SCOTUS Goes Dumpster Diving and Comes Up with Tossed “Dignity”
June 27, 2015 Leave a comment
“As a dog returns to his vomit so a fool returns to his folly.” Proverbs 26:11
Theater of the absurd: This week the majority of the SCOTUS ruled twice in activist ad hoc fashion-once in favor of Obamacare subsidies by misappropriating the word “State” and the other ruling using a misappropriation of the word “dignity” to rule in favor of homosexuality.
Here is a brief summary of a dissenting Judge’s opinion “Clarence Thomas invokes comparison to slavery in raging gay-marriage dissent”:
Justice Clarence Thomas
“Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday wrote a fiery dissent in response to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that gay couples have a constitutional right to marry.
In it, he took issue with the concepts of “liberty” and “dignity.” He argued that the petitioners in this case were not deprived of their liberty, as they have been allowed to travel and settle freely without government intervention.
This is why, Thomas wrote, the majority led by Justice Anthony Kennedy focused its opinion on the petitioners’ “dignity.” (emphasis added)
But Thomas wrote that there is no “dignity” clause in the US Constitution — and that, even if there was, the government could not bestow it upon a person or take it away.
To make his point, he invoked the examples of slavery and internment camps. From his dissent:
The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
Thomas went on to write that one’s liberty and dignity should be shielded from the government — not provided by it….
Today’s decision… will have inestimable consequences for our Constitution and our society,” Thomas wrote in conclusion.
~~~
Here is my scathing dissent posted as a reply comment to one of the majority assent opinions posted on another blog:
“The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” (majority opinion)
Who is better informed-the academically inbred ad hoc elitists or the millennia of millions of people who have IDENTIFIED with traditions subject to God and not to the wiles and wills of tyrannical humanism? This improvised decision is solely based on the loudest noise in the room.
We the people were given a sacred trust and it has been despoiled by the folly of morally penurious populist popes.
Atheism has now become America’s state religion. Pay homage to the gods of humanism, say these popes.”
~~~
And another comment under the same post:
“This decision debases marriage to a level where even animals wouldn’t dare go. And, like I said, it also endorses atheism by its ignorance and/or rejection of any Authority other than man.
~~~
As I read Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent against using the cornucopia word “dignity” as a rule of law adjunct I was reminded of the opening of Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Danger to Human Dignity: The Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law”: “”The law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice.” Wow! Now law enforcement and judges must not only protect us from crime, they must also read minds! A certain amount of prejudice-wisdom and discernment-is necessary to protect oneself from that which is repulsive, reprehensible, disgusting and yes, foolish-don’t you think?
Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in Law, Philosophy, and Divinity, most likely believes that prejudice is itself a crime. She is a devoted advocate of non-shaming to the degree that she would likely regard the shame Adam and Eve felt after they had sinned as beneath their ”human dignity and the equal worth of persons”.
Surrounded by the ubiquitous Epicurean pick and choose morality mindset I would guess that Nussbaum would very much like to completely erase sin and its concurrent and inherent shame (the gods are too harsh!) from public view. She would rather privatize shame as she would rather privatize religion-into nihilism.
As with most liberals with “Unconstrained Vision” (see Thomas Sowell’s book “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”) the institutions such as the criminal justice system or simply concerted public opinion are the problem. Under such curious thinking the individual personifying a predator or a thief or a homosexual or ‘other’, is just a ‘victim’ of institutionalized prejudice. In essence, the individual is not to be held publicly accountable for their behavior. The institutions of justice and of marriage must be changed to fit the deviation with “dignity”.
Adam & Eve & Shame Exposé
Nussbaum worries people will be stigmatized by the ‘penalties’ of shame. She believes that the law should protect people from insults to their dignity. According to her thinking doing away with sin (“Did God really say that?”) and shame would magically disappear. Hence, homosexuality is now given a pass by a SCOTUS ruling under a declaration of (someone’s tossed) “Dignity”-a dumpster diving decision to be sure.
Today mens rea (a guilty mind) is openly presumed before actus reus, or “guilty act” ergo a Baltimore DA and an abetting media and race industry presumes prejudice and subsumes the “guilty act” to the ignominy of Black lynch mob justice.
~~~
Under the category of Justices who say one thing to be appointed a SCOTUS Justice and then say another after being appointed comes a post titled “Elena Kagan 2009: “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.””
Here is my comment to that post about the Janus-faced Kagan:
“Man was endowed by his creator with inalienable rights-life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Most of the focus these days is on “rights” and not on the Creator of those rights…
“[But] as Pierre Manent pointed out in his 1993 essay “Christianity and democracy,” the history of modern philosophy, from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, appears as oriented to and animated by the elaboration of the concept of the will.” In its most radical forms, the “unbridled affirmation of the human will” is joined to the “unlimited polemic against Christianity.” The philosophical architects of modernity such as Bacon and Descartes identified the task of philosophy with nothing less audacious than making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature.” In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes explicitly denied that there are any superintending principles of justice above human will: “Justice and propriety begin with the constitution of [the] commonwealth.” From “The Limits of “Anthropocentric Humanism”” in the Chapter “The Totalitarian Subversion of Modernity” in the book “The Conservative Foundations of a Liberal Order” by Daniel J. Mahoney- a must read for any SCOTUS justice before tomorrow.
To put it differently, Epicureans have been telling us all along that God is out there somewhere minding his own business and we must make our own justice as we see fit.
Anthropocentric humanism seeks to deify man. Anthropocentric humanism mates Adam and Adam in a way nature and its creator would never conceive of.
~~~~
You were born with dignity. What you do with your dignity is based on the choices you make. And, tell me, how, under the name of “dignity” is an aborted child’s dignity saved by these same liberal do-gooders?
The SCOTUS ruling, in effect, says that you can choose homosexual relationships so as to not be deprived of any dignity! Imagine that! The SCOTUS ruling, in effect, says that you must genuflect to homosexual relationships so as to give them dignity!
Move over Greece and Rome, the West is the next civilization to be destroyed from within as promoted by Karma Khameleons President Obama and Elena Kagan and a host of other academic-robed miscreants.
As a growing number of fools return to their vomit our nation’s moral health is becoming more and more dyspeptic. Lady Liberty will soon be HIV positive because SCOTUS dumpster dived.
Added 6-27-2015-Dumpster Diving Brings Up a Rainbow of “Dignity”:
Rainbow hate aka Dumpster Diving Dignity
Something to think about:
60% – the percentage of young Americans living with HIV today who are unaware they’re infected.
36 million – the number of people who have died of AIDS since 1981
Only 1.6% of Adults in the UK Identify as Gay, Lesbian or Bi-Sexual According to Government Report
New figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that only 1.6% of adults in the UK identify themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual. The figures, which were collected by the ONS for its Sexual Identity Project, show that 1.2% of people identify as gay or lesbian whilst 0.5% identify as bisexual.
“The evil deny the suffering of their guilt – the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy and imperfection – by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating. They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do. They cause suffering. The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.” Dr. M. Scott Peck, “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil” (emphasis added)
~~~
homosexual-Camille Paglia
~~~
Added 6-29-2015:
From a National Review article, “The Supreme Court has Legalized Same-Sex Marriage, Now What?”:
“This transformation is itself the “beginning” of something much larger and more dangerous than same-sex, monogamish “marriages.” Yes, polygamy is just around the corner. And Obergefell’s evident determination to, somehow, use the law to equalize the self-esteem (“dignity”) of adults and children in all sorts of irregular groupings is at least Orwellian.
But this is not the half of it. As it has been so far described, one might imagine that there is a dyad involved, one consisting of the “state” on one hand, and these diverse family-ish groupings — and that the rest of us just go about our business. Not so. The revolutionary mindset that the Court has perhaps half-witlessly embraced means to eliminate all felt “stigma,” any trace of social “humiliation,” just so that everyone’s “identity” is equally valued.
Doing all that requires a lot more than just a fair shake down at the courthouse. It requires getting all of our minds right. And so we should expect today’s decision to inaugurate the greatest crisis of religious liberty in American history. I am certain that it will.” — Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.
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D’oh!
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Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn To Live as Exiles in Our Own Country
By Rod Dreher, senior editor and blogger at The American Conservative
“It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.
Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.” (see above tweet as evidence)
The warning to conservatives from the four dissenters could hardly be clearer or stronger. So where does that leave us?”
…LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society.” (emphasis added)
Added 7-1-2015:
Cindy Wity 
Happy Fourth of July-Dependence Day!
July 3, 2015 Leave a comment
!!Trigger warning – Snark attack!! Proceed with clarity of mind…
Who needs ISIS when Greece, Spain, Portugal, France-the totality of the West-can self-destruct from within just by voting for idiots and appointing people into positions of power who have no business (or moral rectitude or moral courage) for holding the position they are in?
I don’t need to name names but these Prime Suspects are currently seeking to placate a deaf, obstinate and Israel-hating-West-hating Iran; these suspects have dealt a fatal blow to the sacred institution of marriage by ascribing “dignity” to godless and blatant lasciviousness; these suspects have mandated Obamacarelessness! Wow! The U.S. can now be like Europe-morally and financially bankrupt with plenty of time off work! Happy Fourth of July Dependence Day!
Not the House of the Rising Sun but similar in Epicurean proportion!
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859)
We were warned …
Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805 – 1859) prescient warning about soft despotism accurately depicts the political will of our three branches of government including the infamous 2015 SCOTUS. And, it certainly applies to all the over-reaching regulatory agencies armed with the tentacles of the politically motivated unelected. Here is de Tocqueville’s warning (emphasis added-across the post):
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four, Chapter VI.
“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?”
“Democracy in America”, “Accidental or Providential Causes Which Contribute to Maintain the Democratic Republic in the United States.”
And this…
“I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.”
Letter to Arthur de Gobineau, 22 October 1843, Tocqueville Reader, p. 229
And this…
“Socialism is a new form of slavery.”
“As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can’t have it both ways.”
Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848).
And this…
“Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.”
Ancien Regime and the Revolution (fourth edition, 1858), de Tocqueville, tr. Gerald Bevan
“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”
Democracy in America, Chapter XVII.
And this, the piece de resistance…
“The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.”
Old Regime (1856), p. 204
**
We were warned …
From my post “The West: Moral Courage or Moral Chaos?”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(1918 – 2008)
Excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Harvard, June of 1978, “A World Split Apart”
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life….”
“Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”
“And what shall we say criminality as such? Legal frames, especially in the United States, are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There are many such cases.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.
The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?”
“How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”
~~~
LGBT Motto
“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.” The Apostle Paul’s second letter to his son in the faith, II Timothy 3: 1-3
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Filed under Culture, Current Events 2015, GLBT, LGBT, Obamacare, Political Commentary, Progressivism, SCOTUS Rulings Tagged with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexis de Tocqueville, Fourth of July, LGBT, moral courage, SCOTUS