Scalia and Feds Control Over Marriage is Wrong

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – You might notice in the movies these days they say, “By the power vested in me by the State of Louisiana, I now pronounce you man and wife.”  What do you mean by the power vested to you by the state?  Marriage is a sacrament.  Latin sacramentum, gift, gift from God.  It is a religious bond consecrated in the eyes of God.  It is a vow made before a representative of God on earth, you know him as a priest, and a man and a woman, voluntarily choosing to enter into that compact that is made before the eyes of God.  It is a religious ceremony.  This is where you and your young people should hire me to be your spokesman and you should go along with me on this.  You should just butt the hell out of the term marriage. Check out the rest in today’s transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

AG:  Mike, you mentioned Justice Roberts really quick.  I wanted to get your thoughts on something that Justice Scalia, who’s out doing a bunch of different forums right now, and he was just at Princeton and taking questions from the audience.  A student asked him about gay marriage coming to SCOTUS and how they’re going to rule on it in two different cases.  As he was describing the Constitution, he made the comment that, “It isn’t a living document.  It’s dead, dead, dead, dead.”  Quoting from a story here on Huffington:

[reading]

Scalia said that people who see the Constitution as changing often argue they are taking the more flexible approach.  But their true goal is to set policy permanently.  “My Constitution is a very flexible one,” he said.  “There’s nothing in there about abortion.  It’s up to the citizens…The same with the death penalty.”  Scalia said that interpreting laws requires adherence to the words used and to their meanings at the time they were written.

[end reading]

AG:  Just to get your thoughts on —

Mike:  Scalia said this?

AG:  Yes.

Mike:  [laughing] He’s contravening and contradicting things that he said himself.  What is he, a schizophrenic now?

AG:  The genesis of this is he didn’t make the correlation between murder and gay marriage but some people have linked the two.  He’s talking the morals of it and whether you can legislate morality.  And if you can’t legislate gay marriage, how could you legislate murder?  It raised kind of a firestorm in the auditorium where the talk was taking place and led to his discussion on the U.S. Constitution.

[reading]

Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder. “I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia said.

[end reading]

Mike:  This is a really good question.  You’re asking a question and that student was asking the question assuming that the high court actually has authority, vested authority over these things.  He’s delivering an answer over what his view of his vested authority is, which is a far cry from the authority that was actually granted in the nebulous and not well-defined and flawed Article III of the Constitution.

AG:  The very end of this article, he talks about how if there’s stuff not in the Constitution, yet he’s still — my interpretation of it is, Scalia says, “My Constitution is a very flexible one.  There’s nothing in there about abortion.  It’s up to the citizens…The same with the death penalty.”  Does that mean it should then go to the Supreme Court in these instances, if it’s not in the Constitution?  That’s where I’m confused.

Mike:  No, you’ve got that backwards.  That means that the court doesn’t have authority if it’s not in.  This is what the amendment process is for.  If you have something you desperately want to do and you say as an entire country we want to foist this on the head of all 50 states and 314 million people, that’s when you have to go and propose an amendment and have it ratified.  No, the court cannot make its own arbitrary and unilateral decisions on anything.  If you read Article III, it’s so poorly constructed.  It is a miracle that we have few people left that even believe in their heart of hearts, being honest men and women, that there is a true form of blind justice that is equal and available to all people under the law with what Article III has done to the law and to jurisprudence over the last two and a quarter centuries.

If you read Article III, it’s not very long, not very well defined, and it was the article that most of the framers of the Constitution thought posed the least amount of threat.  This is why the Constitution is a flawed document.  They never envisioned, as my buddy Andy McCarthy calls it, a juristocracy.  The great book by Raoul Berger, which I encourage all of you to read, Government by Judiciary, they never considered this.  Patrick Henry and George Mason thought it was a threat.  That’s another reason why they opposed ratification without amendments.  Jefferson viewed the federal judiciary as a threat.  The question about the extent of the supremes, what it is that they can and cannot do, is one that should have been settled 220-some-odd years ago.  Unfortunately, it was not and we are left with this quagmire of law that is fiat, meaning at will.

Scalia does make an interesting point.  I don’t know if you’ve read this.

[reading]

“It isn’t a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead, dead.” He said that people who see the Constitution as changing often argue they are taking the more flexible approach.  But their true goal is to set policy permanently.  “My Constitution is a very flexible one,” he said.  “There’s nothing in there about abortion.  It’s up to the citizens…The same with the death penalty.”

[end reading]

Mike:  Those two statements, that’s amazing from the guy that is the author of the case that he wrote the majority opinion on that basically said the people of California could not make legal medicinal marijuana, and that Mrs. Raich had a constitutional duty to suffer pain.

AG:  I thought this article was interesting.  Of course, the news from late last week in terms of the Supreme Court seeing two gay marriage cases, then yesterday we had Glenn Beck kind of take a stance.  His quote was, “The question is not whether gay people should be married or not.  The question is why is the government involved in our marriage?”

Mike:  You mean Glenn Beck took the Mike Church Show position?  Thanks.

AG:  That’s there.

Mike:  We’ve only been advocating that for what, three and a half, four years?  Please continue.

AG:  The evolution of this stance politically and where it goes in the future, but I wonder could the Supreme Court — if a portion of conservatives are moving towards “why is the government involved in marriage to begin with” and the public sentiment sees that as a way to bring marriage back locally, back to the churches, what role does the Supreme Court have?  Could they theoretically be like, “Yeah, good question.  Why is the government involved in marriage to begin with?”  Do they have any jurisdiction?

Mike:  That’s a Clintonian question.  [mocking Clinton] “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.”  When you say government, you have to be specific.

AG:  The question would be: If the evolution of the conservative thought going forward is let’s get the federal government out of marriage, as you’ve said, as Glenn Beck is now saying, as there are a number of different conservative commentators as well as people on the left saying let’s get the federal government out of marriage, what are the steps?  Is the Supreme Court involved?  Is it strictly a congressional legislative act?  What would the steps be to return marriage strictly to churches?

Mike:  You have 50 state legislatures that are going to have to butt out, too.  You might notice in the movies these days they say, “By the power vested in me by the State of Louisiana, I now pronounce you man and wife.”  What do you mean by the power vested to you by the state?  Marriage is a sacrament.  Latin sacramentum, gift, gift from God.  It is a religious bond consecrated in the eyes of God.  It is a vow made before a representative of God on earth, you know him as a priest, and a man and a woman, voluntarily choosing to enter into that compact that is made before the eyes of God.  It is a religious ceremony.  This is where you and your young people should hire me to be your spokesman and you should go along with me on this.  You should just butt the hell out of the term marriage.  If you don’t want to go before God and you don’t want to avow it in a church, fine, don’t do it.  I have no problem with it.  When you go to a justice of the peace or any other secular institution to do it and that would include homosexuals, it’s not a marriage, it is a union.  It is a civil union made legal by the laws of a state, not the laws of God.  There’s a difference.

If we could just compromise, I will concede to every single one of you, or to anyone who cares to listen, the civil union.  I’ll concede it.  I will happily give that ground up.  If you go to the state, you can have a civil union with anyone you want to.  If they consent, they want to form a civil bond recognized by the State of Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, whatever, fine.  Leave the word and the term marriage out of it.  You don’t own it.  It doesn’t belong to you.  It has always been something that has been administered by the clergy, by the church under the guidance and benediction or blessing of God.  Leave marriage out of it.  The state does not have to consecrate it, recognize it, nothing.  That is the compromise we ought to be working towards.  That way you could keep most of this out of the legislatures.

I don’t know this, but perhaps the pursuit of the homosexual, same-sex marriage (SSM), pursuit of marriage to compel through the churches may be an acknowledgement from homosexuals that they do not desire making partnerships with the government.  They’d rather steamroll a church into doing it, force them to do it and have to live under the law of the church than they would under the law of Governor Jindal or Governor Perry.


End Mike Church Show Transcript