What shall we do about issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples?

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that states that issue marriage licenses, must also issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. I do not wish the argue the issue here, rather to give a solution to the probems it has caused. 

One problem was that a number of county clerks did not wish to do issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Yet, one can argue that since they are government employees, they should be fired for not doing so. 

And yet doctors, even in county hospitals, are not required to perform abortions if it violates their belief system. 

How can we handle this issue? We want to allow people to follow their beliefs as long as they are peaceful. Otherwise we would be violating the bedrock principle of our country - the right to act according to one's beliefs. 

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The root cause of many such conflicks comes from the fact that government has way overreached in many areas. 

If we got states out of the business of issuing marriage licenses, we wouldn't be arguing about this. If 3 men get married in a church, that is their business since I am not endorsing it personally or through my government. 

But the government has a cetain legitimate role here. If a married couple, or group of individuals get divorced, there may be children to deal with, property issues, and other issues that might only be resolved by the government. 

So a good way to handle this is for states to stop issuing marriage licenses to anyone. Any couple or group could get a minister, or priest, or even a lawyer to witness their marriage. They would sign some marriage documents of their own choosing. There would not be any government employees issuing a marriage license, since there would be no more marriage licenses, which imply a government's endorsement of a marriage.

This couple could go to the county office and register these decuments, along with any other related documents, such as pre-nuptual agreements. The state would just have to stamp 'received' on it, and no one in the government would need to sign or endorse anything.

We'd have to clean up a few things like that have gotten entangled in marriage such as health insurance, the income tax, etc.

But for most of the history of the world, governments were not involved in marriage. Even at the start of the United States marriage licenses were not issued. 

Keep marriage private. Even schools would not have to teach about what the government's current definition of marriage is.

And then we would be not waiting for the Supreme Court to decide what its next definition of marriage will be.

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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas At Dallas. The opinions given here are his alone.

Government Based Upon Natural Law – (Part 2) – Appointment of Supreme Court Justices and Limits on Congressional Authority

Appointment of Justices 

Only Supreme Court Justices who are strict constructionists should be appointed - those who will interpret the Constitution as it is currently amended - not as they would like it to be. 

There are certainly times when many of us have wished that the Constitution would have granted more (or fewer) powers to Congress.  But these powers of Congress should be changed only through the amendment process given in the Constitution and not by judicial fiat.

Powers of Congress

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress – in what areas Congress is able to legislate.  Reading this section shows how few areas in which Congress is able to create legislation.

Most areas have to do with the military.  Some of the other more important areas have to do with the:

-   Ability to lay and collect taxes

-   To coin money, and borrow money

-   To regulate commerce between the States and between foreign countries

-   To establish post offices and postal roads

-   To establish rules for copyrights and patents

Furthermore, a number of the Bill of Rights amendments further restrict Congress and explicitly indicate that Congress only has the powers granted to it by the Constitution:

-   Amendment I forbids Congress from passing laws involving religious expression; freedom of speech; freedom of the press; the right of the people to peaceably assemble; and to petition the government for grievances.

-   Amendment II forbids Congress from passing laws from infringing on the right of the people to own and bear arms.  (This is an aspect of the Natural Right we have to defend ourselves, our families, and or countries).

-   Amendment III starts with, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, house, papers and effects, shall not be violated by Congress, except upon probable cause, which must be determined by a judge".

-   Amendment IX states, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  In other words, people have thousands of rights, and they could not possibly be enumerated in the Constitution.

-   And Amendment X states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the to the States respectively, or to the people.

It is certainly clear that the Constitution explicitly limited the powers of Congress.  Clearly, Congress has far exceeded its Constitutional mandates.  A good Supreme Court would have struck down many of these laws. 

Examples of a Law that Violate the Constitution 

Probably the most devastating laws passed by Congress have to do drug laws.  Look as hard as you wish and you will find that Congress has no authority to pass such laws.  It is not the place to go into it here, but so many of our citizens have been arrested for such laws that it is a disgrace.  For further information see Michelle Alexander’s excellent book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." 

As proof that such law are unconstitutional, when Congress wanted to make alcohol illegal (Prohibition), they knew that they had no authority to do this, and instead proposed a Constitutional amendment, which passed, but was soon overturned.  Nanny-state laws have no place in the United States of America, a country based upon the freedom to live in peace.

Examples of Supreme Court Decisions that Violated the Constitution

A famous example of a Supreme Court decision that violated the Constitution was to not allow students to lead prayer groups before or after school, with students who voluntarily attended. This was a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Another series of Supreme Court decisions that violated the Constitution allowed for the "separate but equal" treatment of whites and “coloreds”.  For instance, in Plessy v. Ferguson the ruling required railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches to provide equal, but separate, accommodations for the white and colored races.  The "separate but equal" doctrine applied to railroad cars and to schools, voting rights, and drinking fountains.  However, there was nothing “equal” about these decisions, and they were finally overturned in Brown vs. The Board of Education.

A final example is a Supreme Court ruling about the Ten Commandments.

Here various Supreme Courts have come up with conflicting decisions about this. First, keep in mind that the Supreme Court building has the Ten Commandments inscribed in stone in at least three places.  How could they then rule that other public institutions could not do so?

It is a mystery to me. Displaying the Ten Commandments in a public building has been done since the founding of our country and was certainly not found unconstitutional then. Why now? After all, the display of any text does not ‘establish a religion’ which meant that the US would have an official religion.

Even displaying the words, God forbid, “We love Satan”, would not be unconstitutional, although I, and many other would not walk into such a building.

Suggestions

A Constitutional amendment should be passed that requires Congress to cite the part of the Constitution that gives them the authority to pass a given law.

A Constitutional amendment should be passed that requires Congress to pass laws that have no more words that there are in the Constitutional itself. This would stop the ridiculous laws such as the Income Tax Laws that have over 2 million words in them. What Congressman or person can read a law with hundreds or thousands of pages, which is not uncommon.

The Constitution should be amended to require a balanced budget.  A government that lives within its means does not pass on its debt to our children, who must pay it off with interest.  Such an amendment would force our legislators to make difficult decisions regarding spending and taxes, and not be able to cut taxes and increase spending just to get more votes.  The amendment should include a provision so that, in an emergency, Congress may spend more than permitted if two-thirds of both Houses vote to do so.

This may be hard to believe, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the national debt will be around $17 trillion for the 2013 fiscal year.  This is quite a bit over $100,000 of debt per family!  Each year we must pay the interest on this debt, and the debt and interest has been growing under every almost every administration since 1969. Additionally, the Constitution should be amended so that any tax or spending increases over and above those due to inflation and population growth must be approved by a 2/3rds vote of both houses of Congress.

The clauses in the Constitution that give Congress the ability to pass laws in certain areas are called the “enumerated powers”.  The 10th Amendment gives the states and the people the ability to pass laws in other areas.

By helping to control federal spending and by reducing deficit spending, the three items above will help to keep Congress and the President from inserting themselves into the lives of the people any more than is necessary. And this means that we the people have more freedom to live our lives and practice our beliefs as we see fit.

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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer and Graduate Adviser in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. The views expressed herein are those of the author. You are welcome to comment upon this blog entry and/or to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.

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Why Liberals Should be Liberal

What is Liberalism, anyway?

We can’t have an edifying discussion about liberals and liberalism without defining these terms, otherwise confusion could result. So I’ve looked up a couple of terms from a number of sources, and here are some definitions that I’ll use:

Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis, "of freedom") is the belief in the importance of individual liberty.

Classical liberalism refers to a political philosophy that is committed to liberalism: to the ideas of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and free markets.

Liberal refers to a person who believes in liberalism.

These definitions fit well together. Liberalism is a belief, and classical liberalism is a political philosophy that reflects this belief. A liberal is a person who believes in liberalism, and would seemingly embrace classical liberalism as a political philosophy. But some people who consider themselves to be liberals do not embrace the political philosophy of classical liberalism. The purpose of this post is to convince them to do so.

Just to be up front about it, using these definitions I am a liberal. And my political philosophy is that of classical liberalism. Today, the term libertarianism is more often used than classical liberalism.

Also, it is very important to note that individual liberty does not mean that a person can do anything he or she wants to do. Rather it means that a person can think what he wants, and can do what he wants as long as this action does not infringe on the individual liberty of others. Usually, this means that actions that cause another person harm are not part of the concept of liberty. To put it another way, liberty implies that actions that affect others be voluntary and informed. So murder, rape, theft, and assault are not voluntary, and so violate liberty. Similarly, fraud, patent violations, and incomplete disclosure of relevant issues are a form of theft, and thus also violate liberty. On the other hand, playing football in the NFL may well cause harm, but players are playing the game voluntarily, so this would not violate liberty.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that many people in America, who call themselves liberal, are, in many ways, not liberal. That is to say, they do not seem to foster individual liberty.

To give some examples, let’s first consider public education. There are two components to public education and it is important to distinguish between them. One component is that government subsidizes education. The other component is the government decides how students are to be educated. These are quite different, but frequently this difference is not made explicit.

Most of us agree that the government should subsidize education.

On the other hand, it seems to me that anyone who calls themselves a liberal would allow this government-subsidy of education to be controlled by the parents of the child getting the education. They are responsible for their children, and should be free to choose whatever school they wish for their child using this subsidy. It would be a substantial violation of liberty for a government to only subsidize the schools that it runs, for then it can teach whatever it feels is best, even if some of what is taught violates the beliefs of the parents.

One can argue that if parents don’t like their public school, they can send their child to a private school. But this is only possible if the parents have enough money to do so. In practice, this means that the well-off get to choose their child’s school, but the not-so-well-off don’t. And since we all pay for schools, all parents should be free to choose how their children get educated.

This is not the place discuss the details as to how this would be implemented, but one thing I would do would be to take all of the education money a state has collected (in Texas this is around $9,000 per student) and give parents an educational voucher worth this amount for each school-aged child they have. They can use this voucher to send their child to any accredited public, private or parochial school of their choice. The freedom to educate one’s child as parents see fit ought to be the foundation of liberalism.

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Another example has to do with government spending. Virtually everyone wants government, and everyone wants government to pass laws that protect individual liberty – the right of individuals to lead their lives as they wish, as long as they allow others to do the same. At the same time, most of us do not want government to pass laws controlling what we think, we our religion should be, where we work, etc. This can be summarized by saying that we wish a limited government that protects our right to be free. And our Constitution (which includes all of the amendments to it) does this by enumerating the powers of Congress and the President.

Unfortunately, the part of the Constitution that limits what Congress can do has received scant attention for decades now. From Social Security to Medicare to laws that prohibit the use of certain drugs, the Constitution does not give Congress the right to implement these. For instance, Social Security was passed in 1935 during FDR’s administration as part of a package we call the “New Deal.” In 1937, the Supreme Court struck down many of the provisions of this package as being unconstitutional, because no authority was given to Congress to pass such laws. FDR threatened to pack the court with more Justices that he would pick, and eventually the Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that the New Deal package was constitutional. If the gentle reader is in doubt about whether these items are permissible according the Constitution, I invite him to read the enumerated powers and see if any of these are there.

This started a trend, which has been increasingly exacerbated over the decades, such that Congress essentially ignores the enumerated powers clause. For instance, you are probably aware that the Constitution was amended to prohibit the sale and use of alcohol, commonly called prohibition. Amending the Constitution was the right thing to do since Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit the use of alcohol. It was a terrible amendment, and was repealed, of course, but at least they didn’t ignore the Constitution. Since then, Congress has passed many laws prohibiting the use of many substances. Do you remember when the Constitution was amended to allow them to do so? Neither do I.

So what are some of the results of these extra-constitutional incursions? For one, it is estimated that Social Security and Medicare are underfunded by around 50 to 70 trillion dollars! This means that the money we are currently paying for them, the FICA taxes, are not enough to cover the promised benefits by this amount. Worse, these entitlement programs, along with the interest on the national debt are expected to consume the entire federal budget within a few decades unless some drastic steps are taken. This would leave no money for the things like defense or anything else that are actually authorized by the Constitution.

Just the interest on the national debt in fiscal year 2009 was about $3,500 per family. In 2010 it is expected to be over $4,000 per family, and will keep growing each year for the foreseeable future.

What does this have to do with liberalism? To be a liberal means to believe in freedom. And you can’t be free without money. With the astounding growth of the federal government, more and more of the money we earn is being taken, and more and more is used just to pay for entitlement programs and interest on the national debt. This means that each year we are less and less free to live as we wish. The solution? Amend the Constitution to require Congress to balance the budget, and to limit its spending to, say, 20% of Gross Domestic Product. It would take time to get to do this, but once we do, we’d start being more prosperous, and thus freer than we have been for a long time.

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A final example of what it would mean to be a liberal has to do with the United States becoming the world’s policemen. We have over 360,000 troops stationed in over 150 countries. I can’t even name 150 countries, but go to one of them and you’ll find American troops. What does this have to do with liberalism? It is not our duty or right to police the world. It creates enmity toward us, and likely doubles the cost of our military. We could bring our troops home, reduce their number, protect our ports and borders, train them in disaster management and emergency medical care, and give them a raise. The result is a more protected country, less enmity from others, and less defense expenditures. We would still have the best military in the world by far, and would likely be safer than we are, since many of our enemies don’t like us in their countries. At a far lesser cost, we could just do intelligence gathering overseas in order to attempt to root out those who intend to harm us. Less cost and a safer country means more freedom for us.

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Those are just a few examples of what we liberals should want. One could fill a 100 gigabyte hard drive with other examples, but mine is only 80 gigabyes.

“Power to the people” is what a true liberal wants. “Power to the government” is what the communists want. And we know where that leads.

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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. You are welcome to comment upon this blog entry and/or to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.

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The Supreme Court Overturns McCain-Feingold Campaign Funding Laws

Background

Congress passed the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002” commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act. In part, it prohibited national political parties from raising or spending funds that violate federal spending limits, even for state and local races or issue discussion.

It also prohibited broadcast ads that name a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or caucus or 60 days of a general election, and prohibited any such ad paid for by a corporation, including non-profit corporations.

And Now…

On January 20, 2010, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down large portions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, especially those aspects of the law that imposed restrictions on corporate spending on political issues. Essentially the Supreme Court said that, “the Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity.”

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, wrote, "Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence."

He also wrote that, “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

So What?

This decision means that the United States has taken a small step back to actually obeying the Constitution. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects free-speech rights, and the McCain-Feingold law blatantly violated it. It shocked me at the time that it even passed Congress and that President Bush “reluctantly” signed it into law. After all, the President and everyone in Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution.

But Didn’t the Law Prevent all those Evil Corporations from Influencing Elections?

That was certainly the intention, and I presume McCain and Feingold and Bush and the members of Congress who voted for it were sincere in their beliefs. Sincere or not, their oath prohibits them from violating the Constitution.

Corporations consist of individuals and those individuals separately or together have free-speech rights that are constitutionally protected. And that should be the end of the argument.

There are a few Subtleties Here

Setting aside the constitutional arguments for a moment, let’s look at the thinking behind such a law. There are two parts to this thinking. The first is that Congress can violate peaceful free speech for the good of the people. How kind of them. They violate our freedoms to protect us, but the main purpose of government is to protect our freedoms. Anyone see a contradiction here?

The second subtlety is a hidden assumption that we citizens are to be treated as children, and thus prevented from being exposed to what corporations have to say about candidates or issues. This is called paternalism. Do you want Congress to be your Daddy? And this is from politicians who are legally allowed to listen to thousands of lobbyists. So politicians can be lobbied but we unenlightened citizens cannot.

The Bottom Line

Adults are responsible for their own lives and decisions, and it is not up to Congress to protect us from what others have to say. Our politicians are not God, and it is time that they stopped treating us as their children.

The only sad part of this is that there were four Justices who wanted to uphold this law. Maybe they were reading a different Constitution than the one I carry around.


Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. You are welcome to comment upon this blog entry and/or to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.