There is a coup in progress

Keep an eye on this one:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - California's highest court has agreed to hear legal challenges to a new ban on gay marriage, but is refusing to allow gay couples to resume marrying until it rules.

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday accepted three lawsuits seeking to overturn Proposition 8. The amendment passed this month with 52 percent of the vote. The court did not elaborate on its decision.

All three cases claim the ban abridges the civil rights of a vulnerable minority group. They argue that voters alone did not have the authority to enact such a significant constitutional change

If the California Supreme Court overturns a constitutional amendment then the last pretense that the state of California is governed by anything other than a judicial dictatorship is out the window.

State's rights advocates do not like the idea of the federal courts involving themselves in the internal affairs of the states however if this degree of judicial usurpation is allowed to stand then democracy in all of America is dead, to be replaced by a black robed aristocracy.

Think this through carefully. Courts are supposed to apply the law and the supreme law in a state is the state constitution just as the supreme law in the USA as a whole is the federal constitution. Even when activist courts have legislated from the bench they have at least attempted to cloak their activism in constitutional language. For example the majority in Roe v Wade pretended to find a constitutional "right to privacy".

If the California court gets away with simply declaring a legally adopted amendment to the state constitution to be illegal then nothing will be off limits to an activist judiciary. If the people of California acting either through the referendum process or through their elected representatives ever attempt to limit the power of the judiciary then the judges can simply declare those limits null and void.

If the California court overturns a constitutional amendment there is literally nothing to stop them from overturning the portion of California law which requires them to stand for election, thus making themselves judicial dictators for life. If the California court gets away with this then what stops them, or any other state's Supreme Court from simply deciding to award that states electoral votes to the candidate they like rather than the one the people of the state voted for.

This is, after all, what almost happened in Florida in the 2000 election. The left-wing activist state Supreme Court didn't like the fact that more people in Florida voted for George W Bush than Al Gore so they tried to rewrite the state's election laws in the middle of the election in order to give the presidency to the candidate they preferred.

This is why this must be brought to the US Supreme Court if the California justices attempt to declare themselves sovereign monarchs. Otherwise kiss whatever is left of your freedom goodbye.

New York to recognize homosexual "marriages"

From The New York Times:

ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson has directed all state agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, like Massachusetts, California and Canada.

In a directive issued on May 14, the governor’s legal counsel, David Nocenti, instructed the agencies that gay couples married elsewhere “should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union.”

The revisions are most likely to involve as many as 1,300 statutes and regulations in New York governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses.

In a videotaped message given to gay community leaders at a dinner on May 17, Mr. Paterson described the move as “a strong step toward marriage equality.” And people on both sides of the issue said it moved the state closer to fully legalizing same-sex unions in this state.

What will be interesting to see is how the people of New York state receive this bit of news. Legalized homosexual "marriage" is the harbinger of the death of the institution of true marriage. It is not that the sight of two men or two women standing at the alter will cause a heterosexual couple to divorce, or not marry in the first place. Rather it is that when a culture's moral values degenerate to the point where it is willing to redefine marriage in that way it is an infallible signal that marriage is no longer truly valued.

Society is nothing more than a complex network of human relationships. Since marriage is the foundational relationship weakening it serves to weaken the entire society. Imagine if the reinforced concrete which makes up the foundation of the Empire State Building were to be replaced with sandstone. The results would look like the aftermath of 9/11.

In every case in the US in which a state has legalized homosexual marriage, or in this case recognized same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions, it has not come as a result of a referendum in which the people were allowed to vote on the issue directly. Nor has it come about because a state legislature, composed of the elected representatives of the people, has voted on the issue.

In every case it is the judiciary which has imposed homosexual marriage on an unwilling population. In every state where the people have had the opportunity to speak directly on the issue they have rejected homosexual marriage by large margins. This indicates that the moral rot has not spread so far that our culture is beyond repair. However effective steps must be taken to rein in these out of control judges.

And in his cave bin Laden laughs

If future historians ponder the question of why the United States was able to be overcome by primitive savages this story from The New York Times will be exhibit "A" for the case that we were not overcome from the outside, but simply rotted away from the inside:

A federal appeals court ordered the government yesterday to turn over virtually all its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures and setting the stage for new legal battles over the government’s reasons for holding the men indefinitely.

The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as enemy combatants.

It was the latest of a series of stinging legal challenges to the administration’s detention policies that have amplified pressure on the Bush administration to find some alternative to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 360 men are now being held at the United States naval base.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected a government effort to limit the information it must turn over to the court and lawyers for the detainees.

The court said meaningful review of the military tribunals would not be possible “without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator.”

Advocates for detainees have criticized the tribunals since they were instituted in 2004 because the terror suspects held at Guantánamo have not been permitted lawyers during the proceedings and have not been allowed to see much of the evidence against them.

P. Sabin Willett, a Boston lawyer who argued the case for detainees, called the ruling “a resounding rejection of the government’s effort to hide the truth.”

Of course this isn't over. An appeal to the Supreme Court is bound to happen and given the nation's good fortune in having had a president for the past eight years who has made excellent choices of judges there is a very good chance that this ruling will be overturned.