Heritage Foundation: Gender Politics Force Judge to Fight for Her Job

My_Trusty_GavelOur friends at the Heritage Foundation have highlighted a case unfolding in Wyoming that has a judge fighting for her job–simply because of her traditional views on marriage.

In 2014 Judge Ruth Neely was interviewed about “administrative challenges of the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Wyoming.”

Heritage Foundation writes,

The result of the interview Dec. 5, 2014, was a relatively short newspaper story, but it sparked an investigation of Neely’s fitness for office. A year and a half later, she is asking the Wyoming Supreme Court not to remove her from two separate judgeships—nor to enforce a fine of up to $40,000.

All this without a local citizen filing a complaint against the judge, who is active in her Lutheran church, and without her ever being asked to officiate at a same-sex wedding.

You can read the full story here.

Photo Credit: By Brian Turner (Flickr: My Trusty Gavel) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Federal Officials Stumping for Transgender Agenda in Commencement Addresses

Vanita_GuptaWe have written extensively about government overreach in the areas of education and public health; the Obama Administration is reinterpreting federal laws to force schools to let biological males who claim to be female use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms at school. The administration also is forcing hospitals and doctors to offer “gender transition” services–something that flies in the face of many doctors’ professional and conscientious convictions.

In between all of this, federal officials also have been stumping in favor of gay and transgender activists at school graduations.

The head of the federal Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Vanita Gupta, told New York University School of Law graduates on May 19,

And we see this gap [between what laws guarantee and what people experience] in efforts to deny LGBTI individuals – especially transgender men and women – the respect they deserve and the protection our laws guarantee.  And let me add this – efforts like House Bill 2 in North Carolina [requiring people to use  public restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates] not only violate the laws that govern our nation, but also the values that define us as a people.

Earlier, on May 14, she told University of Minnesota Law School graduates,

Even after the Supreme Court’s landmark gay marriage decision last year in Obergefell v. Hodges that guaranteed all people ‘equal dignity in the eyes of the law,’ we see new efforts to deny LGBTI individuals the respect they deserve and the protection our laws guarantee.  And let me add this – efforts like House Bill 2 in North Carolina [requiring people to use  public restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates] not only violate the laws that govern our nation, but also the values that define us as a people.

On Monday, May 16, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch gave the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, in which she said,

[F]rom Bunker Hill to Appomattox and from Seneca Falls to Selma; from the Emancipation Proclamation to the 19th Amendment and from the civil rights laws of the 1960s to Obergefell v. Hodges [which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide] – we have won these and so many other victories only because people of good will and moral conviction refused to stand aside when there was more to be done.

U.S. Attorney General Lynch’s words effectively equate the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to nullify state marriage laws nationwide with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and Assistant Attorney General Gupta seems to think it is patently un-American to believe men should use the men’s room and women should use the women’s room.

In the eyes of this administration letting people use the restroom of their choice is not some minor issue; it is a civil right. That comes as a surprise to many people, considering the many other problems plaguing the world today, but these officials’ words and actions seem to be clear indicators of the federal government’s priorities.

Victims of “Happiness”

About a year and a half ago our friends at Breakpoint and Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview ran an excellent commentary on the unseen pain behind same-sex marriage.

John Stonestreet writes of one woman whose husband left her for his gay partner, saying,

For instance, USA Today, in its cheerleading for same-sex marriage, ran a photo section on her ex-husband, his partner, and her children without her consent or even notice to her. Darnelle wrote, ‘Commenters exclaimed at how beautiful this gay family was and congratulated my ex-husband and his new partner on the family that they “created” . . .,’ even though, she continued, ‘there is a significant person missing from those pictures: the mother and abandoned wife. That “gay family” could not exist without me.’

Stonestreet continues,

In an essay entitled “We Have No Right to Happiness,” [C.S. Lewis] told the story of two neighbors each of whom had divorced their spouses and then married each other.  Another neighbor, with whom he was discussing the situation, replied ‘they have a right to happiness.’

Lewis noted that this neighbor would not say the same thing of a ruthless businessman who was happy when he made money by means fair or foul. Nor would she say the same thing about an alcoholic who was happy when he drank.

The happiness his neighbor was referring to was a right to ‘sexual happiness,’ which, according to Lewis, meant the freedom to act on our sexual impulses without restraint. And it doesn’t matter if such restraint is good for us or for the society as a whole.

You can read Stonestreet’s entire commentary here or listen to it below.

[audio:http://www.breakpoint.org/images/content/breakpoint/audio/2014/100114_BP.mp3|titles=The Unseen Pain Behind Gay Marriage]