Skip to main content

All of a sudden the Tenth Amendment is now our friend...

... when the State of Massachusetts uses it to challenge the Defense of Marriage Act:

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley (pictured) filed a 32-page lawsuit Wednesday against the U.S. government, seeking federal marriage benefits for 16,000 legally-wed gay and lesbian couples. At issue is the constitutionality of Section 3 the Defense of Marriage Act, recently notoriously defended by the Department of Justice.

The suit states that DOMA, termed "overreaching and discriminatory," interferes with the state's "sovereign authority to define and regulate marriage."

"We view all married persons equally," Coakley said at a press conference today.

The basis for the suit is the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Section 8 of the Constitution. Along with the United States itself, defendants include the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs.


But when the issue is Montana challenging Federal firearms regulations or Dave Burris posting on States using the 10th to combat Federal power grabs, the Tenth Amendment is a vehicle for promoting political violence--at least according to some of our local commentators.

So for the sake of intellectual consistency, I suppose that jason should now denounce the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for appealing to the Bill of Rights to limit Federal instrusions on the ability of the States to define and regulate marriage.

Oh. Oops. I just used the words jason and intellectual in the same sentence.

Sorry.

At any rate: good luck to Massachusetts. Given the fact that President Obama's Justice Department felt compelled to compare same-sex marriage to incest and to go to court to claim that DOMA doesn't infringe on anybody's civil rights, there's not likely to be much sympathy for you in the White House.

Comments

tom said…
And while we're on the topic of the 10th Amendment, why are State Senator Bushweller and Reps Mitchell, Carson, Hudson, Lavelle & Ramone trying to collaborate with the Feds on the REAL ID Act when we should be doing something like this instead?
Hube said…
Oh. Oops. I just used the words jason and intellectual in the same sentence.

Your biggest faux pas to date, Steve! ;-)
tom said…
I so wish I'd been paying attention back in April when the fool calling itself "REGULATE" in this comment removed all doubt by plucking a single word out of its literal and historical context and spewing nonsense about its "meaning".

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?