Free speech for me but not for thee. ACLU busted!

Thank you. That's very thoughtful.

Throat-clearing "harumph"...short wait for noise to die down.

"Expose", in this case referred to, meant and means to reveal inconsistency, extremism and submerging of principle below party/ideological fealty.

"Dangerous", in the case quoted, meant and means the consequences for liberty and democracy that follow from those things I would wish to expose. Qing Lai, Red Guard activist from a small town in Shangshon province is only as dangerous as his philosophy is dangerous.

Let's consider "leftists and liberals and secularists" running lose in American universities and brainwashing American children into unAmerican ideas and values. It's a theme promoted by foxfyre and others, and of course, by David Horowitz. Such individuals ought to be watched, documented, and purged.

From a commentary in today's Chicago Tribune ("A handsome, but cranky, coot"):



And this includes that some might still not see this:

Of course the thing the writer doesn't seem to see is:
1) There have been no shifting rationales; only shifting objectives as cirucmstances have change
2) Nobody ever claimed a Sept 11 and Iraq connection - there has been claim of a connection with Iraq and the War on Terror however. Most people can see the difference between the two.
3) The evidence of 'no viable weapons of mass destruction' is still out, but that does not change the fact that everybody in the Bush administration, everybody in the Clinton administration, everybody in the U.S. Congress, virtually everybody in the U.N. and heads of states in all free nations of the world believed there was WMD at the time the invasion was launched. Otherwise there would have been no reason for the sanctions to have continued beyond the 12 years they had already been in place.

And finally, and mostly importantly, other than the freedom to write any damn fool thing any writer wants to write, this has absolutely nothing to do with anything in this thread.

foxfyre turns on the taperecorder and presses "play"


http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2003/09/16/cheney_link_of_iraq_911_challenged/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0616-01.htm

I'd rather play my own tapes of what I have learned and believe than be a Leftwing parrot.

Please, foxfyre, Don't be so harsh! You know when you have stents in your heart and have suffered a massive heart attack, there are other ways in which to get information rather than turning the pages in a book!

Foxfyre wrote:

3) The evidence of 'no viable weapons of mass destruction' is still out, but that does not change the fact that everybody in the Bush administration, everybody in the Clinton administration, everybody in the U.S. Congress, virtually everybody in the U.N. and heads of states in all free nations of the world believed there was WMD at the time the invasion was launched. Otherwise there would have been no reason for the sanctions to have continued beyond the 12 years they had already been in place.

EXACTLY_

and since you are one of the posters who has, in my opinion, the most integrity and clear headedness, I will respectfully ask you to read the following authored by Norman Podhoretz(carefully footnoted and loaded with references that can be checked) which strongly back up your assertion!


COMMENTARY

December 2005

Who Is Lying About Iraq?

Norman Podhoretz

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.




The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that

[t]his indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person?-a person, Mr. Libby?-lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting that

[t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.

Yet even stipulating?-which I do only for the sake of argument?-that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that

Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and?-yes?-France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix?-who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past?-lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.




So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to the invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State. But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the UN on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP?-Ammunition Supply Point?-with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson,

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written,

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that

Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.1




But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President

to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush's benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force?-if necessary?-to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.




Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.2

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that

without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was

hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation.

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that

[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous?-or more urgent?-than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.3




All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it

did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding

no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war.4 Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."5

I am very much afraid that both Mesquite and Advocate after their blah blah blah proving nothing, missed the post below. It blows their thesis right out of the water!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am very much afraid that Mesquite and Advocate do not know that the American People have strongly defended the concept that Marriage is a Union between a man and a woman. Married people are, all other things being equal, far superior to those individuals whose arrangements have not been sanctioned by society since they do not receive all of the benefits that would aid the children that may live with them!

Note



Gay marriage is a lost cause
Gay activists' failed strategy has put same-sex marriage out of reach for a long time to come.

By JEFF GANNON
Friday, September 01, 2006


A COALITION OF 250 authors, activists, intellectuals and celebrities recently released a major statement, "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships."

The manifesto suggests that the gay rights movement take its focus away from a singular emphasis on marriage equality in favor of a broad-based set of economic and social concepts that would eventually produce the same result. However, it is clear that the statement is less of a policy shift and more of an admission of defeat in the battle over gay marriage.

For all intents and purposes, gay marriage is dead. Activists proclaimed that the Goodrich decision in Massachusetts was the end of the beginning of the struggle for equality, but in retrospect it was the beginning of the end.

Let's check the standings: 44 states have laws that restrict marriage to the union of one man and one woman. Nineteen states have constitutional amendments banning gay marriage ?- 16 of those enacted since 2003. Six more states have constitutional bans on the November ballot that are expected to pass.

The highest state courts in New York and Washington recently ruled against same-sex couples claiming a right to civil matrimony, and a federal appellate court upheld Nebraska's gay marriage ban.


LEADERS OF THE gay rights movement bear significant responsibility for that failure. They overestimated the strength of their political position and influence, even though an inherent weakness has been evident for at least 14 years.

In 1992, gays helped to elect President Bill Clinton and were starstruck at being romanced as a constituency by Democrats, mesmerized by the access and empowerment that came with it.

No sooner than the jubilant cries of "We're here, we're queer and we're going to the White House!" died down, the duplicitous Clinton reneged on his promise to allow gays to openly serve in the military. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was proposed by Clinton in 1993, and in 1996 the Democratic president signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law.

The leadership of the gay rights movement failed to recognize the political reality of the party to which it pledged unwavering loyalty. Republicans reject the gay rights movement and Democrats refuse to embrace it. Despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, gay leaders still gaze through rose-colored glasses at a bleak political landscape.


THE OTHER FATAL mistake has been misunderstanding and mischaracterizing the opposition. Conservatism was ascending during the 1990s ?- not declining as gay leaders and liberal media seem to have believed.

Social and religious conservatives were gaining in strength at the local and state levels, which accounts for the current GOP dominance in Washington. Since 1992, social conservatives have been working to halt the advance of the gay agenda, vowing never to be caught off guard again like they were in 1973 when Roe v. Wade made abortion the law of the land.

Gay leaders demonized opponents of same-sex marriage as hateful bigots and homophobes, completely ignoring the religious and social motivations behind the opposition. The reality is that marriage as the union of one man and one woman is our most basic social institution and deeply rooted in our culture.

Even though during the last few thousands of years marriage has had some variations that departed from strict monogamy, same-sex combinations have never been one of them. Gay marriage represents such a fundamental change that few can grasp it, let alone support it.

Instead of waging efforts to change hearts and minds, gay movement leaders have tried to bludgeon opponents and pursued a strategy where a very small minority would impose its will on a vast majority thought judicial fiat.

While activists relied on the courts for victory, supporters of traditional marriage took the debate to the ballot box and won every single time. A failed strategy appears to have put gay marriage out of reach for a long time to come.
**********************************************************

The comment that the 11th Appelate Court is JUST a judgment from THREE JUDGES FROM GEORGIA, is an ignorant comment which shows that the person knows NOTHING about the law. That ruling becomes case law and is subsequently used as Precedent in future cases. Only people ignorant of the rule of law think that ding a ling named Patio Dog has more influence in deciding cases than the 11th Circuit.

The precedent has been established and along with the 44 states that have established laws which restrict marriage to the union of one man and one woman, the drive of gays to adopt children legally is doomed to failure!

Again---------


Gay men lose challenge to Florida gay adoption ban
MIAMI (AP) ?- Four gay men lost a federal challenge Wednesday to the only blanket state law banning homosexuals from adopting children.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the men, who are foster parents seeking to adopt children in their care despite the 1977 law passed in the heyday of Anita Bryant's anti-homosexual campaign.

"Obviously we're crushed," said Paul Cates with the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project.

Florida is the only state in the nation with a complete ban on adoption by gays, whether married or single. The law has withstood several challenges in state court.

Florida argued the state has a right to legislate its "moral disapproval of homosexuality" and its belief that children need a married parent for healthy development.

***********************************************************

Of course, since they do not know how to respond to this EVIDENCE, especially the Documentation concerning the fact that "gay marriage" is dead, they say nothing!! How typical of the left wing--When they are rebutted with evidence, they cannot respond!!

You are trotting out Jeff Gannon, the gay male prostitute who was a shill for the administration in the Whitehouse Press Corp, again?

Do you want to attack the messenger instead of the substance of the post?

ARE YOU SAYING THAT IT IS NOT TRUE THAT 44 STATES HAVE LAWS THAT RESTRICT MARRIAGE TO ONE MAN AND ONE WOMAN as the article says?

Very well- Here's another article that says much the same thing_

You won't be able to rebut this one either!!!













Marriage and the States Posted: April 30, 2004



State laws traditionally govern who can marry and, in turn, how a marriage can be ended. An individual's marital status, in turn, is key to how he or she fits into the federal matrix of benefits, parental rights and financial standings.

Recent moves by state courts and legislatures to further define whether marriage can extend to same-sex couples has inspired new questions about how states regulate the institution in the future, and what role the federal government should play in such regulation.

In early 2004, President Bush said he supported amending the U.S. Constitution to ban marriages between same-sex couples.

The president said he would like to see an amendment "defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman, as husband and wife" but also added that states should have the right to outline "legal arrangements other than marriage."

The growing collision of state and federal regulations over the definition of marriage may ultimately lead the U.S. Supreme Court to evaluate the varying stances on marriage and how they should apply to the gay community.

Basics of marriage and American law
American law and its core marriage regulations are largely grounded in British common law. Those traditions viewed marriage as a voluntary contract between a man and a woman to become husband and wife. Marriage also confirmed the legitimacy of the couple's children.

In the mid-1800s, laws and statutes regarding personal property and women's rights were changed to give both partners more equal legal footing.

Many state-level marriage regulations are administrative, such as requiring a minimum age or requiring blood tests to apply for a marriage license. Other state-specific regulations prohibit relatives from marrying each other.

Once an individual is married, there are certain legal steps or circumstances that must occur for the union to be dissolved or for that person to remarry. These include death, divorce and annulment.

The legal and financial implications of state marriage laws have been amended and added as society has changed over time -- including a large number of states that have moved to prohibit a person from marrying someone of the same sex.

One of the most significant changes at the federal level was the 1996 passage of the Defense of Marriage Act. Under DOMA, states would not be required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in another state. The act defined marriage as "the legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."

On the heels of DOMA's passage, 38 states went on to pass their own "marriage protection" statutes that define marriage as occurring between one man and one woman, and denying recognition of same-sex marriages or civil unions performed in other states.

The ramifications of a same-sex couple not being able to legally marry are more than symbolic -- some 1,049 federal laws include marital status as a factor, according to a 1997 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office.

The types of rights and benefits for married couples that are denied to same-sex couples include property rights, health care benefits, child custody, immigration, inheritance and hospital visitation.

Some states have also adopted additional "covenant marriage" legislation, which goes a step further in solidifying the bonds of marriage. Covenant marriage is an option for those who do not believe in swift no-fault divorce or wish to demonstrate a stronger level of commitment to their marriage bond. Generally, couples who choose to enter a covenant marriage must attend premarital counseling and may only divorce after two years of separation or being able to prove specific circumstances for the split, such as abuse or adultery.

Louisiana was one of the first states to pass a covenant marriage law in 1997. A little over 1 percent of couples married in the state from 1998-2002 opted for the provision, according to media reports.

Court battles over state same-sex marriage laws
As states have sought to define their rules on same-sex unions, legal battles over whether homosexual couples can be refused a marriage license have largely played out in the state courts and legislatures over the last decade.

State courts in Hawaii, Alaska and Vermont were among the first to weigh in on the issue of whether their states had the right to refuse marriage certificates to gay couples. To date, no American court has ever ordered the issuance of a marriage license to a same-sex couple.

In the 1993 case Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that statutes prohibiting a person from marrying someone of the same sex might violate the state constitution.

As the case moved through the court system, the Hawaii Legislature proposed an amendment to the state constitution to give the legislature the power to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples. Voters in Hawaii approved the marriage amendment during November 1998 elections.

The Hawaii legislature went on to enact a law recognizing "reciprocal beneficiary" relationships that would allow couples who cannot marry to register as reciprocal beneficiaries and receive some of the benefits afforded married couples.

The Vermont Supreme Court ruled in the 1999 case State v. Baker that the state constitution allowed same-sex couples to obtain the same benefits as married couples. The state legislature went on to enact a law giving same-sex couples virtually all the same rights and protections as married couples.

Vermont is currently the only state that grants same-sex couples the same state-granted rights and benefits as heterosexual married couples, although the state terms their partnerships "civil unions" instead of marriages.

Some federal benefits, such as Social Security and Medicaid, remain unavailable as DOMA dictates.

Benefits granted to same-sex couples according to state
Hawaii, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey are currently the only other states to formally recognize "domestic partnerships" allowing same sex couples to apply for some of the state-run benefits afforded to the married.

Each of these states is unique in terms of what state benefits same-sex couples can apply for if they meet the domestic partnership criteria. Hawaii, for example, offers multiple benefits for partners of state employees but does not offer property division or alimony rights as a marriage would. Simply filing a declaration with the proper authorities can terminate a reciprocal beneficiary relationship in the state.

New Jersey, the state that has passed the most recent domestic partnership law, allows same-sex couples to claim joint status for state taxes and may claim some medical insurance and pension benefits if their partner works for the state.

New Jersey and California have similar criteria to qualify for a domestic partnership: Same-sex couples must share a common residence and be in a committed relationship of "mutual caring." An opposite-sex couple over age 62 can also apply for domestic partnership status.

Massachusetts has taken a critical role in the legal debate over whether states can allow same-sex couples to marry. After seven couples sued for the right to wed, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in November 2003 that barring same-sex couples from marriage was unconstitutional.

In a subsequent February 2004 decision, the court ruled 4-3 to give the state legislature six months to rewrite the state's marriage laws to accommodate gay couples. Legislators are considering an amendment to the state constitution that would ban gay marriage but could permit civil unions.

"Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. It brings stability to our society," Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote in the ruling.

In February 2004, San Francisco decided to strike out on its own, and began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Same-sex couples flocked to City Hall, waiting in long lines in the hopes of obtaining a license.

"We are reading the direct language within the state constitution, and we directed our county clerk to do the right thing and extend the privilege that's extended to my wife and myself and millions of us across the country to same-sex couples," San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom told CNN in mid-February.

San Francisco issued over 4,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples between Feb. 11 and March 11, when the California Supreme Court ordered City Hall to stop. The issue continues to play out in a lawsuit currently in the California Superior Court.

California has one of the highest concentrations of gay households in the country at 1.4 percent of the total number of coupled households, according to an Associated Press analysis of the 2000 census. In Massachusetts, same-sex partners occupy 1.3 percent of coupled households. Vermont and New York also registered at 1.3 percent.

Lawmakers' role in the debate
The White House's decision to support a constitutional amendment comes after most state legislatures have sought to better define their laws on marriage and its parameters.

In most states, lawmakers are considering proposed amendments to their constitutions that would define existing prohibitions on same-sex marriage and deny recognition of unions that may be allowed elsewhere in the country.

In Alabama, for example, a constitutional amendment is pending action in the House of Representatives but some lawmakers want to delay putting it on the ballot until 2006, to avoid its potentially polarizing role in the 2004 presidential election.

In Indiana, a proposed state constitutional ban on gay marriage passed in the Senate, but Democratic Speaker Patrick Bauer shelved the measure in the House, prompting House Republicans to walk out.

Most states continue to consider legislative proposals, with varying levels of debate and attention.

Some members of the U.S. Congress have pointed to the battles in the state-level courts and the decisions of individual judges as part of the need for a U.S. constitutional amendment.

"Why is an amendment necessary? Two words: activist judges. The only way to save laws deemed unconstitutional by activist judges is a constitutional amendment," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said during a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Law in March 2004

Copied from today's Albuquerque Journal, page E 1:




Complete text of U.S. District Judge Robert Brack's order as pdf-data.

Well score one for common sense finally!!! I would feel better about the ruling if the court had ordered the Plaintiffs to pay the court costs of the City of Las Cruces but that's one of many tort reforms we still need to make in this country.

Meanwhile the insanity goes on. I don't there there has yet been a ruling in the case for the Village of Tijeras (a tiny little burg 8 miles east of Albuquerque).

Saturday, November 11, 2006


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October 24, 2005
How Many ACLU Lawyers Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
By John Leo

The "tiny cross" people at the American Civil Liberties Union are at it again. These are the folks with extra-keen eyes and powerful magnifying glasses who examine the official seals of towns and counties, looking for miniature crosses that ACLU lawyers like to trumpet as grave threats to separation of church and state.
This time around, the folks with the magnifying glasses are leaning on the village of Tijeras, N.M., whose seal contains a conquistador's helmet and sword, a scroll, a desert plant, a fairly large religious symbol (the Native American zia) and a quite small Christian cross. "Tiny cross" inspectors are not permitted to fret about large non-Christian religious symbols, only undersized Christian ones, so the ACLU filed suit to get the cross removed.

The cross is obviously not an endorsement of religion, any more than the conquistador helmet and sword are endorsements of Spanish warfare. The courts have ruled, not always consistently, that crosses, as historical references in such seals and logos, are permissible. But the ACLU, these days, is strongly committed to seeing church-state crises everywhere, and thus pushes things way too far.

Last year the ACLU demanded that Los Angeles County eliminate from its seal a microscopic cross representing the missions that settled the state of California. Under threat of expensive litigation, the county complied. The cross was about one-sixth the size of a not-very-big image of a cow tucked away on the lower right segment of the seal, and maybe a hundredth of the size of a pagan god (Pomona, goddess of fruit) who dominated the seal. Pomona survived the religious purge. She is not the sort of god that the ACLU worries about, whereas the flyspeck-sized cross was a threat to unravel separation of church and state, as we know it. What will happen if the ACLU learns that Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Sacramento, San Francisco, St. Louis and Corpus Christi actually have religious names? We shudder to think.

The campaign to remove all traces of religion from public institutions, and in fact from the entire public square, is now far advanced. Part of that extremist campaign is to squelch private expression in and around public schools. Students have been punished for reading the Bible outside of class, for assembling after school to talk about religion, for thanking God or Jesus in a valedictory speech, and for bowing their heads (and therefore presumed to be praying privately) before lunch.

Another fairly common school crisis comes when a class is asked to write an essay or draw a picture of someone they regard as a hero. Mao Tse-tung or Vlad the Impaler will bring no rebuke, but if the hero is Jesus or Moses, watch out.

Last week the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York accepted the case of Antonio Peck, who, as a kindergartner in 1999, had his drawing censored from a class wall display because of church-state concerns. Along with the rest of his class, Antonio was told to draw a picture to illustrate his understanding of the environment. He drew a man with upraised arms, wearing a robe. When asked, the boy said the man was Jesus, who was "the only way to save the world." The trial will decide whether the school was guilty of viewpoint censorship.

In Tennessee, the Knox County board of education is being sued for refusing to allow a 10-year-old to read his Bible during recess. The school argued that recess is not free time and that the school can forbid the reading of religious material during that period. The Phoenix-based Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which defends religious liberties cases, supported the student.

After ADF intervened, a school in Torrance, Calif., backed down from its decision not to allow a student on a dance team to perform to religious music. ADF also defended students who had been forbidden by their schools to participate in the national Sept. 21 "See You at the Pole" prayer and religious event on school grounds. ADF argued that religious expression cannot be treated differently from any other constitutionally protected expression.

As if to prove that church-state objections can be found on the right as well as on the left, the band director at C.D. Hylton High School in Virginia pulled the song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band after a conservative objected. He wondered why the school should be allowed to sing about the devil when they are not allowed to sing about God.

Next week: The ACLU sues to ban deviled eggs from the school cafeteria.
SOURCE

"People have suggested that if plaintiffs have these complaints, they should leave. No they should not," Brack wrote. "This is the United States of America. As concerned citizens and parents, plaintiffs have every right to raise their concerns in this court."

I didn't comment on whether the Plaintiff should leave. I commented on whether the Plaintiff should pay.

La Cuces Sun-News

And if he loses that one, and I hope with all my heart that he does, he should have to pay the defendant's court costs there too.

Well, you might be right: the Jewish community - Weinbaum is a prominent member of it - is collecting money for these cases since months already.

BtW. this plaintiff is not supported mainly by ACLU but by JewsOnFirst.org "the Jewish response to attacks on the First Amendment by the Christian right".

He must be a miserably unhappy human being with a lot of time on his hands. None of my Jewish friends understand how the presence of a cross, Christian or otherwise, harms them in any way any more than the presence of a Minorah or Star of david harms their Christian friends. Until all this stupid anti-Christian stuff started some time back, Jewish kids had fun singing Christian Christmas carols and the Christian kids enjoyed learning some Jewish songs.

I feel sorry for anyone with that much anger and hatred, but he should still have to pay the court costs of the defendant especially in a suit like this in which he can prove no personal damages whatsoever.

Meanwhile the ACLU has to use their money on something and don't care who gets hurt. And if they prevail in the suit, they can collect tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S. taypayer.

That is just plain wrong.

No idea - seems, there are quite some Jews who joined this organisation.