Trial Judge: Stop Suing over Every Little Thing

Modern American culture is way too quick to sue and waste years of everyone’s life slogging it out in the sluggish court system.  Sometimes even those who make their living from this system agree.

The trial judge in a recent case in West Virginia, on “what is essentially a boundary dispute” that eventually took at least a year and a half of litigation to resolve:

Government’s Interest in Stopping Nazis > Interest in Validating Couples

Ed Morrissey makes a good point (“Religion: The new Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?”) about the government’s new definition of marriage:  As a country, we allowed Quakers and other religious objectors to opt out of military service, even in World War II.  The protection extends to non-religious objectors as well.  If the government doesn’t force people to act against their principles for national defense and saving the world from Nazis—the most “compelling interest” the government can have—why on earth should it force people to participate (whether by baking cakes, issuing the licenses, or otherwise) in same-sex marriages?

Obergefell Supporters: Decision Was Poorly Reasoned, Will Create Backlash

Two contributors at The Volokh Conspiracy, both of whom support Obergefell’s redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples, nevertheless argue that it was a poor decision that will have unintended consequences.

Ilya Somin: “A great decision on same-sex marriage – but based on dubious reasoning”

Nineteenth-century Americans Knew the Fetus Was a Person

National Review Online has an interesting piece about the legal history of abortion in America.  Apparently there’s a certain liberal narrative that “the true purpose of 19th-century abortion laws was to protect women, not unborn children,” and that there was a “right” to abortion in Anglo-American common law “from 1607 to 1830.”

Apparently this narrative is far from historically accurate, and the liberal lawyers who crafted it were sometimes surprisingly explicit (among themselves) about what they were doing:

Abortion and Suicide

Sudden thought: If “pro-choice” people think we have no right to use the government to force them not to have abortions—privacy, bodily integrity, “keep your laws off my body”, etc.—shouldn’t they be even more opposed to the laws against suicide? If it’s intrusive for the government to claim authority over the woman’s middle parts for nine months, surely it’s even more intrusive to claim authority over her entire body for the rest of her life?