Mitt Romney Favors Overturning Laws against Sodomy

In January 2002, early in his run for Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney told the extremist homosexual publication Bay Windows that he favored overturning laws criminalizing sodomy. (That Romney would even grant an interview to this publication is telling.) Romney's position on sodomy laws, an issue of morality as well as public health, is clearly not conservative.

Romney answered a questionnaire from Bay Windows, so this was not an off-the-cuff answer:

“19 questions for Mitt Romney” January 1, 2002
Bay Windows asked: “What is your position on each of the following issues? … Repeal of sodomy laws -- ”
Romney answered: “I don’t think government should interfere in the private lives of consenting adults.”

Does Romney consider sodomy laws to concern just what goes on in private? Does Romney also believe that the state has no interest in outlawing other “private” sexual behaviors such as prostitution, incest, bigamy, or polygamy -- if they are between “consenting adults”?

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Texas law that criminalized sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Antonin Scalia recognized in his dissent the far-reaching impact that ruling would have: “Scalia … averred that, State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of [previous ruling] Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices…. The Court has not ruled on statutes prohibiting adult incest, polygamy, adultery, prostitution, and other forms of sexual intimacy between consenting adults. Lawrence may have created a slippery slope for these laws to eventually fall.” (Wikipedia)

Scalia was right. Just months later, the Goodridge ruling in Massachusetts (which said that it was unconstitutional to ban homosexual “marriage”) cited the Lawrence sodomy ruling as precedent.

Not only is decriminalizing sodomy serious as a legal precedent, it also has public health ramifications Romney apparently wishes to ignore. It is established fact that the high-risk behavior of anal intercourse (sodomy) plays a huge role in the spread of AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases.

In Massachusetts, sodomy is still on the books as a "crime against nature":
Ch 272, Section 34: Crime against nature. Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years.

Judge Bork's Unfathomable Endorsement of Romney

Is Judge Robert Bork a flip-flopper, like the fellow he just endorsed? It seems Bork has forgotten his own thinking on judicial tyranny in endorsing Mitt Romney! If there ever was a great and appropriate opportunity for a principled Executive to stand up to judicial activism, the 2003 "homosexual marriage" ruling in Massachusetts was it. But Romney was missing in action. Silent. Hoping no one would notice. (Though as we've pointed out, pundits including Hugh Hewitt, Phyllis Schlafly, and Pat Buchanan noticed at the time ... along with Professor Hadley Arkes. But they -- along with the conservative "intelligentsia" -- seem to have "forgotten" they ever thought these thoughts.)

Here's Romney's web site on Bork's unfathomable endorsement:

"I greatly admired his leadership in Massachusetts in the way that he responded to the activist court's ruling legalizing same-sex 'marriage.' His leadership on the issue has served as a model to the nation on how to respect all of our citizens while respecting the rule of law at the same time."

How old is Bork now? What is the average mandatory retirement age around the country for judges? How could this be the same man who wrote Slouching towards Gomorrah?)

Here's Judge Bork ruminating on judicial tyranny back in November 1996 (the good old days) in First Things magazine. (Thanks to BizzyBlog for digging this up.) --
Only a change in our institutional arrangements can halt the transformation of our society and culture by judges. Decisions of courts might be made subject to modification or reversal by majority vote of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Alternatively, courts might be deprived of the power of constitutional review. Either of those solutions would require a constitutional amendment. Perhaps an elected official will one day simply refuse to comply with a Supreme Court decision.

That suggestion will be regarded as shocking, but it should not be. To the objection that a rejection of a court's authority would be civil disobedience, the answer is that a court that issues orders without authority engages in an equally dangerous form of civil disobedience. The Taney Court that decided Dred Scott might well have decided, if the issue had been presented to it, that the South had a constitutional right to secede. Would Lincoln have been wrong to defy the Court's order and continue the Civil War? Some members of the Supreme Court were edging towards judging the constitutionality of the war in Vietnam. Surely, we do not want the Court to control every major decision and leave only the minutiae for democratic government.

Dr. Satinover Exposes Big Lies

Just came across this interview with Dr. Jeffrey Satinover (from World Magazine, 2005), "From mental disorder to civil-rights cause; Psychiatrist and Princeton law professor traces the advances of the gay-rights agenda in science and the law to a common source: political intimidation." Satinover is a practicing psychiatrist and author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth. He has degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Univ. of Texas Medical School, and has taught civil liberties and constitutional law at Princeton.

This interview summarizes the Big Lies the homosexual movement is using to bowl over legislators, judges, voters, corporations, schools, parents, and of course children. Big Lies:

• homosexual behavior stems from an inborn "sexual orientation" which does not change;
• homosexuality was legitimately removed from the American Psychiatric Association manual of mental disorders;
• homosexuality is a stable, measurable trait that defines a certain class of people, so they can claim "civil rights" based on that trait

(Note that the first and third lie are now being applied even more absurdly to "transgenders" -- and activists are trying to have "gender identity dysphoria" removed from the APA list of mental disorders.)

[Excerpt:] Satinover: The mental-health organizations have submitted briefs to courts at every level, and have profoundly corrupted our understanding of human sexuality tacitly via their general influence. They influence judges' understanding before they become judges so that when a man or woman becomes a judge he is, for all purposes, an ignoramus with respect to homosexuality, full to the brim with sentimental platitudes.

These platitudinous outlooks "feel" deep, but are astoundingly shallow (the concept "sexual orientation" is an example-it is a "stopthought" that won't bear five minutes of serious scrutiny before dissolving into a welter of contradiction). But when a judge is handed an amicus brief that bears at its end a list of say five or 10 well-respected national or state mental-health professional organizations -- he's impressed. Then he starts reading, and it's "The Emperor's New Robes." In learned-sounding terms, he's fed back all the nice-sounding pieties with which he's become familiar and comfortable. He doesn't have to stop and think for a second. He just has to be "nice."

So, over the years, the concept of "sexual orientation" has worked its way into the culture and up the court system to the level of the U.S. Supreme Court and in certain key state Supreme Court cases, especially in the Goodrich [sic; i.e. Goodridge] case in Massachusetts. The key U.S. Supreme Court cases are Romer and Lawrence. Leaving specific variations aside, all three approach homosexuality from the point of view of civil liberties -- a misframing that goes all the way back to Hooker and the history I've mentioned. It has been critical for the mental-health guilds to stand before the courts and say, "You see, your honors, we in particular, who are the very experts of what constitutes a mental disorder, proclaim that sexual orientation should not be discussed as a condition that is problematic and changeable, it is a normal and immutable state of the human being and therefore should be discussed in civil-rights terms, like race." ...

What you're left with are human beings, no different than you or me, who are, of course, sexual beings. Like you and me, their sexuality is broken in a broken world. The notion that "homosexuals" are in effect a "different species" (different genes) is ludicrous beyond belief. There is not the slightest evidence for that as anyone who actually reads the studies (not reports on the studies) knows. Of course as one grows and changes, one "grooves" a pathway that becomes embedded and increasingly difficult to alter. Of course a different innate disposition places one at a different "risk profile" for all sorts of different paths in life. So what else is new? It is also true that people do sometimes want to change, and some do and some don't. This is true of everything. It's also true that few good things in life are easy, and no achievement is ever perfect.

That said, we should remember that homosexuality has risen to the top of the social-policy agenda because of the utter wreck we all have made of family life over the past 50 years. This horror cannot be blamed on anyone but us.

[Read the entire interview . . .]

Another Tyrant Named to Mass. Supreme Judicial Court

Are we surprised? Today, Governor Deval Patrick will announce his choice to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Judicial Court: jurist Margot Botsford, who shares his "liberal positions on controversial social issues such as abortion, the death penalty, and gay marriage, as well as on civil liberties." Botsford's husband, S. Stephen Rosenfeld, served in Michael Dukakis administration and "has been a campaign contributor to Patrick." See "Jurist Botsford seen as SJC pick," Boston Globe (7-26-07). We are told that she has an "intellectual grasp of legal issues."

Botsford is cited for her ruling in a high-profile case on "a controversial runway at Logan International Airport." She has the "intellectual firepower to handle some of the state's most complex cases," says a past president of the American Bar Association. Problem is that abortion and runways are not equivalent. In fact, abortion is quite simple: It's the pre-meditated murder of an innocent human being. Can Botsford handle that?