Gen. Jacob Smith inspects the ruins of Balangiga a few weeks after the battle there.
The Bells of Balangiga, war trophies from the Spanish American War, are going back to the Philippines, according to a government press release.
The bells have long been a matter of contention between the United States and the Philippines. The 9th Infantry, which took the bells, maintained that it was ambushed in the locality, where it was garrisoned, and the bells symbolized its defense of itself from a surprise treacherous attack. The Philippines have asserted the battle represented an uprising of the indigenous population against occupation and that the conclusion of the battle featured the killing of villagers without justification. Both versions of the event may be correct in that it was a surprise attack on a unit stationed in the town and, by that point in the war, 1901, it had begun to take on a gruesome character at times.
Whatever the case may be, the bells, from three Catholic Churches, have long been sought to be returned. Two of the bells are at F. E. Warren Air Force Base, which which the 9th Infantry had later been stationed at when it was Ft. D. A. Russell, and a third has been kept in Alaska. It would appear that they're now going to go back to the churches from which they came in the Philippines, almost certainly accompanied by at least some vocal protestations from Wyoming's representation in Congress, I suspect. As the current Wyoming connection with the 9th Infantry, let alone the Philippine Insurrection, is pretty think, it's unlikely that the average Wyomingite, however, will care much. Indeed, while it caused its own controversy, a former head of a veteran's position in the state came out for returning the bells the last time this controversy rolled around a few years ago.
Intersection crowded with campaign signs in Casper. In this case, this grouping only means that the ground belongs to the Department of Transportation.
I've touched on this already, but more this election, than ever before, I'm relying on election signs.
And not the way a person might think.
A man is known by the company he keeps
Aesop
I'm frankly counting people out if their signs appear in common frequency with people I know that I can't vote for. If every time I see a sign for Commissioner X, in association with Gubernatorial candidate Y, and I'm not ever going to vote for Y, I'm not going to vote for X either.
Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.
Proverbs 13:20
That may be unfair. . .well, no its not. If people who are so dedicated enough to put up multiple signs for candidates almost without fail do this, there's something to it.
Normally I'd try to assess each candidate for an office that will be on a ballot individually, while noting that this is actually very difficult to do in Wyoming as you vote for an incredible number of offices down to the local level (this will be the topic of another post, but I really wonder if some of this is antiquated in the modern era, particularly when we're voting for local clerical offices). But this year my task is made easier by the fact that there are candidates whose signs occur so persistently with candidates that I won't vote for, that I don't really need to assess them. The linking can't be accidental.
Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge.
Proverbs 14:7
Now, there are exceptions, I will grant. But they are rare.
Somebody in my neighborhood that I somewhat know to be a dedicated Trump loyalist quixotically has up signs for every Democrat running for anything. But I also know that they're Texans who recently relocated and they pretty much fit the old Southern Democrat mold. I'm completely discounting their views on politics, but it's pretty apparent that they're general feeling is that they back Democrats probably because their great, great, great, grandfather Beauregard T. Succession did prior to his untimely death at the Battle of Glorieta Pass. It's a cultural thing.
That means, in other words, not much at all.
I do not sit with men of
falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites. I hate the assembly of
evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.
Psalm 26:4-5
But, by and large, association really means something.
Do not be deceived: Bad company ruins good morals.
First Corinthians 15:33
I wonder if candidates really realize this? It's really easy, at some point in a race, to convince yourself of your own probable victory and to quite listening to critics. You see this in campaigns all the time. People congratulate you for what you are doing, sincerely or not, and pretty soon you are convinced you will win and can branch out to bask in the glory of the probable victory of the like minded.
Make no friendship
with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn
his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.
Proverbs 22:24-25
Never really realizing that you were in an individual fight, as every candidate is, and if you join your battle to the battle of another, who is running for a larger office perhaps, or just who draws different attention, you may be drawing just as many enemies as friends.
As regards a "fellow-traveller", the question always comes up – How far
will he go? This question cannot be answered in advance, not even
approximately. The solution of it depends, not so much on the personal
qualities of this or that "fellow-traveller", but mainly on the
objective trend of things during the coming decade.
2018 The last in house printed, in Casper, edition of the Casper Star Tribune rolled off the presses, and with it over a century of there being a locally printed newspaper in Casper. The paper continued on, but printed by a contractor in Cheyenne.
On the low readership Monday edition, for August 6, the Tribune put a happy face on the event, starting off with a front page article that noted the following:
The newspaper you are reading was
printed in Cheyenne and transported to Casper early this morning for
delivery around Wyoming. It was printed by Adams Publishing Group, which
publishes the Wyoming Tribune Eagle and a handful of other newspapers
around the region. APG’s German-made Mann Rolland press was installed
about 10 years ago and is arguably the highest quality press in the
region. We are really pleased it is our in-state option.
We
did not make the decision to print in Cheyenne lightly. We value our
workers who staffed the Star-Tribune’s press and mail room for years.
But the reality is print subscriptions have declined, and in response,
more and more newspaper publications are moving toward regional printing
plants. One plant printing many newspapers across a region can offer
higher quality products at lower cost than free-standing newspapers. Our
press is aging, and given the long-term outlook, that option is
unsustainable.
Since
word of the change became public last month, some have wondered whether
the Star-Tribune itself is shutting down. Nothing could be further from
the truth. In fact, with our print circulation and more than 3.1
million page views each month, the Star-Tribune has more readership and
audience than at any time in our 127-year history.
A couple of items.
There's no doubt quite a bit of truth in this article, which goes on from there, but probably the most significant admission is that; "But the reality is print subscriptions have declined, and in response,
more and more newspaper publications are moving toward regional printing
plants."
The classic view of the newspaper press. . . now really a thing of the past. The inky, largely all male, domain of the those who put the papers out every day. I've known a few printers and have been in the old Star Tribune printing room once, which had the atmosphere of Navy enlisted quarters in the old days.
The largest newspaper in the state of Wyoming is, and has been for a long time, the Casper Star Tribune.
I like newspapers. Anyone who stops in here would know that due to the fact that I frequently post old papers here, and I make reference to newspapers here very frequently. I've subscribed to The Casper Star Tribune since I was out on my own.
I come from a family of readers, and that includes newspaper readership. When I was a kid my father subscribed to the Tribune and he picked up the The Rocky Mountain News every day. On Sundays we typically had the Tribune,The Rocky Mountain News (now extinct) and The Denver Post. At one time while I lived in Laramie I subscribed to the Tribune and The Rocky Mountain News. At various points, in addition to the Tribune and The Rocky Mountain News, I've subscribed to The Catholic Register, The Whitehorse Daily Star, and the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. Papers I frequently read in the past, which I didn't subscribe to, included the college journals for Casper College and the University of Wyoming, the Laramie Boomerang (which shows up here a lot in connection with the 1910s) and the Stars and Stripes. When I stay out of town somewhere, I always buy the local paper wherever I am and read it cover to cover. Clearly, I like newspapers.
Indeed, I briefly pondered being a newspaper journalist for the same reason that a lot of others have been in that field. I love writing, and I thought about trying to be an author of books (which I have achieved to a very limited extent). I was writing for my high school journal, the Gusher, and it was interesting and we had a contact with the Tribune. Having said that, I lost that interest quickly (and in fact a speaker who came over from the Tribune helped motivate my feelings in that direction, one of a few so so experiences I've had with newspaper journalists since that time).
So it gives me no pleasure to note that since the first time since The Natrona Tribune started publishing in Casper in 1891 there will not be a locally published paper.
1897 edition of the Natrona Tribune, Casper's first newspaper.
Oh, I know, the Tribune will claim and is claiming that its not in trouble and that its still locally publishing. . . just from Cheyenne.
Bull.
The Casper Herald, one of the Tribune's actually ancestors. The Tribune came about due to the merger of the Casper Star and the Casper Tribune Herald.
The Tribune is publishing from Cheyenne. That much is clearly true. And its decision makes business sense. As its publisher, Dale Bohren, noted in an article in the Tribune, outsourcing the printing to a third party makes business sense. And that third party publisher, Adams Publishing Group, already prints newspapers for the Laramie (Laramie Boomerang), Cheyenne, Rock Springs and Rawlins markets.
Well, okay.
Casper not only had two. . . or more newspapers, even while having a smaller population than it does today, there were other newspapers printed all around the county, such as this one from the now completely disappeared Bessemer.
But any reader of the Tribune would realize that the paper has gone from a substantial daily down to the size of a small town paper over the past two decades. During that time period it was often fairly rocky in appearance and quality, although Bohren, who came from the Casper Journal which was purchased by Lee, which owns the Tribune, puts out a consistently good product. But that product is now declining down to a small town newspaper. A reader of the Tribune, if they weren't familiar with it, wouldn't find it all that much different than The Laramie Boomerang or the Riverton Ranger, quite frankly. It's in trouble.
It claims more readership today than at any time in its history, due to its online subscribers. Well, I have my doubts. Subscribing to the Tribune is really expensive as it has attempted to stay in the black. And advertising, which is the king of newspaper revenues, clearly isn't what it once was in the Trib. I'm not saying that the electronic subscriptions aren't there, but they clearly don't tell the full story. I frankly wonder if electronic subscribers get a reduced price of some sort (in which case maybe I'll consider dropping down to that, even though I like holding the paper in my hands and being able to browse it). It's really questionable at this point whether its worth the price.
One of two newspapers that served Midwest and Edgerton in the 1920s.
Indeed, with the rise in price has also come a drop both in content and in volume. It used to be that subscribers to the Tribune also received Bohren's Casper Journal. No longer. Ironically, at least fairly recently, the Tribune would drop Journals off at the houses of non subscribers in hopes, apparently, that they'd subscribe to something.
Well, publishing a paper in a city that's 150 miles away is not publishing it locally. Oh, I get it, reporters will submit their stories electronically and somewhere in the Trib they'll put the format of the paper together and then get it to Adams. But distance does mean difficulties and that's just not the same. Moreover, getting the Tribune to Casper will mean getting the print edition out in sufficient time to haul the paper 150 miles to Casper, get it out to the distributors, and getting it to your door. Newspapers famously go "to bed" late so that they can be up to date. In order to do that, the Tribune reporter's deadline is going to have to be pretty darned early. One more decline in the paper.
Second Salt Creek journal, also from 1923.
This also means that on bad weather days, and if this year keeps up the way its going right now we can anticipate a bad winter, there just won't be Casper papers in Casper. That's significant for more than one reason. If you are publishing an advertisement, let's say "Big Snow Shovel Sale!", having the paper stuck in Cheyenne isn't going to do you much good. Same thing is true if you are waiting on the fourth publication of that legal notice you need to foreclose on something. . . snowed in that day. . . run it again . . at expense.
Not good, and frankly, potentially fatal to the paper.
And then there's the human cost.
One story the Tribune didn't tell, and that's typical of the Tribune when it reports about itself, is what this means for the 25 full and part time employees of the press room. They're loosing their jobs. People who worked in actually printing the paper have been told that August 5 is their last day.
Newspapers generally are relatively liberal in nature and tend to be, like plaintiff's lawyers, declared champions of the working man. If you start laying off the working man, no matter how solid your economic reasons, your claim is weakened in that regard. And something is going on down at the Trib in this area anyhow. What it is, isn't clear, but the reporters unionized last year for some reason. One reporter I was interviewed by was wearing his union button when he did it. That sends some sort of a message.
The daily news has become so odd, it's nearly impossible to keep up with. I actually had a thread that I was working on that I abandoned as the things noted in it became so rapidly obsolete.
And a lot of that is due to our President.
It's probably clear that while I have my own theories on why Donald Trump was elected which don't really involve the Russians that much, although I'll concede that was certainly an element that played into his victory, we can now safely say, and while I try not to discount the legitimacy of the views that got him elected, I"m not a Trump fan. I basically think he was the gasoline and match that disgruntled rank and file Americans of both parties chose to throw into Washington as they were legitimately disgusted with both parties.
And I also think, on that score, that the Democrats, who have acted like a bunch of spoiled brats, have probably hurt themselves more than the Republican Establishment, which for the most part simply acts befuddled.
And I'll even credit Trump for being right on some things others just don't want to admit. Our NATO partners, for example, really have been paying a lot less for their own defense (originally by American design) than they should. Europe really is losing its culture. Trump is correct on those things.
But this whole thing with Putin?
NPR has it right when they start off an article:
The Big Picture: Trump
Sides With Putin. But Why?
At this stage in the
game, President Trump’s outlook on international questions and Russian
interference in the U.S. election in 2016 is almost predictable. Even so,
many found his comments at his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in
Helsinki on Monday jaw-dropping.
Why indeed?
The Russians are an international menace to democracies and they're messing with western elections in a major way. What they were doing in our election, in my view, is an act of war. Poisoning people in the United Kingdom, if not an act of war, is a criminal act. It's impossible to believe that these things do not come at the direction of the Russian state and a person has to be charitable in the extreme not to believe that Putin knows about them.
So what's wrong with Trump here?
Something sure is.
His statements on this are so bizarre that they lend credence to the accusations against him in this arena, accusations that are becoming more credible each day. If he isn't actually outright favoring Putin as he owes him something, he's discrediting himself enormously by acting like he does. Is this a punch drunk boxer reeling in the ring because he's punchy, or a stumbling poorly acted pro taking a dive? It has the appearance of one or another.
Anyway you look at it, people close to the Administration have to come out at this point and put a stop to this utter nonsense.
And Trump would do well at this point to remember that Nixon's downfall didn't come because he ordered the plumbers to break into the Watergate Hotel. . . he conspired to cover it up.
Heck, with people hanging around stoned, how could they not do this?
DENVER -- Starting in January, the rules surrounding alcohol in Denver’s parks are likely to change.On Wednesday evening, Denver’s Parks and Recreation advisory board passed a recommendation making revisions to the alcohol policy.Currently, people are only allowed to consume 3.2 percent alcohol-by-volume beer in Denver parks.The new rules would allow park patrons to possess and consume full-strength beer in cups or cans. No glass containers, including bottles or growlers, would be allowed.
I read in the paper earlier this week that the Lions Club is giving up sponsoring the local fair and rodeo parade, which its done for a decade. This year is its last year. The parade was held yesterday.
Of course, they drew that last parade in an election year, which must have been a pain. I didn't watch but a few minutes of the parade, and that from an office window, but even at that I could tell it featured all the running politicians.
The reason the Lions are giving the parade up is a simple one. It takes about thirty people to do the parade, they reported. They're down to ten members. As the Tribune reported, in an interview of the club's leader;
We looked at our membership. It takes an awful lot of people to put that
parade on. Most service clubs have declining membership and ours has
declined to the point we didn’t feel we could do it adequately. We
notified the fair board officially in January but they knew it was
coming. On a regular basis, we have about 10 members and it takes at
least 30 people to start that parade, so we’ve taken advantage of our
children and our wives and husbands.
Wow.
I've written about the decline in fraternal organizations before. The Lions aren't really that, however. Their a service organization. My prior posts probably somewhat confused the two and frankly most fraternal organizations have a service element to them. Probably in the modern context they darned near all do. But some organizations are expressly service organizations. The Lions are one of them.
The Lions were founded in 1916 in Chicago. It has 1.4 million members worldwide. So it's still around and still relatively big. But around here, it's not. And that's common.
The Rotary Club, which seems to be doing much better, will be taking over. Rotary International is a little older, having been formed in 1905. I've known quite a few people who have been Rotarians, but I've also known a few Lions. The Lions I've known have been frank over the years that they were worried about the local clubs (there were at least two, maybe there still are) future. At some point, I'd think, you'd tip over a scale where the weight would be really against you.
Which is a shame, but then I myself have never been in a service or fraternal organization and don't really have any interest in joining one either. But that's a feature of my character. I wouldn't have been in one if this was 1968, or 1918. It's just not me. I'm glad its been somebody, however.
And he's not a right wing populist, if that's what Donald Trump is, but a left wing populist.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly as AMLO, is a member of Mexico's brand new National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, MORENA), a left wing party that didn't even exist at the time of the last Mexican presidential election. MORENA doesn't have enough representation in the Mexican legislature to have a majority, so it has entered into a coalition with the left-wing Labor Party and right-wing Social Encounter Party under the name "Juntos Haremos Historia." The fact that MORENA has aligned with two other parties, one from the right, and one from the left, isn't actually surprsiing, but rather indicative of its populist nature.
MORENA is hard to define, and Americans are going to be struggling to do just that. It is Cardenist, socialist, and nationalist in nature. It's not going to be like any party that Americans have had to deal with in Mexico for decades. It will be radical, but that radicalism will be of a form that we'll have a hard time grasping. Some will call it Socialist and even Marxist, others will declare it Fascist or Peronist. It's what it is, and in some ways it will be all of those things and none of them at the same time.
AMLO promises, basically, to end corruption and to champion the poor, fine promises but ones lacking in real detail. Nobody knows really what he'll do, but we do know that he's had to align with populist parties from the right and the left, meaning presumably that his focus will have to be both for the impoverished in a now middle class nation that has a mindset of poverty that doesn't quite reflect the reality, and on ending rampant corruption and crime, which is in fact a giant Mexican problem.
Of course, AMLO, if he's as left wing as he original was, could just make problems worse. Mexico has plenty of its own problems to be sure, but as the PRI has slowly declined its brand of Mexican socialism also has and in fact the economy has enormously improved. Most Mexicans are now in the middle class, even if Mexico's national psychology does not allow that mental concession, for the first time in Mexico's history, a gigantic achievement which free marketers everywhere should be trumpeting. Mass Mexican illegal immigration is now a much reduced problem for the United States and in fact, at least recently, there has been more migration back into Mexico (and even more population transfer in that direction if you include American migration to Mexico, which is quite real) and the big immigration problem now, as we've just noted, stems from Central America, not Mexico. MORENA could really disrupt that economic progress and even send it into retreat.
What can be done about corruption remains to be seen. Quite a lot, perhaps, particularly as the century old grip of the PRI on Mexican politics has now ended, although that grip was loosening and evolving for quite some time. A big factor in corruption anywhere is money and in the Mexican case that money comes, ultimately, from the United States, tied to our illegal drug appetite. That will be difficult in the extreme for AMLO to do anything about, but it would appear that it would at least require an increased police presence in a nation where that's been increasing anyhow. And that's where this could get to be frightening, or not. Mexico generally hasn't handled such things terrible well historically, but then the Mexico of today isn't the one of the past.
Indeed, that's pretty evident as this small revolution was done at the ballot box. We no longer even think of it being done at the point of a gun in Mexico anymore, which at one time is how such things were in fact done.
Should be interesting, anyhow.
Just as learning how a Mexican populist president of a now middle class nation economically tied to the United States deals with an American populist president, and vice versa.
Note: I started this post before the recent retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Wyoming had a judicial appointment system for Court appointments. It's called the "Ohio Model".
The way it works is this. A committee takes in and interviews applicants. It chooses three candidates and sends the names to the Governor. The Governor picks one of the three. And then, when his first term is up, he stands for retention and stands again every so often.
With that being the case, you'd think that this would be a consideration in the Gubernatorial race.
It isn't.
It is never mentioned.
That may be a good thing, really, as it may mean that Wyoming judicial appointments are pretty good as a rule. Every governor has a different style, but the choice for the bench isn't solely up to the governor.
The judges do vary, of course. And some judges are more conservative and some more liberal, but all in all, they're good solid jurists.
And so, this doesn't end up an issue in Wyoming's elections.
I'm not suggesting that this means something on a larger level. I'm just noting it.
Justice Burke has been on the Wyoming Supreme Court since 2005 and has been Chief Justice since 2014. This seems amazing to me as I well recall Justice Burke as a District Court Judge of the 2nd Judicial District and that doesn't seem that long ago. I guess it is.
Justice Burke is not a native Wyomingite, which wouldn't be that remarkable in general except that the legal profession in the state is heavily made up of natives. He came to Wyoming due to his service in the Vietnam War era United States Air Force as he was stationed in Cheyenne's F. E. Warren AFB. After receiving his discharge from the USAF he went to law school
Just Burke has been a good Chief Justice and he'll be missed. He was appointed to the Wyoming Supreme Court by Governor Freudenthal and he is the last justice on the Court who was not appointed by Governor Mead. His departure means that starting in early 2019 all of the Justices on the Wyoming Supreme Court will have been appointed by Governor Mead.
Given that I criticized the Obergefell decision here in depth, some might find it surprising that I haven't gotten around to commenting quicker on this one.
I meant to and in fact I was prepared to really scoriate this opinion, based on early legal analysis of it. But having read it, I'll concede that the Court did a much better job with it than I would have thought.
It's not as if they've solved the problem they created with Obergefell, but Anthony Kennedy's opinion and the concurring opinions go a lot further in that direction, and even in a legally cogent manner, than I would have guessed they would have. Indeed, a characteristic of Kennedy's personality seems to come through in the decision in that he appears to be a bit miffed that people ignored his comments on how the earlier decision wouldn't result in a big social revolution, when in fact it is being used to do just that. It's known that Kennedy gets upset with criticize of his decisions in the popular venue and it seems that he might also get upset by their misuse.
When Justice Kennedy cast his lot with those preforming a judicial coup in Obergefell it was my prediction that his happy prediction that it wouldn't really impact anything other than marriages between homosexuals was absolute and obvious nonsense. That came to be rapidly true, and it made it up to the Supreme Court pretty quickly in the form of cake.
Indeed.
Well, perhaps another line regarding Kennedy's initial writing might be more appropriate.
Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun,
Must separate Constance from the nun -
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
A Palmer too!- no wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye;
I might have known there was but one
Whose look could quell Lord Marmion.
Marmion, Canto 6.
Kennedy's original Obergefell decision was always a judicial mess as it was not grounded in the law and didn't develop it in a sustainable fashion. The dissents pegged what really occurred. A group of aged Ivory Tower jurists, attempting to get ahead of a social trend, did what they though hip and cool, thereby giving themselves the credit for what they thought to be an inevitable social trend anyhow. If they were correct in their prognostication, what they really did was to guarantee decades of hostility towards the Supreme Court, which richly deserves it for engaging in a judicial end run, and decades of fighting as Americans do not accept such actions lightly. If they were wrong, they will have created, in the process, misery over misery as people slug it out, outside of their legislatures.
But Kennedy, based upon the original opinion, seemed completely naive to that reality. Now that the first wave has washed up on the shore of the Court, he seems downright irritated that people didn't agree with his view that this didn't impact deeply held religious beliefs and more realistic about what his earlier sloppy opinion meant. So this one is much clearer and, contrary to what the press has indicated about it, it actually decides quite a bit. It may be a limited holding, and indeed it is under its own terms, but it's not as limited as it might seem.
The decision is, I'd note, also exactly legally correct in its procedure, so the pundits that are amazed by that, are basically ignorant of the law.
Okay, let's start there.
Procedurally, the appellant here was found to be in violation of a Colorado law by a commission that's delegated to tell the residents of the Mile High Weedy State what they can and cannot think. Okay, that's not really what the commission does, but the formation of commissions of this type always tend towards that result. The reason for that was that appellant, Masterpiece Cake Shop, declined to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding party based on their moral convictions. Interestingly, and often missed in this public discussion of this matter, Colorado did not recognize homosexual marriages at the time and the service was to be preformed in Massachusetts, not Colorado. Colorado did protect, however, the right civil rights of homosexuals against discrimination, which most people most places are generally in favor of.
To anyone who really ponders it, no matter what their views may be, the fact that a bakery can get in trouble for such things is really problematic. This isn't really the same as refusing to sit African Americans at a diner counter and almost everyone knows that. Obergefell overturned millennia of human practice and is arguably not very much appreciated by a huge section of the public who views the decision as contrary to faith, morals and nature. Moreover, the propaganda of the proponents of the decision leading up to it was that they would never use such a thing to argue for absolute social acceptance at all levels, which they now are. This would nearly require a complete subversion of religious beliefs by all traditional religions and beliefs, which no other earlier civil rights act did. And it also opens the door to any number of really odd results. Can a Christian couple demand that a Jewish delicatessen that caters for weddings provide a pork roast on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) for a Christian wedding? Can a Jewish family demand that a Muslim bakery bake a cake for a Bar Mitzvah? Can a homosexual couple demand that a Russian Orthodox Priest perform a wedding for them in spite of the blistering clear objection to that in that (and other) faiths? These are all questions that were promised to be absurd prior to Obergefell but which are all on the table now.
And this came directly into play in Masterpiece Cake Shop as the Colorado commission dismissed and even insulted the owners religious objections, which extended not only to wedding cakes but Halloween cakes and the like.
So the Court held that the appellants religious objections were not seriously and sufficiently considered and remanded the decision. Yes, it's limited, but that was the right decision and its a pretty serious dope slap to the commission. Now, what we'll see what the commission does but experience shows they usually whine and cry and send back a bad decision again, so we'll likely see this come back up.
But the direction seems clear. In the decision the Court stated:
Whatever the confluence of
speech and free exercise principles might be in some cases, the Colorado Civil
Rights Commission’s consideration of this case was inconsistent with the
State’s obligation of religious neutrality.
So it sent it back for reconsideration, with directions that religious considerations be taken into account.
The Court is correct in all of that and it tried to make it plain, without giving too much direction in one way or another, that it wasn't trying to wad freedom of religion and conscience up in a ball and toss it out. In the decision it noted:
Our society has come to the
recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social
outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth. For that reason the laws and the
Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of
their civil rights. The exercise of their freedom on terms equal to others must
be given great weight and respect by the courts. At the same time, the
religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and
in some instances protected forms of expression.
Of course the Court is treading a fine line between truth and fiction here in that while society came to that recognition, it didn't in the form in which the Supreme Court placed public in Obergefell. That statement by Kennedy, however, is a pretty clear indication of what he thought he was doing, which wasn't really what he did. He went immediately on to haul in part of the decision in the next paragraph as a preventative to what was, and likely is, going to be another challenge sooner or later:
When it comes to weddings,
it can be assumed that a member of the clergy who objects to gay marriage on
moral and religious grounds could not be compelled to perform the ceremony
without denial of his or her right to the free exercise of religion. This
refusal would be well understood in our constitutional order as an exercise of
religion, an exercise that gay persons could recognize and accept without
serious diminishment to their own dignity and worth. Yet if that exception were
not confined, then a long list of persons who provide goods and services for
marriages and weddings might refuse to do so for gay persons, thus resulting in
a community-wide stigma inconsistent with the history and dynamics of civil
rights laws that ensure equal access to goods, services, and public
accommodations.
Yep, that's the problem already.
So we know that clergy cannot be compelled to perform homosexual marriages and we know that objections on conscience are valid. We don't know what the limits to those objections are, and it would have been impossible for the Court to delineate them. This means we're now going to have piles and piles of appellate decisions attempting to define that, and decades of fighting over it, unless Obergefell is overturned in a near term. I know that's regarded as impossible, but we're not living in conventional political times. For example, on the day I'm writing this a massive tariff is being imposed on China due to a campaign promise and that would have been regarded as a political impossibility in any other administration.
Anyhow, assuming that its not reversed soon, it's going to be argued and defined a lot. Kennedy didn't seem to realize that in his earlier decision, but now does, and he's now reminding us that the promise of the Constitution is that religious views will be respected. That was the promise too of the backers of homosexual unions, but they seem to have forgotten that.
Kennedy, it might be noted, is rumored to be considering retirement. Rumors to that affect are constant nearly every term, as he's quite elderly. But this time I'd credit them a little more than usual. Kennedy has been the "swing vote" due to his oatmeal mush like view of the law, which is no doubt not how he views it. He's sensitive to his opinions being criticized and here he has a real problem. It seems that he never intended Obergefell to be read the way it now is being read at the street level and he must surely be aware that out in the commissions and trial courts of the land its in for revolutionary application. We've hardly even begun to see the commencement of the abuse of a decision that could only be used in that fashion. Kennedy, due to his age, is at the point in life in which he's on death's door. Whoever replaces him will swing the Court to the right or the left. The right of the Court, in spite of criticism to the contrary is much more likely to try to keep Kennedy's decision in place in the form in which he envisioned it. The left won't, and instead will take it and run with it until there's a public reaction or societal reformation. If Kennedy left now, ironically, his replacement is more likely to uphold his envision than if that replacement is put on the Court by a Democratic President.
O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!
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