Cliff Stearns: “with the Fourth of July celebration next week, it is important to again remember why we fought for independence, namely…”

“with the Fourth of July celebration next week, it is important to again remember why we fought for independence, namely, to free ourselves from foreign domination. I fear that the Supreme Court's appeal to foreign legal practice has headed us down a slippery slope, down which our rapid descent could hurt the values we hold so dear. In fact, to measure the standards of our Constitution by foreign opinion is to believe the false premise that other nations are evolving toward better answers than we are capable of finding ourselves. If we begin thinking that way, surely we will cease to be Americans. In 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, five Supreme Court justices created a new right to sodomy based largely on legal precedents from the European Convention of Human Rights. In his dissenting opinion on this ruling, Justice Scalia agreed with what I am trying to point out in this speech by saying, he ``expects and fears that the court's use of foreign law in the interpretation of our Constitution will continue at an accelerating pace.'' Later, in the 2005 Roper v. Simmons case, the United States Supreme Court found juvenile execution to be unconstitutional. In deliberations, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor claimed that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give the juvenile death penalty official sanction. She allowed international law to override her own decisionmaking abilities.…”