The USofA Supreme Court has ruled that concealed weapon carry licenses in any one state are valid in every other state AND that all states must issue them like the good states do. This is really good news as this country has been a hodge-podge of Luddite legislation regarding self-defense tools.
While they didn’t use those words exactly, they did say essentially the same thing. Their ruling, for those who attribute supreme super powers to such things, actually says a marriage license in one state is valid in another – like state issued driver’s licenses and such. Which, obviously, would include CCWs.
Of course in the feely-huggy socialist people’s paradise, warm acceptance of gay rights is just about the opposite of the rights to life, liberty, property and self-defense thereof. The former is to them an obvious manifestation of openness and love. As for the latter, well gosh, violent criminals have a right to a safe working environment, don’t they? And governments will protect you … like Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, Stalin, Hitler and so many others did once their subjects were disarmed.
These opposing sociological issues are going to create a dance that will be fun to watch. Not that the supremes won’t come up with wonderful wizard words and murky logic to pull it off, but they darn-near stuck themselves approving national acceptance of state right to carry permission slips using normal logic as applied by mortals and peasants.
The real truth is that in the country defined by the revolution, articles of confederation and USofA constitution, the states reserved preeminence over the federal government. If the feds attempted to breach the boundaries defined for it in its constitution, the states and the people reserved the rights to ignore or withdraw. In the violent, destructive coup of 1861-1865, the federal government claimed ownership of the states, solidifying its position ever since.
Moreover, the concept that the government of a free country could LICENSE relationships, rights of travel, tools of defense, plying of trades, contracts between individuals and so on, is ridiculous. Yet the people of this country have long grown accustomed to governmental hall passes. So this move against centralized authority is a baby step in the right direction.
The ruling by the supremes on state pre-eminence creates a very interesting discord in the long trail of abuses. Needless to say, there will be gun rights groups bringing this discussion to the front lines in the near future.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court declared Friday that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States.
Gay and lesbian couples already can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The court’s 5-4 ruling means the remaining 14 states, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans on same-sex marriage.
The outcome is the culmination of two decades of Supreme Court litigation over marriage, and gay rights generally.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, just as he did in the court’s previous three major gay rights cases dating back to 1996. It came on the anniversary of two of those earlier decisions.
“No union is more profound than marriage,” Kennedy wrote, joined by the court’s four more liberal justices.
The ruling will not take effect immediately because the court gives the losing side roughly three weeks to ask for reconsideration. But some state officials and county clerks might decide there is little risk in issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The cases before the court involved laws from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Those states have not allowed same-sex couples to marry within their borders and they also have refused to recognize valid marriages from elsewhere.
Just two years ago, the Supreme Court struck down part of the federal anti-gay marriage law that denied a range of government benefits to legally married same-sex couples.
The decision in United States v. Windsor did not address the validity of state marriage bans, but courts across the country, with few exceptions, said its logic compelled them to invalidate state laws that prohibited gay and lesbian couples from marrying.
The number of states allowing same-sex marriage has grown rapidly. As recently as October, just over one-third of the states permitted same-sex marriage.
There are an estimated 390,000 married same-sex couples in the United States, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, which tracks the demographics of gay and lesbian Americans. Another 70,000 couples living in states that do not currently permit them to wed would get married in the next three years, the institute says. Roughly 1 million same-sex couples, married and unmarried, live together in the United States, the institute says.
The Obama administration backed the right of same-sex couples to marry. The Justice Department’s decision to stop defending the federal anti-marriage law in 2011 was an important moment for gay rights and President Barack Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage in 2012.