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Well … I suppose that one could say that from the moment that the Roman state began to support the Church in various ways, it was in some sense supporting marriage. In English/British North America, several colonies had state churches from the earliest times. Those churches generally claimed an exclusive right to marry people and insisted that people be married, although some portion of the population either lived outside the area in which limited supplies of ministers exercised their authority or flouted their authority in their actual communities.

A good book on the subject of legal regulation of sex in colonial North America is Goodbeer’s SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN EARLY AMERICA, which I’ve assigned to my students in the fall. It deals not only with marriage, but with other aspects of sex law: laws about sodomy, incest, polygamy, bestiality, etc.

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There’s no ground for the claim that “Douglas wanted slavery in the territories.” What concerned him was that the Federal Government shouldn’t have a position on that issue. He in fact coined the Freeport Doctrine, which contemplated territories’ populations constitutionally excluding slavery.

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Plessy didn’t establish a test, it merely upheld a statute itself setting that guideline.

I don’t think that race discrimination by non-government actors was the target of the 14th Amendment, nor do I think that all varieties of government discrimination were targets of the amendment.

As Tom and I said in WKTC?, the Supreme Court justices who decided Brown didn’t think that the 14th Amendment was meant to address this question either.

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You’re welcome.

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You’re welcome.

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People generally take whichever constitutional position stands to benefit them, or to yield the outcome they prefer, at the moment. Thus, for example, there is a cottage industry of writing books supportive of the bogus Incorporation Doctrine, under the guise of which federal judges have usurped extensive state legislative power. Why? Because they like the results it yields.

The same goes for unlimited legislative power in Congress, which is strongly supported by the AARP, the Chamber of Commerce, et al.

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John,

First, the target of an impeachment proceeding need not be a president: a Supreme Court justice, numerous lower-ranking judges, and several Cabinet officers have been impeached.

As I read the Constitution, the trial is mandatory. Besides that, as the Democrats would stand to gain from having it, I can’t imagine Reid not proceeding.

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I suppose they would, yes, though the issue has never come up.

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Taylor was not a member of the Philadelphia Convention. He was, however, a prominent Virginia Republican, and thus could have been expected to have the ear of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other leading Virginia politicians.

Note that Sen. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut supposedly participated in this conversation too.

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JCD Clark’s THE LANGUAGE OF LIBERTY is superb. Here’s my review of it, pubilshed in MODERN AGE when the book was published and recently republished at THE IMAGINATIVE CONSERVATIVE:

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2012/08/millennial-america-liberty.html

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Virginia had one almshouse for the entire colony/state. Thomas Jefferson wrote that he never once saw a Virginian so poor as to be homeless. Able-bodied people worked, while the halt and the lame, the retarded and the blind were supported by the local parish vestry.

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I show in JMMA that this WASN’T a reference to a right of revolution, but an obvious deduction from common principles of the law of treaties and contracts.

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First, there is no “Judeo-Christian tradition.” Judaism rejects the Christian God, and Christianity claims that the Messiah/Christ fulfilled the Hebrew religion in a way that Jews don’t recognize as valid. No one in the USA at the time of the Revolution thought of them as one tradition.

Second, absent Christianity, there could have been no Enlightenment. Pre-Christian Greco-Roman religion elevated youth, wealth, power, and virility and disdained poverty, age, weakness, and infertility. Christianity more or less flipped that on its head. In that light, we can see how the Enlightenment is essentially an offshoot of Christianity–and understand why some believe that weakening the social influence of Christianity means endangering Enlightenment legacies. It also explains why I think that even the revolutionaries who considered themselves members of the Republic of Letters were actually influenced by Christianity.

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“Rights of Englishmen” and “natural rights” are two different categories.

The right of Protestant subjects to keep and bear arms was indeed a historic English right. You can find it in the English Bill of Rights (1689).

There’s very little record in Veit, et al.’s collection of the original documents regarding Congress’s proposal of twelve amendments to the states in 1789 relating to the 2nd Amendment. I’m not aware of any state’s ratification convention saying that it wanted a guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms in order to keep slaves down. Federalists had said during the campaign over ratification of the unamended Constitution that one reason people needn’t fear giving Congress power to raise an army was that every American man had a gun, and so the federal army would never be able to overpower the militias. One infers the 2nd Amendment grew out of this argument.

Of course, the English provision was not about suppressing slave uprisings, as there were no slaves in England in 1689. This whole concept seems a bit fanciful, not to say tendentious.

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Note that the Montgomery bus boycott was successful in pressuring businesses, including but not limited to the bus company, into prodding the politicians to desegregate bus services.

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