do you remember me demanding any crack-downs on "drug lords?" Aerial bombardment of poppy fields?
How did we get into this drug war? When I was young if you used drugs you went to jail. Then in the 60's a gazillion white middle-class kids started using drugs, and it became politically impossible to jail them all. So our dishonest leaders declared that the way to stop drugs was to interdict supply. Of course this was and is an absurdity. As long as there is demand, there will be suppliers. Stopping some drug shipments just raises the price of drugs, and conjures up legions of new suppliers. (Prohibition worked the same way, with the same bad results.)
The drug war will never succeed, and I'm quite open to the argument that we should just end it, even though drugs are very destructive to people. I don't in fact have a position on this---I can see both sides. I'm not putting my spikes into you.
BUT, that's not what liberals are arguing. At least not that I've heard. They argue that lesser drugs should be legalized because they "don't hurt anyone." They really mean, "They won't hurt me." They don't give a damn about the poor and the ignorant, who are the ones that really suffer from such policies, just as they suffer the most from legal alcohol.
(There are other issues like this. For instance I don't have a strong position on the death penalty. But I hate and despise the liberal "anti-death-penalty activists" who lionize a Tookie Williams while caring not a whit for the impact they are having on communities being destroyed by gang violence and crime. They get my spikes.)
Posted by: John Weidner at May 16, 2008 12:11 PM
