Category Archives: rights

Tension?

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The Supreme Court has taken up the question of whether Louisiana’s redistricting effort for its Federal Congressional representation is legitimate, or not. The Just the News‘ news writer, the unusually (for JtN) anonymous “Just the News Contributor,” posed the central question before the Supreme Court:

In Louisiana v Callais, the Supreme Court is confronted with a direct tension between two legal commands: the VRA’s mandate to protect minority voting rights and the Constitution’s limits on race-based decision-making by the state.

There is—or should be—no tension here. Our Constitution says this in Art VI:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land….

In Marbury v Madison, the Supreme Court made clear that conflicts between statute and Constitution must be resolved strictly and solely in favor of what our Constitution says, and every Supreme Court decision since has hewed to the ultimate supremacy of our Constitution. Any tension can exist only in the minds of activists and activist judges and Justices.

Nor can there be any half-measure wherein some level of race-based discrimination is OK. Any race-based discrimination or “preference” in political gerrymandering is too much and a violation of our Constitution. Here’s the 14th Amendment on the matter:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The clause does not say No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, except when it’s convenient to do otherwise.

Full stop.

“Multicultural”

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A news writer for The New York Times, Peter Baker, in typical journalism guild, misstated American culture in an interview with the left-wing network PBS‘ Washington Week With the Atlantic, as excerpted by The Wall Street Journal.

One of the things that they’ve [the Trump administration] been very successful at, and I would expect to see more of, is their war on DEI, on the notion of diversity, equity and inclusion, the notion that diversity is an admirable goal, even if you don’t necessarily want quotas. They have managed in just a very short amount of time to create a new culture in the country—not just in the government, across the board—where private employers feel the need to retreat from DEI. And you’re going to see, I think, an acceleration of that in the second year…. I think the question, though, is in a multicultural country, at some point does that begin to go too far for people and by the midterms?

Leave aside Baker’s blithe assumption that there’s nothing intrinsically racist or sexist in DEI, which favors approved races and the approved gender at the direct, deliberate expense of disapproved races and the disapproved gender. Those favoring criteria, however far down the selection tree they might be, are explicitly and by design racist and sexist.

More than that, the United States is not a mix of race, of old-world cultures, of religions, or of whathaveyous. The Unites States is a nation of a single culture, one unified by a common belief in a basic system of intrinsic rights: to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness and of a limited government granted to which by our nation’s sovereign citizens only enough power and authority to protect those intrinsic and basic rights.

Baker’s bald claim that the United States is a multicultural country is as cynical as it is wrong.

Even that queen of European identity politics, Germany’s ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, ultimately recognized that multiculturalism is an abject failure. And that’s something that Americans have known since our inception, if unevenly put or kept in effect.

So Much for Liberty

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Contempt for ordinary citizens is the order of the day in the United Kingdom, which has fallen and can’t seem to get up.

[T]he [British] government is moving to allow jury trials for “indictable only” offenses such as murder and “either way” offenses with likely sentences of more than three years in prison. Judge-only “swift” courts will hear cases ranging from burglary and theft to sexual assault and stalking. Judges will also sit without a jury in fraud and financial cases deemed too complex for jurors.

This is…disappointing. It’s also a revival of the 350-year-old Bushell’s Case but with the addendum of eliminating the case’s question altogether. Bushell’s Case was a trial of a couple of government-defined religious miscreants during which the presiding judge refused to accept the jury’s acquittal verdict and jailed the ringleader, Edward Bushell, until he voted for the judge-approved verdict. That case was resolved on appeal in favor of Bushell and British commoners generally, extending as the appeal finally ruled habeas corpus to those commoners as well as the nobility.

Now the British government is moving to go beyond that presiding judge’s position and eliminate juries altogether in a vast number of cases. No juries, no verdicts that run counter to the government’s position.

This revival also is a clear expression of the contempt with which British government men and women hold their subjects: commoners are just too grindingly stupid to understand many kinds of cases, and so they must be led away so their Betters can handle them without any pesky commoner interference.

Juries? We ain’t got no juries. We don’t need no juries! We don’t have to show you any stinkin’ juries!

Religious Bigotry

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West Virginia had a requirement that all school students get vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus (my term, not the State’s), regardless of religious views regarding vaccines or how the vaccines are structured or made or from any other religious perspective. The State permitted no religious opt-outs at all. Raleigh County Circuit Judge Michael Froble waved the BS flag at that requirement and has ruled that parents can, indeed, opt their children out of the vaccination program based on their religious beliefs.

The larger question is why a lawsuit and judicial ruling was needed in the first place.

Is the State’s bar of religious exemption demonstrative of religious bigotry by the relevant State officials? Not necessarily. Some religion-based objections aren’t actually based on religion, but those false assertions are quite rare. It is strongly suggestive of officials’ religious bigotry, though.

“The trade in babies and women’s bodies is an affront to freedom.”

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That Wall Street Journal subheadline is about surrogate motherhood and whether it ought be allowed to exist. Lois McLatchie Miller’s lede and next two paragraphs consist of this:

A New York ballroom filled with men discussing how to procure women’s bodies to produce babies, then discharge the mother from her role.
It sounds dystopian, but the September gathering was the latest conference of Men Having Babies, a group that helps gay couples—and single men, and even groups of three that call themselves “throuples”—form families through surrogacy. Online, they post photos of smiling male couples holding infants still slick from their mothers’ birth canals, celebrating a triumph of “modern family building.”
Those newborns know nothing of politics or reproductive technology. They know only the voice and scent of the woman who carried them for nine months—and whom they will never know again.

That truly is terrible, but it’s far from the norm. Surrogacy is broadly employed to provide healthy babies to families unable to have any of their own.

Alternatively, adopt a baby? Certainly. But the adoption, while also broadly beneficial to both the baby and the new parents, doesn’t get the parents a baby of their own blood, their own genetics. Surrogacy opens a path to that, wherein the father’s sperm is combined with the mother’s egg and the result implanted in the surrogate mother. Or a mother’s egg is combined with a sperm bank donor’s sperm and the result either implanted in the mother, or for her health reasons, implanted in a surrogate mother. Or the same with a donor’s egg and the father’s sperm.

The surrogate mother, then, in those cases carries the baby to term and then turns it over to the baby’s parents. That can be wrenching for the surrogate mother, but it isn’t always, and it does allow the surrogate mother to participate in the formation of a loving family. Even in the wrenching, the surrogacy contract takes care of the surrogate mother’s post-delivery needs.

Miller is a Senior Communications Officer at Alliance Defending Freedom International, so she should know better.

What’s necessary is not banning surrogate motherhood, nor even heavy regulation of it. What’s necessary are strong regulation, with heavy sanctions for misbehaviors and civil sanctions for egregious mistakes, of the outcomes. Along with that is the necessity of producing quality information that will allow childless families and prospective surrogate mothers to identify reliable and effective facilities—and each other—so as to allow both sides of the surrogacy to have satisfactory, rewarding outcomes.

Banning surrogacy altogether is what would be truly an affront to freedom. It would be an affront—a denial—of the freedom of families and individuals to decide for themselves how they will approach a family problem.