We may disagree about gay marriage, but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are - whether it's here in the United States or, as Hillary (Clinton) mentioned, more extremely in odious laws that are being proposed most recently in Uganda.
I do not exclude this, but I would like to draw your attention to one absolutely key aspect: In line with international law, only the U.N. Security Council can sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other pretext or method which might be used to justify the use of force against an independent sovereign state is inadmissible and can only be interpreted as an aggression.
They say that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a homosexual. Truth be told, we don't love him because of that, but he was a great musician, and we all love his music. So what? I assure you that I work with these people. I sometimes award them with state prizes or decorations for their achievements in various fields. We have absolutely normal relations, and I don't see anything out of the ordinary here.
I appreciate the decision made by Gov. Brewer to veto this legislation. I hope that we can now move on from this controversy and assure the American people that everyone is welcome to live, work and enjoy our beautiful State of Arizona.
Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfill that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others? The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process.
The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.
When the state executes a member of the human family, it declares that person worthless, without possibility of redemption. As Christians, we believe this is a heresy, a denial that each human being is created in God's own image.
It's interesting to me that killing damages the image of God when it's done by a person, but it doesn't damage it when it's done by the state.
Above all, the state of grace is absolutely necessary at the moment of death; without it, salvation and supernatural happiness the beatific vision of God - are impossible.
It is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance.
The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner.
A humane and generous concern for every individual, his health and his fulfillment, will do more to soothe the savage heart than the fear of state-inflicted death, which chiefly serves to remind us how close we remain to the jungle.
Unlike abortion nobody gets hurt when gays marry but it does have deep implications for what kind of society we want to be. Therefore, individual states should decide the question.
It doesn't make any difference if you are in favor of capital punishment or if you are opposed to capital punishment. The fact of the matter is that as a viable penalty, capital punishment does not work at this time and has not worked in the State of Florida for many, many years.
Many states and even many people who are in support of the death penalty question their support of the death penalty because of the imperfection of our courts. Through DNA testing, we don't always get it right, even with that.
With respect to the death penalty, I believe that a majority of the Supreme Court will one day accept that when the state punishes with death, it denies the humanity and dignity of the victim and transgresses the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. That day will be a great day for our country, for it will be a great day for our Constitution.
Our history shows that the death penalty has been unjustly imposed, innocents have been killed by the state, effective rehabilitation has been impaired, judicial administration has suffered. It is the poor, the sick, the ignorant, the powerless, and the hated who are executed.
I know something about killing. I don't like killing. And I don't think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing.
Every ISP is being attacked, maliciously both from in the United States and outside of the United States, by those who want to invade people's privacy. But more importantly they want to take control of computers, they want to hack them, they want to steal information.
When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue.
The United States has a system of taxation by confession
As far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.
Baseball doesn't seem very important on a day like this...When you live in the United States and you think it's the greatest country in the world, you feel somewhat protected and immune. You read about [terrorism] happening in other parts of the world. A day like this makes you rethink. A lot of us really have a false sense of what the world is really like.
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty... that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.
There is but one method of rendering a republican form of government durable, and that is by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the state by means of proper places and modes of education and this can be done effectively only by the aid of the legislature.
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