THE STAND Blog is the place to find personal insights and perspectives from writers who respond to current cultural topics by promoting faith and defending the family.
THE STAND Magazine is AFA’s monthly publication that filters the culture’s endless stream of information through a grid of scriptural truth. It is chock-full of new stories, feature articles, commentaries, and more that encourage Christians to step out in faith and action.
Sign up for a six month free
trial of The Stand Magazine!
Sitting federal judge Richard Posner says there is absolutely no point in judges studying the Constitution. I arf you not. Here's the direct quote: "I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation...the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14th), do not speak to today."
It's already true that law students don't actually study the Constitution itself in law school - they study nothing but court rulings and never grapple directly with the meaning of the text itself. They don't even read the Federalist Papers anymore. The Federalist Papers were written in 1788 by Founders James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to help New Yorkers understand the Constitution which had just been drafted and was before the voters for ratification.
I once heard a lawyer with a leading First Amendment law firm describe a speech he had given to students at one of the nation’s premier law schools. He asked the class how many of them had taken a course on the Constitution during law school. Every hand went up. He then asked them how many of them, in their Constitution class, had read the Federalist Papers, the best source for understanding the Constitution as the Founders intended it to be understood. Not one single hand went up.
Immediately after the lecture, a student came up and said, “Instead of asking us whether we’d read the Federalist Papers in our class on the Constitution, you should have asked whether we’d read the Constitution in our class on the Constitution. You’d have gotten the same result.”
Posner, mind you, is a sitting federal judge who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, but now informs us he thinks the whole thing is irrelevant. Posner is not telling us anything we did not know about the judiciary's contempt for the Constitution - he's simply removing all doubt.
And speaking of judicial ignorance of the Constitution, a federal judge in Mississippi, Carlton Reeves, has shredded what is left of religious freedom and the First Amendment by striking down a conscience-protection provision in Mississippi state law that would protect county clerks like Kim Davis from being thrown in an 8x10 cell for exercising their right to the free exercise of religion.
What this means, bottom line, is that it is no longer the KKK which is squashing civil rights in the South. It’s now renegade, out of control federal judges. It’s Judge Reeves who symbolically is standing in the door of the county clerk’s office with a bullhorn, a firehose, and police dogs, daring Mississippians to exercise their constitutional rights, under penalty of being thrown in jail cells formerly occupied by civil rights workers in the ‘60s.
Bonus bytes
Sign up for a free six-month trial of
The Stand Magazine!
Sign up for free to receive notable blogs delivered to your email weekly.