Archives for June 2013

Several students are demanding a Tennessee community college psychology professor be disciplined for persistently pushing her pro-gay views on her students and even forcing students to identify themselves as in favor of the LGBT agenda in a mandatory project.

The Alliance Defense Fund is representing the students who objected to the classroom tactics of Columbia State Community College Professor Dr. Linda Brunton.  The students say any views opposed to Brunton’s were not welcome and any opposition to the gay agenda was considered to be the thinking of “uneducated bigots” who “attack homosexuals with hate”.  But one assignment in particular triggered the protests.

“She assigned the class to wear rainbow coalition ribbons in support of homosexual behavior for at least a day on campus and wherever they went off campus.  Students then had to write a reaction paper from wearing those ribbons and how they were allegedly discriminated against while wearing the ribbons,” said Alliance Defense Fund attorney David Hacker.  “Several students contacted us, just objecting to this.  It’s a very clear case of a government official, a state college professor, compelling students to speak in a way they disagree with.”

Hacker says it’s fine for teachers to have students consider ideas from different perspectives, but Dr. Brunton clearly crossed the line.

“Colleges and professors can require students to play devil’s advocate in a paper or argue a position in class that they don’t necessarily agree with, as long as it’s an academic exercise,” said Hacker.  “Once the professor here, Ms. Brunton, required the students to advocate a message outside the classroom, that’s compelled speech and it’s clearly unconstitutional.”

Before seeking a legal remedy, the students brought their concerns to Dr. Brunton.  Hacker says those efforts went nowhere.

“She, unfortunately, just brushed aside their concerns and basically described their views as ignorant and uneducated and she said that she hoped the assignment would cause them to change their beliefs,” said Hacker.

“Colleges are supposed to be the marketplace of ideas, not an environment where professors are manipulating students into advancing particular political agendas,” said Hacker.

Alliance Defending Freedom is asking Columbia State Community College to investigate the matter and Hacker says the school has agreed to do so.  He says this sort of compelled speech must be addressed but he says college campuses nationwide are actively promoting the pro-gay movement.

“We’re finding it’s very common.  A few years ago, we represented a student at Missouri State University.  She was in a social work class and the class was assigned a project to write a joint letter to the Missouri State Legislature advocating in favor of same-sex adoption and fostering.  The student objected, said she didn’t want to do that because it went well beyond just an academic exercise.  It was advocating a position to a legislature,” said Hacker.

“The professor turned around and filed ethics charges against her, in fact the worst ethics charges a student can receive at the school and then required her to sign an agreement saying she won’t allow her her personal religious beliefs to get in the way of doing these sorts of assignments.  I mean just a clear violation of her religious liberty, her rights of conscience and her freedom from being compelled to speak in a way that she disagreed with.”

It’s been weeks since Edward Snowden revealed details of the NSA programs that collect phone and internet data on Americans for possible scrutiny.  While Snowden remains in the lam, the Capitol Steps put their perspective on just how much the NSA knows about our daily lives.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Charlie Cooke of National Review cheer a preliminary appeals court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby against the Obamacare contraception mandate.  They also shake their heads as the U.S. Park Police cannot account for more than 1,400 weapons.  And they react to an Oregon community holding a memorial service for dead bumblebees.

Charlie Cooke of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America discuss the good, bad, and crazy! John Boehner says the Senate immigration bill will not be considered in the House, Paul Ryan is poised to be the House version Marco Rubio on immigration and the Obama administration dials back the tough rhetoric on extraditing Edward Snowden.

The Supreme Court had no reason to rule on the merits of the Defense of Marriage Act but the majority opinion lays the groundwork for a sweeping, national legalization of gay marriage in the near future, according to Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed gay marriage advocates a pair of victories.  In addition to dismissing a defense of California’s traditional marriage amendment based on legal standing, it struck down a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutional that allowed federal benefits only for spouses in heterosexual marriages.  That’s because the 1996 federal law recognized a marriage as only the union of one man and one woman.  The court preserved the DOMA provision that allows states to refuse recognizing gay marriages performed in other states.

“Under DOMA, same-sex married couples have their lives burdened, by reason of government decree, in visible and public ways,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion.  “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.”

Kennedy was joined on the opinion by the court’s four liberal justices.

Staver blasts the majority for ruling on the merits at all, saying the case never should have come this far since the Obama administration refused to defend DOMA.  The government, the plaintiff and the lower courts all agreed on the earlier verdict so Staver says this matter never should have reached the Supreme Court.

“The parties all agree that the ruling below is correct.  Therefore, it should never have gone to the court of appeals and certainly the U.S. Supreme Court has no jurisdiction.  This is just an advisory opinion,” said Staver.  “This is unprecedented that the court took this step to actually even decide the merits of the case.

“And then when it decided the merits of the case, it used words such as ‘bigotry’, ‘hostility’ and ‘demeaning’, referring to the equal protection clause but it never did an equal protection analysis,” he said.  “Every equal protection clause analysis has to at least determine several things.  One is the so-called right that you’re after, one that is rooted in history and part of our idea of ordered liberty.  Here they’re asking for the right to same-sex marriage.  Has that been rooted in our history?  Is it part of ordered liberty?  The answer to that is obviously no.  The reason they didn’t address that question is because they would have to have come to an opposite conclusion.  They skipped it.  It’s unbelievable.

“This is just five people that have written a piece of opinion and issued it under the guise of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it has no grounding in the constitutional text or in the history of its previous precedent,” said Staver.

Some defenders of traditional marriage say today’s decisions weren’t a total loss because the court refrained from issuing a nationwide pronouncement in favor of gay marriage.  Staver is not among them.  He sees today’s DOMA ruling as the precursor such a ruling in a future case.

“In the short term, it’s not the blanket same-sex marriage across the country.  That’s something that we actually could have had from this case today.  On the other hand, this is the 1972 contraception for individual cases that ultimately laid the foundation for the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.  This is the groundwork for same-sex marriage that the court laid today.  There’s no question about it,” said Staver.  “The way that they wrote this decision, while it doesn’t put same-sex marriage across the country, they are telegraphing that’s what they want to do.  And they will open up the floodgates of litigation and they are begging for another case to come to the high court.

“This decision crosses the line and the people have to respond or they’re going to be under a ruling oligarchy of five individuals that have untethered themselves.  They’ve cut the line between themselves and the Constitution,” said Staver.

Staver was a strong supporter of Proposition 8 in California, but believes the unusual collaboration of justices in the majority were correct in dismissing the appeal based on standing since California officials refused to defend their own law.

Justices Roberts, Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan rejected the standing of the traditional marriage supporter defending the constitutional amendment.  Justices Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor and Kennedy dissented.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Charlie Cooke of National Review agree that the clear will of the people was ignored in the Supreme Court’s ruling that California’s Proposition 8 can be scrapped because the defenders did not have legal standing.  They differ on whether the court engaged in equal protection or judicial activism in striking down a key provision in the Defense of Marriage Act.  They slam pro-abortion activists for turning a Texas Senate debate into chaos and Texas Republicans for not doing more to get the law passed.  And they shake their heads as Massachusetts elects Ed Markey to the U.S. Senate.

President Obama is vowing to lead the international effort to combat climate change and he is not waiting around for congressional approval of his agenda.  Obama says climate science is settled and he will enact major policy through executive actions that will bypass the scrutiny of lawmakers.

Obama says the planet is clearly warming, makes severe weather events more common and urgent action must be taken.

He rejected skepticism about climate science, saying, ‘We don’t have for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.'”

Reducing “carbon pollution” is at the heart of the Obama plan.  In addition to doubling investments in clean energy technology, the administration will seek to impose tougher emissions standards on conventional, coal-fired power plants.

One of Obama’s climate advisers is even publicly embracing the idea of a “war on coal”.

“The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed,” Harvard University Center for the Environment Director Daniel P. Schrag told The New York Times.

Washington Rep. Doc Hastings is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.  He says this approach from Obama should come as no surprise.

“This administration has pursued a war on coal, with the Stream Buffer rule that has gone through a couple of changes,” said Hastings.  “It would essentially strangle the coal industry.”

Hastings also says further crackdowns on coal production and coal-fueled power plants would be economically devastating.

“These jobs are very good paying jobs.  In a sluggish economy, that’s the last thing we need to do is to take good American jobs away from Americans.  And yet, that seems to be what this administration is doing,” he said.

Obama and his allies blame fossil fuels for threatening the earth’s climate, but Hastings says that position ignores the benefits of using our own resources and fails to consider the clean technologies already put to use in the energy sector.

“Let’s talk about the abundance of coal we have in this country for goodness sake and let’s talk about the technology that we have proven time and again that we can burn our fuels in a cleaner, more environmentally friendly way.  We have proven that over the last half-century and there’s no reason to believe we can’t do it again.  But to simply say we’re not going to burn any coal at all does not make any sense to me at all,” said Hastings.

In addition to lost jobs, Americans in many parts of the country could face much higher energy costs as more and more coal-fired power plants risk closure under tighter environmental regulations.

“There’s no question that they would go up because at the same time that the president is strangling the coal industry, he is attempting de facto to do exactly the same thing with oil and natural gas production, especially on federal lands,” said Hastings, who is among the House Republicans championing the Offshore Energy and Jobs Act, a bill that supporters say would create 1.2 million jobs.

Hastings says the bill is in response to Obama closing access to 85 percent of the areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts that were identified as areas for potential energy exploration.

“What we say in this legislation is that this president and future presidents shall offer leases where they know there are known resources.  What a novel idea, offering leases where you think you can get oil and natural gas,” said Hastings, who says additional domestic production is also a positive step away from dependence upon foreign oil.

The chairman says it is possible that increased exploration could mean another disaster like we saw in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, but he says safety standards make such an event very rare and energy companies have already developed faster, more effective response plans in the event of another crisis.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Charlie Cooke of National Review react to the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act and the predictable responses from the left.  They also slam President Obama for preparing to wage a war on coal with no input from Congress.  And they vent over a Nebraska school forcing a deaf three-year-old to change the sign language gesture for his name because it looks too much like a gun.

As America waits for the final Supreme Court rulings of this session, Utah Sen. Mike Lee is revisiting the landmark Obamacare ruling by the Supreme Court from last June and explaining why Chief Justice John Roberts failed to follow the Constitution in upholding the individual mandate.

Lee is the author the the ebook, “Why John Roberts Was Wrong About Healthcare: A Conservative Critique of the Supreme Court’s Obamacare Decision”.  Lee is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  He is a former assistant U.S. attorney and a former Supreme Court clerk for Justice Samuel Alito.

“I wrote it first and foremost to explain to people that what the court did in that case was to make law, to legislate.  The chief justice rewrote Obamacare in order to save it.  He amended it no just once but twice in order to save it from an otherwise inevitable finding of unconstitutionality and that’s a problem,” said Lee, referring to Chief Justice Roberts ruling that the mandate failed several constitutional tests but survived as a tax, which is within the power of Congress.  Democrats have always insisted that the fee imposed for not complying with the mandate is not a tax.

The majority opinion also altered the Medicaid provisions within the law.

“I can’t think of any other instance in which a court so blatantly rewrote legislation in order to save it.  There have been instances where a court will look the other way, where a court will pay short shrift to this or that aspect of the analysis before it.  But I can’t think of another case where the court has rewritten a statute not just once but twice in order to go to obviously great lengths to avoid a finding that it’s unconstitutional,” said Lee.

Roberts defended his decision by saying a court’s role is to save a statute if there is a way to plausibly claim it’s constitutional.  Lee says that was one of the chief justice’s major mistakes.

“That’s where he went wrong.  It’s true that when courts are reviewing a statute against a constitutional challenge, to the extent that there are ambiguities, to the extent that you can read a provision one way or the other, the court’s supposed to favor any possible reading of the statute that would save it,” said Lee.  “The reading that he adopted was not fairly possible.  It was unambiguous based on the text that what Congress did contravened the Constitution.  And that’s why he messed up.”

Shortly after the 5-4 ruling was handed down last summer, reports surfaced that Roberts originally sided with the three conservative justices and swing vote Anthony Kennedy to find the individual mandate unconstitutional.  Sometime between the oral arguments in March and the final verdict in June, Roberts flipped his vote to uphold Obamacare.

Speculation at the time suggested public pressure from President Obama and other supporters of the law succeeded in convincing Roberts to find a way to uphold Obamacare.

Lee believes that’s largely correct.  He says the construction of the minority opinion demonstrates that it was the majority opinion at one time but Roberts ultimately succumbed to the pressure.

“This change in his vote likely occurred about the same time when I saw a big uptick in the public criticism against Chief Justice Roberts.  It was sort of preemptive criticism from Democrats in the Senate and from the White House counseling him, pleading with him, warning him , insisting that it would be a form of judicial activism if he invalidated a law that was ‘duly enacted by an elected Congress’.  So yeah, it does appear to have had that effect,” said Lee.

Roberts was first nominated to the Supreme Court as a replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the summer of 2005.  When Chief Justice William Rehnquist died just weeks later, Bush shifted the nomination for Roberts to become Chief Justice.  In almost eight years in that role, Lee says Roberts has honored his oath very well but the one exception to that record could not have come on a more important case.

“For the most part, he has been consistent with his oath to uphold the Constitution.  He has been a judicial conservative, what you would call a textualist, someone who tries to read the law based on what it says rather than what he wishes it said,” said Lee.  “This case was an aberraton, not only in its outcome but also in the fact that I’m not sure there’s ever been another case that he’s decided that was as prominent and as far-reaching in its implications as this one.  Nor was there any other case in which there was so much attention paid to him personally related to the outcome of the case.”

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Bob Costa of National Review react to the Supreme Court having little love for affirmative action despite an anticlimactic decision and the very strong denunciation of the practice by Justice Clarence Thomas.  They also decry the Senate sprint to pass the immigration bill and speculate on whether Massachusetts will elect another Republican senator and whether conservatives have much in common with the GOP nominee.