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Welcome AdvanceUSA readers!

Retired Judges of America is pleased to be the first featured subject of the AdvanceUSA Spotlight.

Citizens in Berkely, Michigan, are making news for standing up for what the First Amendment actually says: https://www.candgnews.com/Homepage-Articles/10-25-06/FG-NATIVITY.asp Here’s an interesting point in the article:

“Meg Boker argued to keep the nativity scene where it is, saying that her children are inundated with immoral and objectionable material every day on television and the Internet, yet she has to fight for any kind of religious or spiritual symbols to be displayed in public. ‘When we force religion indoors, we become less tolerant as a society,’ she continued. ‘We never get to learn about our brothers and sisters.’”

Her assertion – a powerful one – is that the First Amendment simply does not protect people against being offended. Thomas Jefferson affirmed that proposition in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, the icon most closely identified with the concept of “separation of church and state” when he wrote that, “…the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions….” Elsewhere Jefferson wrote:

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:221

A little critical thinking puts the issue in perspective: why is it that the same First Amendment free speech clause that protects the “rights” of persons who wish to speak ill of God shouldn’t protect the rights of persons who wish to speak well of Him in public? Regrettably, the Supreme Court’s misapplication of the “separation of church and state” principle has given us what Justice Arthur Goldberg warned could become “…a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious.”

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«A federal judge hearing a constitutional challenge to a Kansas law requiring doctors, teachers and others to report underage sex between consenting youths said the state presented no credible evidence that underage sex is always harmful.U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten stopped short of issuing a decision from the bench, but he repeatedly interrupted Thursday’s closing arguments by Assistant Attorney General Steve Alexander to challenge his assertions.“Motives are irrelevant – I want to deal with facts,” Marten said. “Where is the clear, credible evidence that underage sex is always injurious? If you tell me because it is illegal – I reject that,” Marten said»

AP Wire | 02/09/2006 | Judge: No credible evidence underage sex always harmful:
https://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/state/13823878.htm

Commentary:  Of course if an elected trial judge were to utter such nonsense, the line would begin forming to oppose his re-election.  However, Judge Marten – clutching his federal commission – could care less about public opinion.  In fact there are only 435 “natural enemies” of the Judge Martens of America.  And if hizhonor reads the paper Monday morning and finds that no impeachment inquiry has been initiated against him, then in the grand scheme of things, he has been officially vindicated and every member of the House of Representatives has, by his/her silence, become complicit in issuing Judge Marten a 🙂    of continued “good behaviour.” 

That is because impeachment must begin in the House of Representatives.  See Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.  It’s that simple (and hard).  Remember James Madison’s words, “In republican governments, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” Federalist #51. 

And if “we the people” don’t take the time to contact our congressman’s office to respectfully insist that that such behaviour is not “good” and deserves impeachment, we become “principals” by “aiding and abetting” the judge’s misfeasance.  For in a self-governing nation, there are no innocent bystanders; only those guilty of bystanding!

Judge Darrell White (Retired)

So far Rodney Alexander and Bobby Jindal are the only members of the Louisiana congressional delegation who are cosponsors of the Public Expression of Religion Act, or PERA (H.R.2679). The bill would prohibit judges in civil suits involving the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause from awarding attorney’s fees to those offended by religious symbols or actions in the public square – such as a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse or a cross on a county seal. If passed, the ACLU would have to spring for its own attorney’s fees in suits such as the one pending in Tangipahoa Parish where it persuaded a former-state-ACLU-president-turned-federal-district-judge to order the duly elected parish school board members to stop opening their meetings with prayer.
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Constitutional Law Professor John Eidsmoe has issued the following tongue-in-cheek rationale for banning all holidays.  
December 25 is now history, and the combatants in the “Christmas wars” have laid down their arms until next year. But the issues are far from resolved, and the conflict is far from over. Look for the guns to sound again come next December.
The problem with a ban on “Merry Christmas” is that it doesn’t go far enough. To be consistent (though that is a rare virtue these days) we should consider banning all holidays that might offend someone. Looking at my 2006 calendar, I find many holidays at which some might take offense.
New Year’s Day is an observance of the Gregorian calendar, an offense to those who don’t accept the Gregorian calendar, who don’t accept Jesus Christ as the central focus of human history, and who are offended by a calendar named after a Roman Catholic Pope. Let’s ban it.
January 16, Martin Luther King Day, is offensive to racists. Some might say racists deserve to be offended, but what right have we to be judgmental? Besides, the day is also used to celebrate the birth of Robert E. Lee, and this is offensive to Yankees. Let’s ban it.
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Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of Toward Tradition and author of America’s Real War, notes that “In Israel, the mail is not delivered on Yom Kippur.  It is a Jewish nation.  In Saudi Arabia, the mail is not delivered on Friday.  It is an Islamic nation.  In America, the mail is not delivered on Sundays or Christmas.  It is a Christian nation.”
Not surprisingly, a November 2005 FOX News poll discloses the following:

• 59 percent of Americans think Christianity is under attack here;
• 81 percent disagree with the statement that religion should be “excluded from public life”;
• 93 percent want “In God We Trust” to remain on our currency and coinage;
• 90 percent are for keeping “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of Alliance;
• 76 percent say public display of the Ten Commandments should be legal;
• 82 percent favor voluntary school prayer; and
• 77 percent believe “the courts have gone too far in taking religion out of public life.”

Meanwhile, the civil war of cultural values continues to heat up with polygamists now seeking their “civil rights” – https://www.washtimes.com/specialreport/20051211-121113-7195r.htm.  Are they entitled?  Justice Anthony Kennedy and four concurring SCOTUS justices opined in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”.  On the other hand, Noah Webster, in his massive work, the 1828 Dictionary of the American Language defined civil liberty as “the liberty of men in a state of society, or natural liberty, so far only abridged and restrained, as is necessary and expedient for the safety and interest of the society, state or nation.”  Thomas Jefferson affirmed that view in his now famous-but-little-understood 1802 letter to Danbury Baptists [enshrining “separation of church and state”] when he wrote that man “… has no natural rights in opposition to his social duties.”

Will we continue down this unmistakable “slippery slope”?  Put more personally, if the outcome of restoring our constitutional republic depended on you, would we transmit it intact to our children and grandchildren?  Well, it really does depend on you – and me!  Theodore Roosevelt issued a poignant challenge when he said, “No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.” -Theodore Roosevelt