Second Amendment survives; Alito on child rapists

The Second Amendment of the Constitution – which protects your right to defend yourself and your family through the force of arms – barely

survived today, as the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that individual Americans have the right own guns for personal use.

“The most natural reading of ‘keep Arms’ in the Second Amendment is to ‘have weapons.’

“The term was applied, then as now, to weapons that were not specifically designed for military use and were not employed in a military capacity.” (Note: this crushes the misguided perception that the possession of arms is to be reserved for the National Guard or other military units.)

“Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guaranteed the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.”

By the time activist federal judge Lynn Winmill and the notorious 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals finished their work of finding ways to overturn the work of Idaho legislators who were trying to protect parental rights and unborn children, Idaho taxpayers have been stuck with a $466,000 tab to fund the ACLU.

Idaho legislators have repeatedly been frustrated by the collusion of the ACLU and sympathetic judges in their efforts to ensure that no teenage girl in Idaho

makes a decision to kill her unborn baby without the involvement of her parents.

Judges not only have smacked down the legislature, they have ordered the citizens of Idaho to reimburse the ACLU for the expense it has incurred trying to keep parents completely in the dark about the life-changing decisions their daughters make.

After three tries, the Idaho legislature, under Sen. Russ Fulcher’s able sponsorship, finally got a bill into law in 2007 that not even the ACLU will try to challenge, a law which requires a minor girl to get parental consent before terminating a pregnancy.

According to LifeNews, a recent study conducted by Dr. Michael New revealed that parental involvement laws produced a dramatic 50% reduction in the number of abortions among minors between 1985 and 1999. When an Idaho parental consent law was in force for about four years early in this decade, teenage abortions declined by about 30%.

But after yesterday’s ruling, the ACLU will now have an additional $66,000 to make mischief elsewhere, all on your dime.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, prohibiting the execution of those who violently rape young children, has stirred justifiable national outrage. Even Sen. Obama, a long-time critic of the death penalty, couldn’t find a way to justify the Court’s decision.

Details of the crime make the Court’s ruling even more incomprehensible. (Warning: this paragraph and the next contain extremely disturbing content.) The victim of this violent rape, the stepdaughter of the perpetrator, was just eight years old at the time. She was found by police responders wrapped in a bloody blanket, bleeding profusely from the vaginal area. An expert in pediatric forensic medicine testified that the girl’s injuries were the most severe he had ever seen. A laceration to the left wall of this poor girl’s

vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, which caused her rectum to protrude into her vagina. Her entire perineum was torn from the posterior fourchette (a band of skin near the opening of the vagina) to the anus. Extensive emergency surgery was required.

Immediately after the rape, which took place around 6 a.m., alarmed by the copious amount of blood, the rapist spent an hour on the phone calling colleagues for advice about how to get blood out of a white carpet. When his efforts failed, he then called a carpet cleaning service at about 7:37 a.m. requesting urgent assistance. He claimed the bleeding had occurred because his daughter had “just become a young lady.” He did not call 911 until almost 9 a.m., by which time his stepdaughter had been bleeding for almost three hours.

In the penalty phase of the trial, another victim, a relative of the perpetrator’s ex-wife, came forward and testified that the rapist had sexually abused her repeatedly when she too was just eight years old, including intercourse on one occasion.

Yet Justice Kennedy and his liberal colleagues, who would fancy themselves the paragons of sympathy and compassion for the downtrodden, overturned the rapist’s death penalty. What’s worse, they barely pretended to be doing so on constitutional grounds.

As Justice Alito’s dissent makes clear, they justified setting aside the death sentence in this case on two grounds, neither of which has anything to do with the Constitution or the rule of law. The first was a “national consensus” that the death penalty is not an acceptable form of punishment for the rape of a child. They obviously did not consult with you or me or the vast majority of

decent Americans who think death would be too good for a man who would do such things to a child. I would suggest that this “national consensus” is a figment of their hyperactive imagination.

Alito himself points out that there is simply no evidence that this consensus exists. In fact, he points out, the trend is actually the other way, as the number of states who have passed death penalty laws for child rape have been increasing in recent years.

Their second reason for overturning the sentence, as Alito points out, is that it is inconsistent with what they call “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” But what do “evolving standards of decency” have to do with the plain meaning of the Constitution and the responsibility of judges to fairly apply the law? Nothing. And how in the world does this decision mark any kind of “progress?”

Alito correctly observes that when the Court consults “evolving standards of decency,” they have departed from constitutional jurisprudence altogether. He writes that the Court’s application of the Constitution should be determined by the standards that prevailed when the 8^th Amendment was adopted, “not the norms that currently prevail.”

As Alito says, “[T]he Court has provided no coherent explanation for today’s decision,” and adds that every bit of its ruling depended on arguments that were “not pertinent” or “irrelevant” to the case at hand.

The majority argued that murder represents a greater degree of moral depravity than child rape. Anyone reading the description of the crime above would have to agree with Alito when he says, “I have little doubt that, in the eyes of ordinary Americans, the very worst child rapists – predators who seek out and inflict serious physical and emotional injury on defenseless young children – are the epitome of moral depravity.”

The bottom line here is that this unbelievable ruling puts the issue of judicial nominations at the top of the list of concerns for the pro-family community when it comes to the presidential election. The next president is likely to appoint at least three judges to the bench. The American people simply cannot take the chance that our next president will appoint more legal disasters like Anthony Kennedy to the highest court in the land.

MASSACHUSETTS LAWMAKER VOWS TO ‘RIP APART’ CHILD RAPE VICTIMS AT TRIAL

As if the above section is not enough to stir you to pledge to do what is in your power to protect innocent young children, a lawmaker in Massachusetts, debating against a version of “Jessica’s Law,” vowed that he, as a defense attorney, would “rip apart” child rape victims when they took the stand to testify about what had been done to them.

“Jessica’s Law” mandates a minimum 25-year sentence for the perpetrator of

a rape against a child under the age of twelve.

Democrat James Fagan, the chairman of the House ethics committee for the Massachusetts legislator, said of young victims, “I’m gonna rip them apart. I’m going to make sure that the rest of their life is ruined, that when they’re 8 years old, they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody.” (You may watch his floor debate here on YouTube.)

Mark Lunsford, for whose 9-year-old daughter Jessica’s Law is named (Jessica was kidnapped, raped, and buried alive in a trash bag by a sex offender in 2005), said, “Why doesn’t he figure out a way to defend that child and put these kind of people away instead of trying to figure ways for defense attorneys to get around Jessica’s Law?” A good question indeed.

If you would like to share your observations respectfully but directly with Rep. Fagan, you may reach him here:

We will certainly hear again during next year’s Idaho legislature that we must expand day care regulation to smaller and smaller day care operations, all for the safety of children. That might make some sense if there was any evidence that the cumbersome procedures involved actually guaranteed safer

environments for kids.

But as this story makes clear, having a state license cannot guarantee the safety of your child in a day care center.

According to prosecutors, the licensed operator of a Buhl, Idaho day care center broke the leg of a 3-month-old boy in her care, and prosecutors suspect that she may have harmed another infant as well.

She was stripped of her operating license, but not before the damage had been done. Perhaps we should leave the evaluation of prospective day care options to parents rather than requiring the state to certify them, which turns out to be no guarantee at all and may serve only to give parents a false sense of security.

If you value the work of the IVA in representing our values, please consider a gift to our work. You may do so here. Together we can make Idaho the friendliest place in the world to raise a family! Thank you!

Ø Good news: Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal yesterday signed a bill which authorizes the castration of sex offenders, and said he was “especially glad” to do so. The bill gives the court the option of chemical castration on a first conviction for a number of sex crimes, including

forcible rape and the molestation of a child under the age of 13, and requires it on a second conviction. The bill also allows a court to order physical castration instead of chemical castration. Chemical castration requires repeated injections, while physical castration obviously is permanent. Castration reduces recidivism to about two percent, and should be something Idaho lawmakers consider as we deal with a burgeoning sex offender population. Said Jindal, “I want to send the message loud and clear – to the Supreme Court of the United States and beyond – make no mistake about it, if anyone wants to molest children and commit sexual assaults on kids they should not do so here in Louisiana ... We will not rest until justice is won and we have fully punished those who harm them.” (Jindal condemns Supreme Court, signs castration bill)

Ø The ACLU is up to its old tricks, desperately fearful that some people somewhere might be exercising their right to the free exercise of religion. Now it’s going after the practice of prayer before lunches at the Naval Academy, which has been a tradition at the school since it was founded in 1845. No one, of course, is required to participate in the chaplain’s prayer, but the ACLU can’t even stand the thought of voluntary prayer in public institutions, even though the First Amendment forbids the federal government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. (ACLU Might File Suit To End Lunch Prayer - washingtonpost.com)

Ø More good news: As many as one-third of the Anglican bishops around the globe are planning to boycott the denomination’s once-in-a-decade Lambeth Conference over the church’s radical departure from biblical teaching on homosexuality. The boycotters include som

e leading clergymen from the West, who are rightly unhappy that American bishops who support the ordination of homosexuals and gay marriage have been invited to the conference. Said a prominent English bishop, “Those who have gone against church teaching should not attend representative Anglican gatherings.” The vast majority of Anglican bishops around the world, especially in Africa where most Anglicans live, still adhere to biblical standards on human sexuality. Said the leader of the movement, the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, “We must rescue what is left of the church from the error of the apostates. We will not abdicate our God-given responsibility and simply acquiesce to destructive modern cultural and political dictates.” (Bishops Plan to Shun A Key Conference)

Ø Islam and religious liberty are simply incompatible. Further proof comes from Algeria (99% Muslim), where two men are on trial for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity and having the effrontery to seek to persuade others to do the same. They’ve also been charged with the crime of praying in a building that had not been granted a religious permit. For sharing their faith with Muslim friends, they can go to prison for five years and be fined $15,570. (Christians on Trial in Algeria for Spreading Faith - washingtonpost.com)

Ø From the campaign trail: Sen. Obama is certainly not shy about showing his unqualified support for the radical homosexual agenda. He is sending his wife to tomorrow night’s Gay and Lesbian Leadership

Gala at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, where she will be the keynote speaker. And the blogosphere is alive with the possibility that the birth certificate Sen. Obama has posted on his “Fight the Smears” website may not be authentic, as it is missing both the seal of the State of Hawaii and the appropriate signature at the bottom. The Director of Communications for the State of Hawaii Department of Health says, “In the State of Hawaii all certified copies of certificates of live birth have the embossed seal and registrar signature on the back of the document.” The certificate posted on Obama’s website is at best an uncertified copy of his birth certificate, and the certificate number has been blacked, making it impossible to trace. A comparison of Obama’s posted certificate may be compared with an authentic certificate at the following link: israelinsider: politics: Faked certificate suggests that Obama may not be "natural born" US citizen (Washington Times - Inside the Beltway)

Ø The Democratic National Convention, trying to be “the greenest convention in the history of the planet,” is insisting on fanny packs, for their 15,000 volunteers, made of organic cotton by unionized labor in the USA. (Unfortunately, the logos would use petroleum-based ink.) Problem: they don’t exist, nor do organic baseball cap

s. And they’re having trouble coming up with biodegradable balloons. Volunteers – 900 of them - will grope through every bag of trash to make sure garbage is not mistakenly put in the wrong bin, which might include compostable utensils (which are shipped, by the way, from Asia on fuel-guzzling cargo ships). No fried food will be allowed, and 70% of all meals must consist of ingredients that are organic or locally grown. Good corporate citizen Coors will donate biofuels made from beer waste for the convention’s vehicles. Says Denver’s mayor, “It’s the new patriotism.” The head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute suggests helpfully that the DNC could really shrink its footprint by holding a virtual-reality convention. “Just have everyone stay at home with their laptops, sitting in their pajamas, interacting through their avatars.” (The Greenest Show on Earth: Democrats Gear Up for Denver - WSJ.com) (hat tip: Sharon Fischer)