US Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage

[kandrathe]

That's funny, because neither is drug use specifically mentioned in the Constitution, yet look what we have? I feel the explosion of marketed designer drugs really took off once all drugs we're regulated by the FDA and made illegal, and this is why most drugs will never be legal, not to "protect" us, but because money is money folks... but marriage wasn't up against such stark adversity.

Well, technically neither marriage or drug regulations are well laid out in the constitution. The Congress can make laws, which are supposed to withstand constitutional challenges. Roberts dissent was more that over many years a feckless Congress failed to act to create a national marriage equality law. In fact, under Pres. Clinton, we had DOMA, a national marriage inequality law. So we've backed into marriage equality via judicial correction of a bad law ( implying rights from the Fourteenth Amendment’s vague promise that liberty shall not be denied without due process — otherwise known as “substantive due process” ). I actually stand closer to FIT on this, where I don't think it is governments business to approve, or deny the private, civil relationships of adult citizens. Much of the arguments relate to civil transactions which could be clearly spelled out without the assumptions of marriage and "spousal benefits". Such as; beneficiaries - one or many, "next of kin" visiting you in hospital, parental rights, etc. I celebrate the righting of a wrong, but grieve the further empowering of a government with decisions which should not be under State or Federal scrutiny in the first place. Simply put, now same sex couples can be taxed differently based upon their relationship status. Does this make any sense?

RE: MARRIAGE

Roberts’s Obergefell dissent is, at its heart, an attack on the method Justice Anthony Kennedy used to reach the majority’s conclusion that the Constitution forbids states from denying equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. Kennedy held that marriage is a fundamental right, and that this right extends to same-sex couples. Roberts offers a harsh response:

Stripped of its shiny rhetorical gloss, the majority’s argument is that the Due Process Clause gives same-sex couples a fundamental right to marry because it will be good for them and for society. If I were a legislator, I would certainly consider that view as a matter of social policy. But as a judge, I find the majority’s position indefensible as a matter of constitutional law.

This is not a frivolous critique, as the Court’s fundamental rights jurisprudence has long been one of the most rudderless and unbounded areas of the law. As Roberts explains, the Obergefell plaintiffs’ “‘fundamental right’ claim falls into the most sensitive category of constitutional adjudication.” This claim does not rest upon a right that is specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Rather, the plaintiffs argued that marriage discrimination violates “a right implied by the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that ‘liberty’ may not be deprived without ‘due process of law.’”

This method, of implying rights from the Fourteenth Amendment’s vague promise that liberty shall not be denied without due process — otherwise known as “substantive due process” — has a dark history. As I explain in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, conservatives used this doctrine to hobble laws intended to benefit workers in the early twentieth century. The Supreme Court used it to strike down laws establishing a minimum wage, ensuring that laborers would not be overworked, and protecting workers’ right to organize.

(Substantive due process also formed the basis of a decision conservatives love to hate — Roe v. Wade — although, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has explained, a Supreme Court decision abolishing substantive due process would not necessarily mean the end of the right to choose.)

Think Progress -- Chief Justice Roberts’ Marriage Equality Dissent Has A Hidden Message For Conservatives

RE: DRUGS

• The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 -- To protect people from the sale of "adulterated" or "misbranded" foods or drugs
  
• The Harrison Act (1914) -- originally was to track the sale of narcotics, like Opium. Trading and using was still an individual right. In 1915, it was amended to add a tax. By 1921, regulating narcotics was fully in federal law enforcement control.

The true addict, by universally accepted definitions, is totally enslaved to his habit. He will do anything to fend off the illness, marked by physical and emotional agony, that results from abstinence. So long as society will not traffic with him on any terms, he must remain the abject servitor of his vicious nemesis, the peddler. The addict will commit crimes-mostly petty offenses like shoplifting and prostitution-to get the price the peddler asks. He will peddle dope and make new addicts if those are his master's terms. Drugs are a commodity of trifling intrinsic value. All the billions our society has spent enforcing criminal measures against the addict have had the sole practical result of protecting the peddler's market, artificially inflating his prices, and keeping his profits fantastically high. No other nation hounds its addicts as we do, and no other nation faces anything remotely resembling our problem.

My view here is we need to stop arresting users of drugs, and start focusing on the distribution networks of illegal drugs.