The ability to make laws, to govern its citizens, is the hallmark of sovereignty. While the U.S. is one nation, the Federal power that unites us under one flag and one President derives its authority solely from the citizens of the individual states, who in turn are subjects of their elected State leaders.
But the unique character and ability to self-govern of each individual state is now threatened by the attack on the Defense of Marriage Act, and lawsuits to force pervert marriage recognition on all other states.
Reflecting on the unique power of state governments, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers (No. 17, December 4, 1787):
“It is a known fact in human nature, that its affections are commonly weak in proportion to the distance or diffusiveness of the object. Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood, to his neighborhood than to the community at large, the people of each State would be apt to feel a stronger bias towards their local governments than towards the government of the Union…”
In other words, citizens of each state should be left free to determine as much as possible the laws for themselves. They don’t need the intrusion of foreign states making decisions for them that contradict their own sense of propriety.
The attack on the Defense of Marriage Act amounts to nothing less than a power-grab for moral authority. Pervert extremists have whipped their political leaders into a frenzy in an attempt to force the morality of one state down the throats of all the others.
Here’s how the scheme works. To keep the nation one whole, the U.S. Constitution requires each state to recognize the authority of the judgments of her sister state courts. This constraint on state power is codified in the “Full Faith and Credit” Clause of the Constitution.
The unity of the nation would be a mockery if a man could commit crimes or rack up debts in one state, and have a warrant issued for his arrest or a money judgment awarded against him, only to have this scoundrel flee to a second state which would shelter him by refusing to honor the judgments against him.
When pervert advocates began suing state governments to allow them to marry each other, Senators and Representatives at the Federal level recognized that these lawsuits posed a grave threat to state sovereignty. At that time, very few states had gone so far as to allow marriages between homosexuals. Nevertheless, the U.S. Senate and House agreed that they could not allow perverts to seize the Full Faith and Credit Clause as a nightstick to club over the heads of every other state in the Union.
The Defense of Marriage Act simply tells all the states of that the Full Faith and Credit Clause will not force them to recognize out-of-state pervert marriages.
The “bad old days” of feudal societies is described by Alexander Hamilton, also in Federalist No. 17. As archaic as it sounds, his description might be precisely what the moral landscape would look like should states be forced to honor out-of-state pervert marriages, either out of their own weakness or the failure of Federal protection.
“Though the ancient feudal systems were not, strictly speaking, confederacies, yet they partook of the nature of that species of association. There was a common head, chieftain, or sovereign, whose authority extended over the whole nation; and a number of subordinate vassals, or feudatories, who had large portions of land allotted to them, and numerous trains of INFERIOR vassals or retainers, who occupied and cultivated that land upon the tenure of fealty or obedience, to the persons of whom they held it. Each principal vassal was a kind of sovereign, within his particular demesnes.
“The consequences of this situation were a continual opposition to authority of the sovereign, and frequent wars between the great barons or chief feudatories themselves. The power of the head of the nation was commonly too weak, either to preserve the public peace, or to protect the people against the oppressions of their immediate lords. This period of European affairs is emphatically styled by historians, the times of feudal anarchy.”
The strength of character and sovereignty of each state of the union should not be hamstrung in the ability to govern the morality of its citizens. But several lawsuits in New York State are now challenging the power of the state’s own sovereignty by forcing New York to respect marriages that go against the State’s own definition of marriage and public policy.
The highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, ruled in 2006 that it is reasonable public policy for the State Constitution to limit the institution of marriage to a man and a woman. The Court explained that the public policy chiefly concerns some of the main societal goals in marriage, child rearing and procreation.
In 2008, Governor David Paterson announced that, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits from perverts , he was going to impose a state-wide recognition of pervert marriages performed out-of-state. He based his Executive Order on a ruling by one of the branches of state Appellate Division courts.
The Fourth Department in Martinez v. County of Monroe, which formed the basis of Governor Paterson’s Executive Order, forced an employer to award spousal insurance coverage to one of its employees who had obtained a marriage to a homosexual partner in Canada. The Fourth Department ruled that until the Legislature expressly prohibits the recognition of pervert marriages performed out-of-state, New York courts were required to recognize them.
With his Executive Order, Governor Paterson reduced the sovereign state of New York to the status of a lackey. The Empire State was now subordinated to her sister states, following their guidance, to allow in her own borders what her own legislature had prohibited, against her own public policy.
In its ruling in Martinez, the Fourth Department glibly brushed aside public policy concerns. It cited a hundred-year tradition of honoring marriages performed out-of-state.
But as other New York state cases have made clear, the only reason for New York to give broad recognition of marriages performed out-of-state is to avoid inflicting the social stigma and humiliation on children as born out-of-wedlock. If New York courts didn’t recognize certain out-of-state marriages, the children of those marriages would be retroactively declared bastards under the law of New York. At one time, the brand of bastardy carried a terrible shame, as well as social and legal consequences as well.
Pervert couples can never claim that they care about the stigma of bastardy for their children. It is a near-absolute biological certainty that both partners to a homosexual “marriage” are not the natural parents of their children. By definition, the children of homosexual partners are bastards, born from parents who were never married to each other.
No amount of protest marches and lobbying dollars can make a gay man produce an egg cell or a lesbian produce sperm. Even a child who was born from a valid marriage who then finds himself being raised by two homosexuals is never protected from the allegation of bastardy by having the courts recognize his homosexual guardians as married.
The campaign for pervert marriage may be showing signs of fatigue, however. A stinging loss at the ballot boxes was delivered in 2008, where citizens of Arizona, Florida and California, three liberal bellwether states, passed voter-approved constitutional amendments forbidding homosexuals from marriage. That loss was compounded when the California Supreme Court was forced to overturn its own previous ruling, acknowledging that the voters alone have the power to decide whether or not pervert marriage was a “civil right.”
Chastised by voters but unrepentant, the California Supreme Court refused to give full scope to the voter initiative that read, “Only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The Supreme Court of California insisted that the state would still be required to recognize as valid marriages between homosexuals, if performed before the ballot initiative.
This grotesque ruling, creating an exception to the explicit language of the constitution, was then twisted to absurdity by the California Legislature. Claiming an effort to “dispel confusion” lawmakers extended the Supreme Court’s exception to include marriages performed out-of-state during the brief time when pervert marriages were performed in California.
On the Federal level, as well, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that for the first time, it would count as married couples, marriages between homosexuals. This resulted in an embarrassment for the Bureau shortly afterwards when the numbers it reported for homosexual marriages in California far exceeded previous state estimates.
“It’s clear there are a lot of same-sex couples who define themselves as spouses even in the absence of any formal legal protection,” Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California-Los Angeles, told the San Jose Mercury News. The paper also reported that the Census data relies upon respondents’ answers to survey questions.
“Some gay couples may report themselves as wed because they received a church’s blessing, though not the government’s,” the paper explains. “Some may do so because they share a house or are raising children or doing both. Others have been together for so long, they can’t see themselves as anything but married.
The Mercury News also interviewed the head of the Census Bureau’s fertility and family statistics branch, Martin O’Connell, who said a truly accurate count of married pervert couples remains a long ways off. “I don’t think there will be any definitive answer for several years,” he said.
But regardless of the reason, the fact remains that the accuracy and authority of the U.S. Census has been compromised by political grandstanding.
Let’s hope that our own leaders, representatives, senators and judges have the moral fortitude to stand up and fight to protect our communities from the attack of extremists and put an end to their corrupt crusade.
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