View of Foreign Law Worries Conservatives
by Ed Vitagliano
April 7, 2004
(AgapePress) - The liberal majority on the U.S. Supreme Court appears to be pushing for a staggering shift in the way it makes its decisions, away from a sole reliance on the U.S. Constitution and towards other sources, such as legal thought originating in Europe.
Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute for Concerned Women for America, pointed to this past summer's high court ruling in the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case.
"Justice Anthony Kennedy dismissed the historical overview of sodomy in the United States as written in [the previous Supreme Court decision in] Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), in which the court had upheld Georgia's sodomy law," Knight said. "Instead, Kennedy cited the European Convention on Human Rights, the Wolfenden Report on homosexuality from Great Britain, and the United Nations."
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies that the Lawrence decision foreshadows the Supreme Court's future direction.
"I suspect that over time, we will rely increasingly -- or take notice at least increasingly -- on international and foreign law in resolving domestic issues," she said in an October speech to the group.
Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus said O'Connor's comment violates her official mandate to uphold America's constitution as the sole authority for Supreme Court decisions. He said he believed she should be removed from the bench.
"To me, if she in fact does, as she already has, rely on something other than the Constitution of the United States in making a ruling, she has broken her oath of office, and she should be removed as quickly as possible," he said.
The reliance of the majority opinion in Lawrence on extrinsic legal concepts angered Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote in his dissent that Kennedy's discussion of "foreign views" was "dangerous," because the U.S. Supreme Court "should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans."
One of America's leading constitutional scholars, Ambassador Alan Keyes, also warned against the nation's highest court relying on anything else besides the U.S. Constitution when rendering its opinions.
"What they are telling us is that now that they have become dictators, with everybody saying that what they say is law, they are going to start imposing on us laws that could never be passed by our legislatures and that would not pass muster under our Constitution," he said. "If we continue under this arrangement, we don't have a Constitution anymore."
Ed Vitagliano, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is news editor of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association. This article appeared in the April 2004 issue.
