Pray Away the Precedent
Will sanity prevail at the Supreme Court?
This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the 14th Amendment’s assurance that the children of freed slaves were citizens also means that if an 8-month-pregnant Mexican woman runs across the border and drops a baby, that baby is a citizen, too.
Which brings up the point, let’s hope the dogma doesn’t live loudly within Justice Amy Coney Barrett. That was what the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein said to Barrett during her confirmation hearings, noting that the dogma might not always align with “big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country”—such as, for example, off the top of my head, amendments added to the Constitution after a bloody Civil War to end slavery.
At the time, conservatives accused Feinstein of anti-Christian bigotry, but I thought her remarks were poetic. I’d love to be accused of having the dogma live loudly within me.
On the other hand, if the dogma living within Barrett is not Holy Scripture but the pope’s anti-American pronunciamientos on illegal immigrants, I’ll be on DiFi’s side, even if it was cruel antipapism.
While our laws say that it’s illegal to sneak into our country, uninvited, the pope says—citing Our Lady of Guadalupe—that the laws of the United States must be subordinated to his own florid assertions about the “dignity” of illegals.
The Catholic bishops continued this spirited assault on American democracy by announcing that punishing people for “the mere attempt to immigrate” (illegally) to the U.S. is “immoral,” and, further, that we are “obliged” to let in anyone who wants to come and then support them for the rest of their lives—with generous donations to Catholic Charities, no doubt.
(OK, I know we’re all thinking it, but what exactly is the church’s position on the Export–Import Bank?)
If Barrett rules in favor of our Constitution, and reaches the blindingly obvious conclusion that the post–Civil War amendments’ citizenship clause referred exclusively to recently freed slaves, I vow to stop referring to her as “that papist nut.”
On the other hand, if she goes with the gaseous blathering of a man whose own sovereign territory is protected by 40-foot walls and 135 armed Swiss Guards, then J.D. Vance has to consider becoming a Presbyterian.
MS-NOW’s legal commentators keep claiming that the Supreme Court has never found that anchor babies aren’t citizens. Nor has it ever found that they are. To the contrary, court after court after court has expressly ruled that the 14th Amendment is about freed slaves and freed slaves only.
In what we legal buffs like to call “precedent,” a long string of cases made absolutely clear that the clause refers only to—I quote—“the slave race” (the Slaughterhouse Cases), “persons of the African race” (Ex parte Virginia), “the colored man” (Strauder v. West Virginia), and on and on.
As one Supreme Court decision put it, “no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose” of the Civil War amendments, that “we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
Lawyers talk about the jurisdiction, residency and domicile requirements of the amendment. All true, but the larger point is: We just fought a civil war. What do you think they were talking about? With 600,000 corpses still littering the landscape, the country did not rise up as one and shout, Wait a minute—if a century later, millions of Mexicans run across the border and have babies, damn straight those kids will be citizens!
In other Supreme Court news this week, the court struck down, 8–1, a Colorado law criminalizing “conversion therapy”—i.e., talk therapy that aims to help someone with gay tendencies quell those feelings. Colorado’s position was: We have to offer people who claim to be transgenders complex surgeries and massive doses of hormones, but if a gay wants to talk to someone about not being gay, he must be stopped!
Maybe the New York Times’ Michael Barbaro should write the next part. This star of the Times’ wildly popular “The Daily” podcast apparently converted not because of therapy, but because he fell in love with a girl. So it does happen, and the fact that it does isn’t an insult to gays.
In my experience, the gays angriest about the mere existence of conversion therapy are the ones who most need it. Maybe throw in anger management classes for free.
I’m no expert—I’m an expert on raising children (I have none) which I’m happy to share with any parents out there, before leaving for a cigarette and a glass of wine—but some gays are born gay. They were gay from age 5. They were gay in the womb. They’re the normal gays. Almost all of them are Republicans. (Just as our blacks are better than their blacks, our gays are way better than their gays.)
But there’s another group, who are gay either out of self-protectiveness or for revenge. Just as girls who are molested as children often become highly promiscuous to go through the same motions, but this time, they’re in control, boys who were molested as children sometimes do the same thing.
I personally know several no-longer-gay men who were sexually abused as kids—speaking of the Catholic Church. (That’s not a cheap shot; several were molested by priests.) Upon remembering the abuse, they realized they weren’t gay at all.
Incidentally, I’m not talking about Jesus-freak evangelicals like me. They all happen to be members of the liberal elite.
Then there’s another group of not-really-gay gays who just hate their parents, hate the world and want everyone to suffer, including themselves. Sodomy is their revenge (so I guess you could say they win in the end). It could have been drugs or self-harm. These days, they’re more likely to join antifa or go transgender and commit a mass shooting.
Maybe shrinks can do something for this latter group, like at least stop them from shooting up a school. But the former group is crying out for counseling. They may not even remember that they were molested. (Girls tell everyone about their trauma, boys repress bad memories—as anyone who’s ever met another human being knows.)
Then there are gays like Barbaro who are gay because it’s a good way to meet girls.
I know some normal gays who were sent to conversion therapy by their parents, and guess what? They weren’t angry. They knew it wouldn’t work, but whatever—mom wanted them to go. It didn’t work, and mom was fine.
Warning: This column is illegal in the state of Colorado.
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