Would you have wanted to receive this postcard in the mail? |
IT
WAS THE opinion of certain people in our society that the court should have
been enforcing “the law” by striking all these actions down. Instead, the
Warren-era court helped advance us out of the days when segregation was
considered an “all-American” value of our society.
Those
people are largely dead. By and large, it’s their grandchildren who are now the
overly-vocal ideologues who are trying to perpetuate a certain vision of what
the United States should be about.
And
their vision took two highly-visible blows from the Supreme Court this week –
the high court issued a final ruling that upholds the attempts by President
Barack Obama to impose health insurance for all and strikes down a lower court
ruling that tried to keep laws in place against gay couple from being
legitimately married.
The
end result is that gay couples can now not be denied a marriage license in
places like Alabama and Mississippi. And the political people who will continue
to strike down the Affordable Care Act that provides for subsidies to help
people in need afford health insurance will have to admit it’s their own
personal ideological hang-ups at work – and not any legitimate flaw in the law.
HOW
LONG UNTIL we start getting the “Impeach John Roberts” billboards popping up in
crackpot land?
ROBERTS: Will ideologues blame him? |
Roberts
is the Supreme Court justice appointed by a Republican president who was
supposed to keep the high court’s rulings in tune with conservative ideologue
desires, but wound up siding with health care reform because he saw how
ideologically-motivated its opponents were.
To
someone who is concerned about the letter of the law above all else, it makes
sense to be scared off by ideology.
As
far as gay marriage is concerned, Roberts was among the justices opposed to the
idea. Although he wasn’t able to persuade a majority of the court to back him.
To the ideologues, what good is being “chief justice” if you can’t strong-arm
your colleagues into doing what you want?
SO
THEY’RE BOUND to despise him. Even though the bulk of the country will wind up
supporting him.
KENNEDY: 'Equal dignity' |
Because
both of these issues are ones of great importance to our society.
The
lack of health insurance by people is a problem that hurts us all because the
fact that the United States offers access to the best health care in the world
doesn’t matter much if one can’t afford it. If those people wind up relying on
emergency rooms for their health care, then being unable to pay the bill, the
public will wind up paying.
As
for gay marriage, I honestly feel it’s none of my business who someone else
wants to marry. I don’t think it is anybody’s business what a couple does.
Until the day comes when a man is forcibly married to another man (or woman to
woman) against their will, this isn’t an issue for the law to be concerned
with.
THE
COURT WOUND up siding the way they did, despite the outspoken criticism of
justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia – the latter of whom
was once a professor of the same University of Chicago Law School that Obama
was once an instructor at.
Scalia
was particularly snotty in his written diatribe against the gay marriage
ruling, saying the line of logic used to defend marriage, intimacy and
spirituality as Constitutionally-protected rights is at about the level of “a
fortune cookie.”
As
opposed to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion that supported gay
marriage, saying the fact that gay couples wanted to be able to marry was
actually the utmost respect for the concept that they wanted to share in.
“Their
hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of
civilization’s oldest institutions,” Kennedy wrote. “They ask for equal dignity
in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
SCALIA: Will ideology die with him? |
WHAT
I SUSPECT truly bothers Scalia and his ilk is the notion that they were
appointed by ideologically-motivated presidents whose intent was to create a
conservative tilt to the high court that would long outlive them. Perhaps
Scalia thought his ideological leanings would outlive him and become a
permanent part of our society.
Instead,
it seems the court would rather follow the law than his ideology that won’t
even outlast his term on the Supreme Court, and he and his followers will be
the ones “condemned to live in loneliness” that they ultimately imposed on
themselves.
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