Gay Felons' Relationships Equal To Marriage, Rules Federal Judge

Let me set the scene. A pair of homosexual drug dealers, Roberts & Mangini, were convicted, jailed and then paroled.

One of the conditions of their probation was that they can't associate with other felons, including each other (this rule is known as Standard Condition No. 9). They sued, with the help of the (of course!) ACLU, on the grounds that they were spouses:

The rules for enforcing Standard Condition No. 9, it turns out, include a blanket exception that allows a convicted felon on probation to associate with another convicted felon if they are spouses or blood relatives. Mangini and Roberts claimed this unfairly discriminated against them, violating their rights to "due process" and equal protection of the law under the Fifth Amendment.

"They considered, and still consider, themselves to be spouses," [U.S. District Judge Marvin] Katz explained in his July 31 opinion. "Defendants were in every way a family."

The judge pointed out that the two men took in Roberts' niece as a foster child; and at one point in his opinion, he called them the niece's "two fathers."
...

Katz now swung for the fences. Citing Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision which absurdly held that the Constitution prohibits states from banning same-sex sodomy, he declared: "The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right to intimate association."

Because of this, he argued, probation rules must treat two unmarried men who claim an "intimate association" just as if they were a married couple or a brother and a sister. "The Probation Office has violated defendants' Fifth Amendment right to equal protection by refusing to grant defendants permission to associate with each other, while maintaining a policy of granting such permission to similarly situated individuals in other kinds of family relationships (i.e., siblings, parent and child, and spouses)," he said. [Emphasis added.]

So a pair of convicted drug dealers sodomizing each other deserve the same respect for their relationship as I and my wife raising our children to be good citizens?

This judge obviously started with the ruling he wanted to make, and then searched for the laws he could cite to justify it. I wonder what other interesting rulings he's made?

While we're not paying attention, the courts are marching on in the movement to elevate every sort of "alternative" relationship to the same status as real marriage. Or else to drag marriage down to the degraded level of those other relationships.

While we worry about Iraq, what will the President do to stop the courts' concerted efforts to destroy traditional marriage? What will the presidential candidates do to preserve the traditional family as the basic building block of our society?

This is why we need an amendment to the Constitution protecting traditional marriage, and overturning Lawrence v. Texas. But we'll never live to see it.

I continue to believe that the only hope for America, and it's a slim hope, is that what we used to call "decent people" will raise their kids with their outdated, countercultural standards of decency, while the libertines will continue to come together in barren, contraceptive, abortive and homosexual relationships. Our grandchildren should sufficiently outnumber theirs that they'll be able to set things to right without too much difficulty.

Maybe some of us will live to see that.