6/27/2005

Supreme Court Bars Oldest Legal Document From Being Displayed At Courthouses

While sitting in a court room that featured an engraving of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, the Supreme Court, in yet another 5-4 decision, decided that other courthouses in the United States were not allowed to display the world's oldest legal document. Why, because the Commandments are associated with religion and in this country, anything having to do with religion must be removed from sight.

They said that putting up the Ten Commandments in a courtroom establishes religion. Of course, they didn't specify which religion. Surely it isn't Catholicism or any mainline Protestant denomination, since they are all free from the Law. Maybe it is Judaism. Who knows?

Well at least they didn't bar the display in all public places.

6/19/2005

Flag Burning Amendment Is A Bad Idea

Any American who burns the flag is revealing themselves to be an ungrateful idiot, and I believe that person should be taken to the woodshed and given an old fashioned whipping. Regardless of how I feel about that person though, Americans have the constitutional right to act like idiots. I realize that flag burning makes some of you angry. It makes me angry too. But the right to protest and speak out against the government should never be taken away. You see, a flag burning amendment is not about flag burning as much is it is about liberty. I opposed a flag burning amendment during Bush 41's presidency. I felt that Bush demogogued the issue in order to get re-elected. The two Senators who are sponsoring this amendment are doing the same. They know that it has no chance of passing, but they need the good publicity that comes from looking patriotic. But as much as it is unpatriotic to burn a flag, it is even more unpatriotic to ban a persons right to burn a flag. We must preserve a person's right to protest, even if their protest is offensive. If we do not preserve that basic liberty, we might as well have never won our independence.

6/16/2005

Repeal the 17th Amendment

Back during the debate concerning the constitutional option to end judicial filibusters, a few Senators suggested that the constitutional option would change the Senate forever. I don't know about you, but I considered that to be a good thing. The US Senate is a toilet. Senators do not serve their constituents, they serve the special interest groups who send them on those nice vacations and donate millions to their campaign funds. At one time though, they actually represented the states. Yes before what was supposed to be a "democratic reform", Senators were actually accountable to the state legislatures that sent them to Washington. Of course the Seventeenth Amendment changed all of that. In a comment to one of his recent posts, Blake of Nashville Files stated that he supported the repeal of the 17th amendment. I agree. I would love to see power return to the states, which is where it belongs. Then maybe the Senate won't be the toilet that it currently is.

6/14/2005

Roy Moore Is An Absolute Disgrace

Luna's Tunes tipped me off to this article about former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore and his possible political aspirations.
I am a Christian and a conservative who is also from Alabama and I do not like Roy Moore. I don't like the way he has used the Ten Commandments as a springboard to a political career. He was just a local judge in Etowah County, Alabama who had the Ten Commandments on his wall. He could have made a valid argument for keeping it there on the basis that the Commandments are historically a legal document. He didn't though. He went on this populist binge of religiosity and used his showmanship to get elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He didn't stop there. He had to go and pull another publicity stunt and put a monument of the Commandments in the supreme court building. Once again, rather than using the legal document argument, which has merit, he went on another rampage of religiosity. Ironically William Pryor, who was attorney general at the time, was the one who enforced the court order and removed the Ten Commandments monument. You all remember Pryor. He is one of the judges the Democrats recently filibustered because he supposedly put his personal beliefs above the law.
So thanks to his religiosity, Moore has risen from a small town judge to the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, to a best selling author. Speaking as a conservative, and also a Christian, Roy Moore is a disgrace and an embarrassment to both of those terms.

I believe the Ten Commandments should be hung on the wall of a courtroom just like any other legal document. But Roy Moore never made that argument. If he had made that argument, he may have won and retained the right to post the Commandments in his courtroom. But obviously having the Ten Commandments on the wall didn't mean as much to Moore as becoming a demagogue and writing a book, because rather than making that argument, he made a bunch of crazy statements that proved liberals worst fears about us Christians. I know a lot of you out there probably think that Moore is a great guy and a great Christian, but trust me on this folks. I am a Southern Baptist conservative from Alabama and I am telling you that Roy Moore is in it for Roy Moore. I studied these types of southern demagogues in college and I am telling you, this guy is not a conservative. He is nothing but a rabble rousing populist out to make himself famous.