SelwynDuke.com

Hillary Clinton Unchained: Gun Ban “Worth Looking at”

By Selwyn Duke

Would Hillary Clinton ban guns in the United States? She apparently supported the idea last Friday, but then supposedly dismissed it three days later. It’s the difference between an on- and off-Teleprompter candidate.

During an October 16 town hall meeting at Keene State College, a questioner asked Clinton if we could follow Australia’s lead and ban handguns. She replied that the nation’s confiscation of firearms was a “good example” and was “worth looking at” when formulating U.S. gun policy. Here's more of her unguarded-moment answer....

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Christians Need Not Apply

By Selwyn Duke

“Haters of humanity” was the charge leveled against Christians in early first-millennium Rome. Thus impugned because they didn’t want to participate in the empire’s pagan festivals, they suffered a plight common to those swimming against their civilization’s tide: persecution. Of course, even in a nation that appreciates freedom of speech and religion, stigmatization of certain groups is inevitable. For as someone once pointed out, stigmas are the corollaries of values: If certain things are to be valued, it follows that their opposites will be devalued. As an example, you cannot value economic freedom highly without devaluing communism. Ergo, stigmas are necessary. And since they’re the flip side of values, what a civilization chooses to value is of utmost importance.

So when Rome valued paganism, it quite naturally devalued Christianity. But this would change. Jesus’ faith was legalized in 313 A.D., and in 380 it would become the empire’s official religion. And it would so infuse and shape the West  that the Occident would become known as Christendom and the United States’ first president would say, “To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.” For, in fact, Christian character was once considered integral to everything.

But a change has been afoot in America. It has been happening quickly, so quickly that few people, even most astute culture warriors, fully appreciate what’s occurring.

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Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis Jailed: Christians Need Not Apply

By Selwyn Duke

“To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.” So said the father of our nation and first American president, George Washington, in the 18^th century. Now, in the 21^st century, the “distinguished character of a Christian” is increasingly considered a disqualification from employment. And Kim Davis (shown), the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who has made news recently, is a case in point.

She has just been jailed for acting in accordance with her Christian faith and refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

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Clerk Defies Unconstitutional Court: Won’t Issue “Marriage” Licenses to Homosexuals

By Selwyn Duke

Few people take moral stands today that could land them in prison, but Kim Davis (shown) is an exception. The Rowan, Kentucky, county clerk has made national news by refusing to issue marriage licenses to anyone — homosexual or straight — since the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional June Obergefell faux-marriage ruling. And now Davis has doubled down, defying courts that have ordered her to resume issuing licenses, even though the Supreme Court has just decided not to support her position. In explaining why she is unbowed, Davis says that she’s acting “under the authority of God.”

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Grassroots Nullification: Ky. Clerk Says “No” to Homosexual “Marriage” Licenses

By Selwyn Duke

The media don't have much to say about “sanctuary cities,” which defy constitutional federal immigration law. But when the matter is a moral-sanctuary locality or bureaucracy that defies the unconstitutional Obergefell faux-marriage ruling, it’s a different story.

And such is the story in Morehead, Kentucky, where a county clerk has responded to the Supreme Court’s constitutional trespass by refusing to issue marriage licenses — to anyone.

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The Sexual-heresy Agenda: The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance That Isn’t

By Selwyn Duke

So-called “LGBT” activists are citing a certain political battle in Houston as being “the next stage of the struggle for full LGBT equality.” But what they advocate truly is a case of some citizens being more equal than others.  

At issue is the euphemistically named “Houston Equal Rights Ordinance” (HERO), which expands the number of “protected” (read: privileged) classes to include homosexuals and the “transgender.” The measure, passed by the Houston City Council in May 2014, “prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity, military status, marital status, religion, disability, national origin, age, familial status, genetic information, sexual orientation or gender identity,” writes the Huffington Post. And while the ordinance’s provisions have been highly controversial — critics say it would allow people to use the opposite sex’s bathrooms — its path to legality has been no less so.

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Pound Sand, Your Honor! More Americans Want States to Ignore Federal Courts

By Selwyn Duke

While dissenting from the recent Supreme Court decision rubber-stamping same-sex “marriage,” Justice Antonin Scalia warned his colleagues that with “each decision ... unabashedly based not on law” the Court moves “one step closer to being reminded of [its] impotence.” And a new poll shows that another such step has in fact been taken, with more Americans supporting the idea that states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings.

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States’ Reaction to Same-sex “Marriage” Ruling: A Little Talk, Even Less Action

By Selwyn Duke

“To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”

So wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case in which the Supreme Court declared Friday that faux marriage must be governmentally recognized throughout the nation. And, tragically, critics might say, virtually all American governors are ensuring that a lack of representation will be a reality.

Reacting to the Court ruling, most of the governors in the 13 states that still had operative faux-marriage bans registered notes of complete capitulation, with the exception of two governors who exhibited varying degrees of mild defiance.

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When the Feds Quash Free Speech with Legal Tyranny

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine you run a website and are ordered by the federal government to divulge personal information on article commenters. Now imagine that the feds also issue a gag order preventing you from revealing what they’re up to.

This is precisely what happened with award-winning libertarian website Reason.com

Site editor Nick Gillespie related his travails just today at the Daily Beast, and it’s a story many will find chilling. His problems began after he blogged about the life sentence handed down to Ross Ulbricht, founder of Dark Web website Silk Road, by a judge named Katherine Forrest. Not surprisingly, agitated Ulbricht defenders took to his piece’s comments section and, par for the Internet course, savaged Forrest. As Gillespie writes, they suggested “that, among other things, she should burn in hell, ‘be taken out back and shot,’ and, in a well-worn Internet homage to the Coen Brothers movie Fargo, be fed ‘feet first’ into a woodchipper. The comments betrayed a naive belief in an afterlife [note, my libertarian friend Gillespie, that people without that ‘naïve’ belief in an afterlife generally have a naïve belief in government] and karma, were grammatically and spelling-challenged, hyperbolic, and… completely within the realm of acceptable Internet discourse, especially for an unmoderated comments section.” Gillespie then continued:

But the U.S. attorney for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York thought differently...

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Supreme Court Rubber Stamps Same-sex “Marriage” — Time for Nullification

By Selwyn Duke

Has our nation traded the rule of law for the rule of lawyers? Critics would say so. And this week’s Supreme Court rulings — most notably Friday's 5-4 decision on faux marriage — could be their Exhibit A.

Friday's ruling, stating that same-sex couples have a “right” to “marry” in all 50 states, went down precisely as critics had predicted — and feared. Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the Court’s four most liberal judges — Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer — in the promotion of faux marriage; he also wrote the majority opinion. Justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito were on the opposing side, with each writing his own dissent.

Scalia was scathing in his denunciation of the majority opinion, calling the Court a “threat to American democracy,” characterizing its opinion as “lacking even a thin veneer of law,” and writing that it “is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.” Chief Justice Roberts, known for his own activist lawyercraft in the Court’s infamous ObamaCare decisions, wrote that the “court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us." Roberts perhaps felt particularly strongly about today’s decision as he read a summary of his dissent from the bench, the first time he has done so during his almost decade-long tenure. And putting matters in no uncertain terms, he said to faux marriage advocates, “By all means celebrate today's decision.... But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it."

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