The Legal Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

A life lived for the Living Constitution  

 September 24, 2020 By William J. Watkins, Jr

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, on the occasion of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 10th anniversary on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, referred to the diminutive jurist—who would later join him on the high court—as “the best of colleagues, as she is the best of friends. I wish her a hundred years.” The iconic Supreme Court justice fell short of that mark, passing away recently at the age of 87.

Ginsburg was as liberal as Scalia was conservative: he a constitutional originalist, she embracing the concept of a Living Constitution.

Some remember Justice Ginsburg as a trailblazer and champion of women’s rights. That may be so as “women’s rights” currently is understood, but she also was a defender of judicial power who preferred that lawyers and judges, rather than democratically elected public officials, have the last word on public policy decisions............

Her sweeping opinion ordered the school to admit women, constitutionalizing a presumption against public, single-gender education.  Through raw judicial power and in the name of women’s rights, Ginsburg and the Court took from the people of Virginia and their elected representatives the ability to make their own decisions about the value of VMI and whether its approach to martial education was suited to women as well as men.............. Not surprisingly, Ginsburg also was a steadfast defender of Roe v. Wade (1973), the famed decision that constitutionalized (and thereby nationalized) abortion by divining a right to privacy that previously had gone undetected in the Constitution.........For Ginsburg, activist lawyers always knew best—especially those in robes. That’s her legal legacy..........To Read More....

Dozens of documents indicate Ilhan Omar lived with Ahmed Hirsi while claiming to be married to Ahmed Elmi

by Tiana Lowe and John Gage June 23, 2019

Dozens of official documents suggest that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was living with her current husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, throughout her entire legal marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, contradicting the story she tells to explain her multiple marriages.

Omar tells her marital history in the following way:.........To Read More...

Justice Kennedy's Hubris

By Nancy Pearcey December 2, 2018
  

This week on The David Rubenstein Show, retired Justice Kennedy finally admitted the real reason behind his Obergefell ruling, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that created a novel definition of marriage to give legal status to same-sex couples.  Kennedy said, “It seemed to me just wrong that under the constitution, over 100,000 adopted children of gay parents could not have their parents married.  I just thought this was wrong.”

Well, now we know.  The justice’s reasoning had nothing to do with Constitutional principles.  He had an emotional reaction and in his hubris he imposed his private feelings on the nation.

 

Ironically, the former justice had things exactly backward.  The Court’s unprecedented redefinition of legal marriage harms the very children it was designed to protect -- and indeed, all children.

A free society is possible only if it recognizes certain rights as pre-political.  The state does not create them -- it merely recognizes them.  Chief among those pre-political rights are marriage and family.  In all civilizations, people have known it takes a male and a female to produce a child; thus the core definition of the family was based on biology. 

All that changed with Obergefell. ...........To Read More.....

Marxism and Marriage

By David Solway August 17, 2018

In its centuries-long efforts to dismantle the load-bearing structures of traditional and classical liberal society, Marxist dogma in its various forms – communism, socialism, neo-Marxism, Cultural Marxism – has embarked on a sustained campaign to weaken and ultimately to abolish the institution of marriage as it has been commonly understood since time immemorial.  The dissolution or misprision of marriage, as a contract between a man and a woman committed to raising a family and recognizing its attendant responsibilities, is a prerequisite for the revolutionary socialist state in which the pivotal loyalty of the individual belongs to the sovereign collective, not to the family.............

An effective way to destroy marriage and the family was advanced by communist theorist Georg Lukács, who introduced the concept of "cultural terrorism," which involved the liquidation of religion, monogamy, and the ostensibly male-dominated family. Lukács advocated the introduction in the schools of – and as a minister in the 1919 Hungarian Bolshevik government of Béla Kun actually installed – courses on free love, sexual liberation, and Freud's notion of "polymorphous perversity," which he believed a revolutionary necessity. ...............To Read More

Marriage in chaos

June 11, 2018 By Robert Arvay

In the lifetime of us older guys, the institution of marriage has taken a severe beating. Easy divorce, premarital cohabitation, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and same-sex so-called marriage have all thrown the civil institution of marriage and family into chaos, and indeed, into decline. Many women on welfare, in effect, marry the government. The latest news item reports that a man is suing a pharmacy for carelessly divulging to his wife that he had purchased Viagra, whereupon marital discord ensued, since he had purposely kept the information from her..............Read more

This Is How the Elite Poisons Our Culture

The New York Times Magazine takes an open-minded view of open marriage.

by David French May 12, 2017 3:19 PM @DavidAFrench

Let's imagine that one day, after many years of marriage, your wife comes to you and tells you that she’s deeply, profoundly dissatisfied. She’s lost any sense of her own sexuality, she’s losing connection with her “best self,” and she misses the thrill and intoxication of a new relationship. For the vast majority of married couples, a conversation like this would touch off an extraordinary crisis. It might be followed by the confession of a marriage-breaking affair, it might touch off a desperate effort to save the relationship, or it might launch a years-long cold war, leaving the couple to grind out their days together without solving their problems.

But a small number of couples settle on a different choice: They open the marriage. They become “non-monogamous” (the term preferred over “polyamorous”) and “explore their sexuality.”
........Sorry, but hedonism and self-obsession aren’t “advanced nanotechnology”; they’re sins as old as mankind. And the more Dominus writes, the more apparent it becomes that these old sins still have the same familiar consequences....... the open marriages frequently fail, flaming out in a tangled web of jealousy, sadness, and bizarro-world sexual practices.....  ....... In the meantime, those who actually act as if all choices are equally valid, fidelity is optional, and a lifelong faithful marriage is no more “right” than serial group sex, fall into a cultural and economic abyss. Lift taboos, and people will indulge in those taboos. The misery from their mistakes will reach across the land. .........Read more


My Take - Many years ago there was a Masters and Johnson book that proclaimed open marriage was the great happiness machine.   I guess divorce is another word for happiness?   Open marriage - oh....let's just call if for what it is.....infidelity......violates a major biological imperative - jealousy.  Not to mention the fact it destabilizes society.  Which is exactly what the left has been trying to bring about for decades.  I hate having to bring this up, but events keep pointing to it.  The Communist Takeover Of America - 45 Declared Goals.  Here ares some pertinent ones. 

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."  
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

Life on the Education Plantation

By John Conlin February 10, 2017

In the course of my management consulting, I’ve been to some of the toughest neighborhoods in the country.  If you do business in these areas, you know to always visit them early in the day when they are relatively safer. Thus in my travels I’d see four and five-year-old kids playing like all four and five-year-olds do.  But, as they got older, they developed an increasingly hard look in their eyes. And, by only nine or 10, many had a look in their eyes no child in America should have.  Even at that age, they had put up with more crap than one can imagine. The neighborhoods they were born into have astonishing crime rates. The few terrorize the many and, unlike the police, they don’t leave.......Read more

The Daily Signal

Justice Department Halts Program Allowing Law Enforcement to Split Proceeds of Seized Cash, Property - The law enforcement community is pushing back against the Justice Department decision, warning it could have negative consequences on public safety.....

State Lawmakers Urged to Question Taxpayer-Subsidized Climate 'Alarmists' - Conservative lawmakers, scholars, and activists say it's time for the Virginia General Assembly to look into the taxpayer funding of academics who don’t want President Obama to tolerate dissenting views on climate change....

How Kentucky's Governor Upheld Religious Freedom in Issuing Marriage Licenses - Kim Davis, the Democratic clerk of a Kentucky county, drew national attention when she went to jail for five days for refusing to issue any marriage licenses to avoid issuing them to same-sex couples....