Mark S. Knapp, Federal Way Firearms Lawyer

Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief with a law?  Psalms 94:20. 

A landmark 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case related to "gay rights"  stands for more than gay rights.  According to the Court's majority, in Lawrence v Texas it is now the  Court's goal to meld its interpretations of our U.S. Constitution so as to blend in with foreign precedents determined by courts in other countries so that we can be "one world", according to Justice Breyer.


The Hon. Justice Breyer, appeared on ABC's "This Week" with Sandra Day O' Connor (both Justice Breyer and Justice O' Connor also voted with the majority) and stated as follows:

"Through commerce, through globalization, through the spread of democratic institutions, through immigration to America, it's becoming more and more one world of many different kinds of people.  And how they're going to live together across the world will be the challenge, and whether our Constitution and how it fits into the governing documents of other nations, I think will be a challenge for the next generations."

Emphasis added

It is ironic that this kind of spurious legal doctrine has been perpetrated and perpetuated on our legal system by a majority of the Court in the name of globalism:

"To the extent Bowers relied on values we share with a wider civilization, it should be noted that the reasoning and holding in Bowers have been rejected elsewhere. The European Court of Human Rights has followed not Bowers but its own decision in Dudgeon v. United Kingdom. See P. G. & J. H. v. United Kingdom, App. No. 00044787/98, ¶56 (Eur. Ct. H. R., Sept. 25, 2001); Modinos v. Cyprus, 259 Eur. Ct. H. R. (1993); Norris v. Ireland, 142 Eur. Ct. H. R. (1988). Other nations, too, have taken action consistent with an affirmation of the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct. See Brief for Mary Robinson et al. as Amici Curiae 11—12. The right the petitioners seek in this case has been accepted as an integral part of human freedom in many other countries. There has been no showing that in this country the governmental interest in circumscribing personal choice is somehow more legitimate or urgent."

The Court is seeking to enforce secular orthodoxy on the American people.  The pilgrim fathers came to the New World in order to construct a Scripturally pure community, not to escape from English civil society.  The Calvinist Puritans sought to build a "New Jerusalem" in the New World.  

Most of the Founding Fathers, with the exception of a few deists, were theistic believers in Christ and the Bible.  They had a thorough knowledge of England's common law heritage and the legacy of the English Civil War which they applied when they drafted the new Constitution.  The U.S. Constitution was a compromise reached in 1789 for the purpose of forming a republic while limiting the power of the federal government to establish a national religion or any other centralized power that might overwhelm the common law rights that were handed down to the colonies from England- rights that were referenced in the new U.S. Constitution.

No one in the U.S. or England at the time of the American Revolution intended to go down the road of establishing a Puritan theocracy but our democratic institutions had been developed in a mostly Calvinistic ecclesiastical polity that had flourished since the early 1600s in every colonial village and city church.  My point is that the founders of our Republic expected morality and, yes- even religion- to inform our civil institutions at all levels of government. 

 Congress opened with sermons from fire and brimstone "fundamentalists" every year and preachers construed every question, even questions of economics, based on what the Bible said.  Look at how the Republic has been blessed.  Every American reading this message lives a lifestyle of which previous generations, even in our parents' time, only dreamed.

The idea that our Constitution should give way to popular opinion or internationalist legal doctrine (the European Court of Human Rights or any other foreign legal institutions) is abhorrent to anyone with knowledge of stare decisis (the common law principle that established precedents should not be set aside in favor of some new legal fashion). Justice Scalia was righteously disgusted by the majority's decision in Lawrence and expressed himself in a scathing dissent"

"State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. See ante, at 11 (noting “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex” (emphasis added)). The impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional “morals” offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis challenge. “The law,” it said, “is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.” 478 U.S., at 196."

By the way, to my knowledge, there has never been another decision that cited foreign laws as a basis for the Court violating the principle of stare decisis and overturning one of its prior decisions.  The Court had previously held in Bowers v Hardwick  that consenting same sex individuals had no Constitutionally protected right to engage in sodomy.  The court decided Bowers seventeen years prior to its 2003 reversal of its own opinion).  The concept of importing foreign precedent from other jurisdictions is judicial activism taken to new levels.