“The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
Kennedy found a Constitutional right that allows persons to define and express their identity? Paging Albert Camus.
The Constitution supports Existentialism? The Constitutional defies the notion that human beings have a set nature? The Constitution as Existentialist Anthropology? Is this written by Anthony Kennedy or by Jean Paul Sartre?
Who could have known?
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“The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”
A few sentences later,
“And their (sodomite) immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path to this profound commitment.”
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
1.) First they themselves are defining and expressing their identity. Then, a few sentences later we find out about their “immutable nature.” How does someone both define their identity while at the same time possessing an immutable nature? If they are defining their identity they cannot have an immutable nature. If they have an immutable nature their identity has already been defined for them. Contradict much Mad Anthony?
2.) This can only make sense, it seems, if we construe that Kennedy’s theology is anthropocentric, and his Deity is inter-subjective. Just as the Lord God is both creative and immutable, triggering change in a universe which he both transcends and pervades, so too, for Kennedy, the Almighty Individual sodomite is both creative and unchanging in his unsearchable ways. He announces to the world, “I AM, I said!” And so speaks himself into existence. Who art thou, o critic, to question what the sovereign sodomite does? Fortunately we have judges like Mad Anthony to clarify these conundrums for us, the uninitiated. (Hat Tip — Habakkuk Mucklewrath on this one.)
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Indeed, changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations, often through perspectives that begin in pleas or protests and then are considered in the political sphere and the judicial process.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
Cultural relativism anybody? Social Evolution? Truth as a social construct?
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The Court, like many institutions, has made assumptions defined by the world and time of which it is a part.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges Opinion
Pure historicism. Hegel’s “Universal Spirit.” Truth is ever evolving. Criminals in one generation are the leading indicators for and those who anticipate the definition of Saints in the next generation.
Of course, all of this is a reflection of the legal theory of legal positivism.
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“The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation. “
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
1.) Would you mind too terribly Mad Anthony if you could site your epistemological source for this insight?
2.) Why only two persons Mad Anthony? Why not 3 or 4 or a bakers dozen?
3.) And by what requirement two persons? An enlightened view of marriage requires us to allow for two horses and a trans-gendered lesbian woman entering into marriage if that is how she has created her self identity.
4.) Kennedy, by restricting the number entering into marriage, as well as the kind of beasts that can enter into marriage with one person, is obviously struggling with the residual remains of his Christian upbringing.
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Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
If Mad Anthony ever tires of writing legal briefs as a member of SCOTUS he has a future in Harlequin Romance novels.
Really, this kind of sentimental tripe in a SCOTUS legal brief?
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The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
Now there exists a fundamental right to marry?
And to think, all those lost years when our forebears thought that boys go with girls in marriage while thinking it only seemed natural and just. Poor besotted fools.
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The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era. Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here. But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied. Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
1.) “Rights come not from ancient sources alone” — Clearly a swipe at the Christian Scriptures. So, rights do not come from God alone? Well, what other God is there to give rights if not man?
2.) “Better informed understanding” — those poor poor fools of the past who were not bright enough to have the better informed understanding of this brilliant current generation.
3.) We’re not disparaging you or your beliefs as wrong in the least. We are just saying that you did not have the “better informed understanding” that we have. No disparagement at all here.
4.) So, Christian beliefs as enacted law should not be but the religious beliefs of sodomites should be enacted law?
5.) Is it ever proper to stigmatize or disparage any sexual self identity Mad Anthony? Should we stigmatize Bestiality? Should we disparage Pedophilia? Should we consider Necrophilia taboo? Remember Justice Kennedy you have created a right of self identity in this decision.
In a sane world, Justice Mad Anthony Kennedy would be committed to an insane asylum.
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Were the Court to stay its hand to allow slower, case-by-case determination of the required availability of specific public benefits to same-sex couples, it still would deny gays and lesbians many rights and responsibilities intertwined with marriage.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
This is just another way of paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln when he said that, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.“ Only this time Kennedy is saying that the this government cannot remain half sodomite and half non-sodomite.
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Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The
First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to
continue the family structure they have long revered.
Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges
Tell that to the Photographers, the Bakers, the Florists and others who have been put out of business because they tried to adhere to their religious doctrines. Tell that to those who have refuse to condone sodomite marriage by refusing to do business with sodomites in celebrating their “marriage.” Where is you proper protection now Mad Anthony?
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The important thing to keep in mind folks is that with this Obergefell vs. Hodges decision what SCOTUS has done is not primarily to allow sodomite marriage. What it has done is to create a legal category and Constitutional underpinning of the right to “self identity.” Self identity is the umbrella category that has been created that thus allows sodomite marriage to fall under. The possible repercussions of this is the destruction of law. If self identity is all that is required in order to garner recognized rights then no law can be written that could possibly fence in the privileges of “self-identity.” This decision erases the whole idea of “the rule of law,” and places us clearly in the twilight realm of the law of men. What happens when one self identity clashes with another self identity? No stable law can tell us that. Only the whim of men can sort that out and only guessing could be used as a guide to the outcome.
Let’s apply this. Let’s say that a child self identifies as an adult and an adult self identifies as a child. Now lets say that these two people are caught having sex. In this case it is the child who self identifies as the adult who is the pedophile. Outrageous you say?
So was the idea of sodomite marriage 40 years ago.
Statutory rape is a thing of the past. You’re 14 year old daughter is caught fornicating with her 19 year old boyfriend. Missy simply says, “I self identify as 21.”
Surgically precise. Thank you.