By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On July 19, the House of Representatives passed “the Respect for Marriage Act,” a bill intended to bypass the states and mandate the recognition of same-sex marriage on the federal level.
To achieve that end in states that forbid same-sex marriage, the bill’s text prohibits states “from denying out-of-state marriage licenses and benefits on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin.”
Curiously, 47 Republicans joined with the unanimous Democrats to vote in favor of the bill.
Even more curiously, Catholic Vote reports that 89 Catholic representatives, including 15 Republicans, voted in favor of the bill.
On the legislative side, the bill would overturn the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as the union between a man and a woman. That legislation was overturned by the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, but after the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, advocates of same-sex marriage expect new challenges to Obergefell.
The “Respect for Marriage Act” now goes to the Senate, with its outcome uncertain. But pass or fail, proponents are still frantic.
Why?
Like “abortion,” the word “marriage” does not appear in the Constitution. With that observation, Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs returned the issue of abortion to the states. They fear that the Court will apply the same logic to the issue of marriage.
Nobody expected the Culture of Death to lay down its arms after one Supreme Court decision. This battle will continue, both in the courts and in the culture.
Liz Cheney, Washington’s New Prom Queen
With a primary challenge coming next month, folks are asking, “What’s with Liz Cheney, anyway?”
She’s playing junkyard dog when it comes to Donald Trump. But he’s very popular in Wyoming, the state Cheney represents in Congress.
So what’s going on?
Liz Cheney is playing the loyal daughter of her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney engineered all of the major decisions of the Bush-Cheney administration. And Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 represented a thorough repudiation of that legacy.
Dick Cheney goes way back. He was secretary of Defense when George H.W. Bush launched “Desert Storm” thirty years ago. Under George W. Bush, he engineered the “War on Terror” abroad and the campaign to spy on private American citizens at home.
The Bush-Cheney wars continued long after Saddam was gone, and their growing unpopularity handed the Congress to the Democrats in 2006 and the White House to Obama in 2008.
The Wanderer opposed Bush’s “War on Terror” from its inception. Not only did he refuse to ask Congress for a Declaration of War, he also embraced a Manichaean approach that he never completely outgrew.
“Americans do not yet have the distance of history, but our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil,” he told the Congress on September 14, 2001.
Well, by 2016, Americans recognized that mission as a false god.
Bush might have been “such a good Christian” in the view of millions of Evangelical voters, but his wars brought failure abroad and massive growth of government and control by government here at home.
Equally important, as Pope St. John Paul II had warned in March 2003, Bush’s wars were destined to achieve what 1,200 years of Islam had failed to do: wreak disaster on Christianity in the Middle East, and virtually to eradicate it in many areas.
And Dick Cheney was in the lead. He and his skilled lawyer were in charge of one of the invasions of American citizens’ privacy rights in American history.
“Under Dick Cheney, the office of the Vice President has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak,” wrote Bruce Fein at the time. “In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists.”
Unfortunately, the list is very long.
Perhaps most importantly, the wars pulled the rug out from under the pro-life movement.
In 2004, this writer and other pro-life advocates met with Karl Rove, who was at the time a key adviser to the Bush-Cheney administration.
“We’ll get to your issues after the election,” he repeatedly assured each of us, as, one by one, we pointed to the weakness of the administration’s advocacy of life.
Well, he never got there. And neither did we.
So the turnaround began, with Ron Paul in 2008 and the Tea Party four years later. But it was Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 that represented the Deplorables’ thoroughgoing repudiation of the elites — among whom the Bushes and the Cheneys were among the most prominent.
With her position on Pelosi’s Star Chamber in the House, Liz Cheney has her chance to get even. And she is acting like the bully that her father was to pull it off.
Ms. Cheney considers her work there is “the single most important thing I have ever done professionally,” she recently told a fawning Jake Tapper on CNN.
Which is to say, Washington, not Wyoming, is Liz Cheney’s first love. Win or lose in her August 16 primary, she’ll never go home again. She will be a rhinestone RINO, and, we predict, she will run against Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries — whether Trump runs or not.
After all, Liz Cheney has no qualities, no principles, no achievements to offer on her own. If her last name were “Jones” she’d still be sitting by the side of the road.
No, Liz Cheney will run on “TRUMP!!!” And the elites will canonize her, flood her with money, and fight over her for prime-time gigs in the Swamp.
Isn’t that what life’s all about?
Leftovers
We recently reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued a “policy memo” mandating that every school in America, public or private, receiving federal food assistance to initiate LGBT rules in every aspect of their operations.
We are pleased to report that on Tuesday, July 26 Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita are leading a coalition of 22 states filed a lawsuit to overturn the regulation in a federal district court in Tennessee.
The case will undoubtedly join other cases challenging federal government mandates that invade the Constitution’s rights of the States and of the People.
While the Biden administration attacks schoolchildren with LGBT mandates, attacks continue on pregnancy centers throughout the country since Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was leaked in May. The number of incidents had reached 78 at the end of June, and the Biden Justice Department has done nothing to stop them.
In fact, Biden administration officials continue to malign the centers.
In 2020, Vanita Gupta, now associate attorney general, was president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. (We recall that the conference, a powerful force in the pro-abortion movement, was built by Ralph Neas, Notre Dame, Class of 1968. Neas is the brilliant lawyer who led the successful battle to defeat the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court 35 years ago.)
In 2020, Gupta called emergency pregnancy centers “fake health-care clinics that lie to, shame, and intentionally mislead women about their reproductive-health-care options to block them from accessing abortion care.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), who introduced a bill in July to expand criminal penalties for attacks on the centers, said last week that Gupta’s remarks are “no surprise” given the Justice Department’s “disregard” for the assaults on pro-life organizations.
“It’s shameful that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice — responsible for enforcing our laws — is ignoring the epidemic of violent attacks against organizations that are just trying to provide health care to women in need,” Hawley told the Washington Free Beacon.
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