There's been a ton of talk about a race that is contested all the way to the convention, perhaps resulting in some sort of brokered deal to get a new candidate. Sean Trende (see here, here and here) has your must-read summaries of what makes such a convention possible, why it's still unlikely and what the risks would be.

Color me skeptical, for reasons that overlap to a good extent with Trende's. First, any sort of brokering will be done by and through the party machinery - the very folks who are already behind Romney, and would be the last ones to abandon him to a deal with Santorum or Newt. Second, while Santorum and Newt may have plenty of experience counting noses in Congress, a scramble for uncommitted delegates is likely to come down to the kind of horse-trading where money is the decisive advantage - and again, that means Romney (alternatively, power would rest with current officeholders, few of whom have backed Santorum or Newt). Third, any establishment figure who is open to a draft and would be a semi-credible candidate is likely someone who is already publicly behind Romney (eg, Chris Christie) or at least privately more favorable to him than to Santorum or Newt. Fourth, a candidate chosen so late in the game is bound to be unprepared, undervetted, not blessed by any choice of the voters, and in need of a ton of fence-mending with people who spent the whole spring and summer behind another candidate. I can't see it happen.

For similar reasons, I don't expect anybody else to get into the race now. The people who bowed out did so for various of their own reasons, and are unlikely to want to reconsider if it still means jumping in against Romney's well-oiled attack machine. It's not possible for a late entrant to get on enough ballots to get past 50% of the delegates, so we go back to the list above of reasons why Romney would win at a contested convention. There's no time to build a new organization and new fundraising base in time to get in the race, unless the new entrant inherited one already in existence. And the not-Romney voting bloc, large as it is, would need to be convinced that a late entrant isn't yet another ruse to allow Mitt to win on a divide-and-conquer strategy.

But there remains one and only one way, however unlikely, that this whole dynamic could change: if Romney drops out. Which he's naturally not inclined to do, after running almost continuously for six years. But would his view change if a significant bloc of his support came to him and said it was time to back a new entrant - if his supporters concluded either that Romney couldn't stop Santorum or would be too damaged goods to mount a serious challenge to Obama? I think it might, just as the view of someone like Christie might change if he was released from his endorsement of Romney and begged to enter to stop Santorum (who Christie clearly views as a disaster for the party). Even without the ability to win 50% of the delegates, a credible new entrant who started reeling off wins in the remaining contested states would be able to build an argument that the grassroots and the establishment have finally found a candidate they can agree on, creating a much stronger position to squeeze Santorum and Newt to get on board.

(I've used Christie as the most obvious candidate, but he's not the only possible one among figures who can more plausibly bridge the gap between the various factions of the party but who chose not to run)

Is this a likely outcome? Probably not, even if Romney loses Michigan (it might have been more likely if he'd been blown out there, but that won't happen). But it's at least still a plausible path, and in my view the last plausible path to any outcome other than Romney or Santorum (or, far less likely, Newt) winning this thing the traditional way.

Transcript:

I want to make two -- I want to make two quick point, John.

The first is there is a legitimate question about the power of the government to impose on religion activities which any religion opposes. That's legitimate.

(APPLAUSE)

KING: Sure is.

GINGRICH: But I just want to point out, you did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide. OK? So let's be clear here.

(APPLAUSE)

GINGRICH: If we're going to have a debate about who the extremist is on these issues, it is President Obama who, as a state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion. It is not the Republicans.

Moe Lane deals with the BAIPA issue. Newt is, for various legitimate reasons, almost certainly not going to be the nominee (in 2012, or ever), but he's put on a clinic this campaign season on some of the crucial things Republicans have to do in debates, speeches and interviews, and one of those is his willingness to put out in the open the extent to which lines of questioning to Republicans and Democrats are asymmetrical and unstated assumptions are shared between the Democrats and the media. Newt's approach should be studied by every future GOP campaign.

After Newt, Romney gave a halfway decent answer about religious conscience (albeit one that, characteristically, elided areas of agreement between his own record and Obama's on this issue). Then Santorum took the bait and started into a digression on the importance of the family, which is a winning issue for him in general but not in the context of this particular question. Finally, Santorum brought the point back close to where the answer should have started:

And you know what? Here's the difference.

The left gets all upset. "Oh, look at him talking about these things." You know, here's the difference between me and the left, and they don't get this. Just because I'm talking about it doesn't mean I want a government program to fix it.

That's what they do. That's not what we do.

As it happens, Santorum is also not the ideal messenger on this point, because he pretty quickly segued into explaining how that is what he did with funding for abstinence education - try to counter a bad liberal program by adding a good conservative program on top of it. I'm sympathetic to the impulse that led Bush-era Republicans to pursue this course, but its time has passed. Newt, by contrast, tried to put things in the proper context and remind people why that time has passed:

I want to go a step further, because this makes a point that Ron Paul has been making for a generation and that people need to take very seriously.

When you have government as the central provider of services, you inevitably move towards tyranny, because the government has the power of force.

(APPLAUSE)

You inevitably -- and I think this is true whether it's Romneycare or Obamacare or any other government centralized system -- you inevitably move towards the coercion of the state and the state saying, "If you don't do what we, the politicians, have defined, you will be punished either financially or you will be punished in some other way like going to jail."

And that's why we are, I think, at an enormous crossroads in this country. And I think the fact is, for almost all of us who have been at this for any length of time, we're now looking at an abyss that forces you to change what you may once have thought -- and I suspect all four of us are much more worried today about the power of the state than we would have been -- with the possible exception of Congressman Paul -- than we would have been at any point in the last 25 years.

As he so often does, Newt captured the actual rationale of why a lot of people in the party - voters and elected officials alike - are more skeptical today of the kinds of things that litter the records of even people like Newt and Santorum who have solid conservative instincts and principles. It's among the causes of radicalization on spending and regulation I detailed in my original essay on the Establishment on the Right.

Speaking of lessons that Republicans can draw from Newt, I would highly recommend this one: you have to campaign on three levels, Principle, Policy and Results. That is, first you explain your ideas and principles and how they differ from your opponent; then, you explain how your policies would differ; and only then do you bring home (by some combination of data and anecdote) how the record of your policies is good and the record of the other guy's is bad. Romney, in particular, tends to skip ahead to the third step a lot (blasting Obama's jobs record) or at least skip one of the first two steps, either failing to communicate conservative principles or stating them in general terms without bothering to detail how his own proposals would put those principles in practice in ways that differ from Obama. This is one reason why Romney tends to get in trouble discussing things like the stimulus, the auto bailouts and the unemployment rate when he is confronted with the contrary arguments about Obama's results; he hasn't tied his arguments into a coherent critique but is just assuming the voters already agree with his assessment that the stuff Obama has done isn't working. As a result, Romney's not very effective in persuading people who may be on the fence.

So, how should a Republican presidential candidate have answered that question? Like this:

If you're asking me what I personally believe about birth control, that's a private issue and it's none of anybody's business. People have different moral views about birth control, and they can make their own individual choices in private. It's a free country.

But if you're asking me if the federal government should be involved in contraception, my answer is simple. Barack Obama says it should - he's the one who wants the federal government to stick its nose into birth control. I say it shouldn't - you want it, you get it yourself. Tell President Obama that he should repeal the new federal rules, because birth control is none of the federal government's business.

Even people who don't agree with social conservatives on moral issues and aren't especially interested in religious liberty can understand the appeal of freedom and the downsides of having the federal government insert itself into these issues. If Republicans can't carry a simple message like that, we shouldn't be in this business.

This Klan manifesto from 1923 - see Points 6-8 - seems positively restrained by comparison:

Politics ain't beanbag, and Twitter is often not a place for the most thought-out opinions. But by any stretch, this is far over the line to simple hatemongering. It may not surprise us, but it should still offend us. And it should offend and embarrass Democratic officials that this is a loud voice in their coalition.

It may seem unfair to ask public officials to anticipate that stoking the fires of anti-Catholicism will be seized upon by extremists like Waldman, but they can certainly denounce it - unless it's precisely what they aim to accomplish. There is a long and dolorous history of anti-Catholicism in this country. The Know-Nothings' anti-Catholicism and hatred of new Catholic immigrants were intertwined. Then House Speaker Blaine sponsored the anti-Catholic 1875 Blaine Amendment to the Constitution (defeated in the Senate but enacted in many states and still used as a sword by the public school teachers' unions to this day) and lost the 1884 presidential election when he stood by as one of his surrogates branded the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion". The Klan was the leading voice against the Church in the 1920s, and as late as 1960, John F. Kennedy was forced to defend his faith against conspiratorial charges of papal control of the federal government. Catholicism has been the faith of many waves of immigrants to this country and strivers for upward social mobility - Irish and Italians and Poles, Filipinos and Hatians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans. There have always been those who find our faith threatening and seek to control it.

And the Catholic Church has been in the Democrats' crosshairs in this election season, moreso than in any election since at least 1960. It's not hard to see why. The four remaining GOP presidential candidates include Rick Santorum, an outspokenly traditional Catholic who has faced questioning on such uncontroversial Catholic beliefs as the existence of Satan, and Newt Gingrich, a late-in-life Catholic convert. Catholics are prominent and rising in GOP ranks, including John Boehner, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush (a convert), Bob McDonnell, Pat Toomey, Rudy Giuliani, Kelly Ayotte, Susan Collins, John Hoeven, Sam Brownback, Tom Corbett, Susanna Martinez, and Luis Fortuno. The six Catholics on the Supreme Court include all five Republican appointees: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito. (The sixth is the first Hispanic Justice, Sonia Sotomayor).

The Obama Administration has played wedge-issue politics against the Church for reasons of both policy and politics, most recently with the rule, enacted by the Department of Health and Human Services, requiring Catholic institutions to provide health care plans including coverage of contraception, in violation of the Church's own position - a rule condemned by all 180 Catholic Bishops and scores of Catholic institutions, but which Democrats gleefully predict will be an electoral asset against the GOP precisely because defending the Church's religious freedom is a point of principle on which neither the GOP nor the Church can bend. In Washington State, Democrats are pressing even further, to require all health plans to cover abortions. These moves are all about taking away the Church's freedom, in its capacity as an employer, to follow its own conscience, and thus eliminating one of the last major institutions in this country not beholden to government. And the DSCC is using the confrontation in fundraising emails:

Will no one rid the Obama Administration of these meddlesome priests? The harder the Administration pushes the Church for political and financial gain and to achieve government dominance over social issues, the more the excitable followers of the Administration work themselves into lathers of Catholic-bashing. This is as good a time as any for Democrats to admit that this tactic has gone too far. (It's a recurring issue - Evangelical Christians and Mormons have come in for the same treatment before and will again).

Catholics are a majority in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania and over 40% of the population of in Massachusetts; Catholics are the largest religious denomination in 33 states, and in particular the predominant faith of Latinos in this country. We deserve to know that our elected leaders, regardless of party, will not encourage Waldman's sort of bigotry. Catholic politicians like Bob Casey, Joe Biden, Patty Murray, Jack Reed, Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin - or politicians like Elizabeth Warren who are seeking the votes of Catholic voters - should think long and hard about associating themselves with Daily Kos as long as Waldman is part of it. But moreso, they have an obligation not to encourage the extremist bigots in their midsts.

The Ninth Circuit panel majority reassures the reader that the distinction between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage "is currently a matter of great debate in our nation, and an issue over which people of good will may disagree, sometimes strongly." Yet, like Judge Walker, the majority determined that no person of good will could have any rational reason for voting for Proposition 8. I detailed at greater length the flaws in Judge Walker's original decision back in 2010; let's hit the high points of why the case against Prop 8 is so intellectually shoddy.

Tradition for Me, Not For Thee

The core problem with the Ninth Circuit panel's analysis, as with that of Judge Walker, is its inconsistent treatment of the role of tradition and culture. When it comes to finding that same-sex couples have been injured by being deprived of the use of the term "marriage," the court waxes eloquent on the cultural status of the institution:

All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of 'marriage,' which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships.

+++

[W]e emphasize the extraordinary significance of the official designation of 'marriage.' That designation is important because 'marriage' is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults...The word 'marriage' is singular in connoting "a harmony in living," "a bilateral loyalty," and "a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred." Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 486 (1965).

+++

We need consider only the many ways in which we encounter the word 'marriage' in our daily lives and understand it, consciously or not, to convey a sense of significance. We are regularly given forms to complete that ask us whether we are "single" or "married." Newspapers run announcements of births, deaths, and marriages. We are excited to see someone ask, "Will you marry me?", whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see "Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?". Groucho Marx's one-liner, "Marriage is a wonderful institution ... but who wants to live in an institution?" would lack its punch if the word 'marriage' were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare's "A young man married is a man that’s marr'd," Lincoln's "Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory," and Sinatra's "A man doesn't know what happiness is until he's married. By then it's too late." We see tropes like "marrying for love" versus "marrying for money" played out again and again in our films and literature because of the recognized importance and permanence of the marriage relationship. Had Marilyn Monroe's film been called How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire, it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different. The name "marriage' signifies the unique recognition that society gives to harmonious, loyal, enduring, and intimate relationships.

+++

The incidents of marriage, standing alone, do not...convey the same governmental and societal recognition as does the designation of 'marriage' itself. We do not celebrate when two people merge their bank accounts; we celebrate when a couple marries. The designation of 'marriage' is the status that we recognize. It is the principal manner in which the State attaches respect and dignity to the highest form of a committed relationship and to the individuals who have entered into it.

All of this is unobjectionable - it accords with the view that the term "marriage" has value that comes from a longstanding social and cultural tradition, stretching back in fact much further even than Shakespeare. As Justice Holmes famously said, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Human experience gives meaning to words, or else we could not have a language that is commonly understood. The full quotation from the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion in Griswold - including the portion not quoted by the Perry panel majority - makes precisely this point in finding that rights arising from marriage are derived from the institution's age and traditional role and importance in society, and not from mere judicial syllogism:

Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights -- older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.

But that whole history - and each and every cultural references cited by Judge Reinhardt - is a history of opposite-sex marriage. The long, hard work of establishing the meaning and value of marriage - earning that social and cultural "respect and dignity" that raises marriage to the level of a commitment "intimate to the degree of being sacred" in the eyes of society, from literature to film to church to law - has been done by uncounted millions of opposite-sex married couples over thousands and thousands of years. What the Perry plaintiffs want is to free ride on that effort, to be granted the social respect earned by a distinct relationship - and have the government enforce that by redefining the very language. The issue is not at all one of "live and let live," but a demand for "state legitimization and societal recognition" enforced by the courts. Yet somehow, in ruling on that issue, the Perry panel majority puts the weight of such considerations on only one side of the scale.

Tradition, history, culture, social recognition: these things were good enough, not only for Justice Douglas in 1965, but for the Ninth Circuit panel majority itself in its own discussion of the reasons why the term "marriage" matters and has value - yet they suddenly become a thing that could have been given no rational weight when determining whether the state may continue to use the same word to mean the same thing it has meant throughout history. This cannot possibly be defended as law or logic.

If the term "marriage" is a thing of sufficient social and cultural value to give rise to a constitutional injury, then the source of that social and cultural value must be considered a rational basis for continuing to use the word to have the same meaning. It is no equal protection of the laws to say that the Perry plaintiffs may legitimately consider social and cultural status important, yet 7 million California voters may not.

The Birds and the Bees

Declaring opposite-sex and same-sex marriage to be identical also ignores the basic fundamental biological distinction between the sexes: it takes a man and a woman to make a baby. There is - as I have explained at much greater length here and here - an entirely rational basis for distinguishing as a class between opposite-sex and same-sex couples by virtue of the relationship between opposite-sex relations and the bearing and begetting of children. The Ninth Circuit majority waves this consideration away on the grounds that Prop 8 did not directly affect the right or ability of either type of couple to have or raise children. And admittedly, California law's expansive domestic partnership and palimony laws have long failed to give much in the way of privileged legal status to traditional marriage. But again, the Perry panel majority fails to consider the common-sense point that maintaining some of the social and cultural respect unique to marriage (the very thing the panel majority just got done trumpeting in significance) is the very least thing the state can do to preserve the status of an institution that is so vital to raising the next generation.

Its relationship to having children is the aspect of marriage in which the state has the most obvious interest, and which justifies any state involvement at all. The state has a compelling - to the point of being existential - interest in encouraging the birth of children. This is especially true in a world of declining birth rates and an entitlement state whose demographic premises are rapidly eroding (and no American state is in as dire fiscal straits as California). Statistically speaking, opposite-sex couples produce nearly all the world's children. Same-sex couples, even with the aid of modern technology, are highly unlikely to reproduce at even a replacement level. Disparities between the likelihood of the two groups to produce children are backed up by current Census data. Encouraging opposite-sex marriage in ways and to an extent different from same-sex couplings is an entirely rational way of pursuing this goal, and this is so even without conducting a more intrusive examination of whether particular couples of one type or another are willing or able to have children (or even know if they are, at the time they marry).

The state also has a compelling interest in encouraging opposite-sex couples to marry, precisely because unmarried opposite-sex couples may have children, and because of the superiority of raising children in a married rather than unmarried home (a point backed not only by common experience but by virtually all social science research ever) The state has no nearly similar interest in encouraging same-sex couples to do so - the number of gay single parents is vanishingly small and (not to state the obvious) includes essentially no unplanned pregnancies.

Perhaps one may argue that the state can, or should, offer more than (literally) a single word of encouragement for traditional marriage. But nothing in constitutional law requires that the state do every possible thing to achieve a goal in order to show that it has acted for a rational purpose.

Reading Is Fundamental

The plaintiffs in Perry have also argued that they were deprived of the "fundamental right to marry." The court, wisely in my view, steered clear of this argument, which is a dishonest bait-and-switch for much the same reason.

The Constitution mentions no right to marry. The Supreme Court has recognized this right as being "fundamental" for essentially the reasons identified in Griswold - because it is a social institution older than the Bill of Rights itself, and which the Founding Fathers would not have thought to protect in the Bill of Rights solely because they did not anticipate the federal government tampering with it. That is, in fact, why we have a Ninth Amendment ("The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"): to protect against novel intrusions on rights long recognized and respected at common law. Rewriting the definition of "marry" to mean something significantly different from the word's common law meaning would call into question the entire rationale for recognizing the right as fundamentally beyond the reach of the law in the first place. Constitutional law would get a lot more interesting if the ordinary meaning of words can be changed to place desired outcomes beyond the reach of the democratic process.

Here, Sir, The People Rule

We have written constitutions, enforceable by judges, for a reason. The Founding Fathers believed in natural law and natural rights - that is, in the notion that we are endowed by our Creator with certain rights that are inalienable, immune from the proper reach of the law. But they did not write the Constitution to give the judiciary a broad-ranging charter to determine what rights were God-given; they wrote down specific powers granted to particular organs of government and specific rights reserved to the people, and - by Article V - empowered We the People to change the Constitution by supermajority if the People felt that it required revision with the times (something the People have done 27 times so far).

Judicial review to strike down democratic enactments on the grounds that the People have placed certain things beyond the reach of legislation - such as the freedom of speech, free exercise of religion and prohibition on slavery - is essential and legitimate. It is the way in which the rule of popular sovereignty is enforced and enhanced, not degraded.

But when judges seek to decide what is "rational" or "fundamental" without any guidance from the text of the Constitution or the history of its enactment (two things conspicuous by their absence in Perry, as it would be laughable to suggest that the 14th Amendment addresses the definition of marriage or was understood at the time to do so), they are engaging in that open-ended exercise of what amounts to determining the will of God rather than of the People, and doing so without any particular reason to believe that they are more competent to the task than the electorate. The fact that rights are declared to be fundamental or decisions to be irrational on the basis of an avowedly secular set of principles does not make such a system of government meaningfully different in practice from theocracy or any other form of oligarchy, in which some questions are simply off-limits to the consent of the governed, to be interpreted only by a self-selecting elite. In a democracy, there are no such things as questions too important for the voters, only questions about what the voters have placed within and without the current sphere of their authority.

Absent text and history to guide them, what makes two judges (or one, or five) a better determinant of what is rational, or fundamental, than seven million Californians, drawn from all races, religions and walks of life? And why can't those seven million Californians draw on things like experience, tradition, culture, and plain old common sense in making their decisions?

As I've written before, democracy, free markets, tradition and the rule of written law are all valuable for the same reason - they include the largest number of people in the making of decisions. Tradition protects us from the tyranny of small sample sizes, by delivering to us the lessons drawn from experience of prior generations. Tradition is not stasis; it is the gradual accrual of the lessons of trial and error of countless individuals. It changes when new things are proven to work, and old things are found to have become unuseful. In fact, you cannot believe in moral progress of any kind if you do not believe in tradition, only a sort of moral Brownian motion in which nothing learned today has any guarantee against being unlearned tomorrow.

But the myriad individual and social judgments that compose tradition are made by the common man (who is valuable precisely because he is so common), and far less reliable when made by a small and insular number of lawyers. Voters gave us the Bill of Rights; judges gave us Dred Scott. Indeed, if voters' views of same-sex marriage change, as they have in some states, the law will change with them. But if we continue down the path of decisions like Perry, the voters of tomorrow may find little left they are permitted to decide. And that, far more even than the specific policy question at issue, is something worth getting upset about.

In the Territory of Utah the law of the United States passed for the Suppression of polygamy has been energetically and faithfully executed during the past year, with measurably good results. A number of convictions have been secured for unlawful cohabitation, and in some cases pleas of guilty have been entered and a slight punishment imposed, upon a promise by the accused that they would not again offend against the law, nor advise, counsel, aid, or abet in any way its violation by others.

The Utah commissioners express the opinion, based upon such information as they are able to obtain, that but few polygamous marriages have taken place in the Territory during the last year. They further report that while there can not be found upon the registration lists of voters the name of a man actually guilty of polygamy, and while none of that class are holding office, yet at the last election in the Territory all the officers elected, except in one county, were men who, though not actually living in the practice of polygamy, subscribe to the doctrine of polygamous marriages as a divine revelation and a law unto all higher and more binding upon the conscience than any human law, local or national. Thus is the strange spectacle presented of a community protected by a republican form of government, to which they owe allegiance, sustaining by their suffrages a principle and a belief which set at naught that obligation of absolute obedience to the law of the land which lies at the foundation of republican institutions.

The strength, the perpetuity, and the destiny of the nation rest upon our homes, established by the law of God, guarded by parental care, regulated by parental authority, and sanctified by parental love.

These are not the homes of polygamy.

The mothers of our land, who rule the nation as they mold the characters and guide the actions of their sons, live according to God's holy ordinances, and each, secure and happy in the exclusive love of the father of her children, sheds the warm light of true womanhood, unperverted and unpolluted, upon all within her pure and wholesome family circle.

These are not the cheerless, crushed, and unwomanly mothers of polygamy.

The fathers of our families are the best citizens of the Republic. Wife and children are the sources of patriotism, and conjugal and parental affection beget devotion to the country. The man who, undefiled with plural marriage, is surrounded in his single home with his wife and children has a stake in the country which inspires him with respect for its laws and courage for its defense.

These are not the fathers of polygamous families.

There is no feature of this practice or the system which sanctions it which is not opposed to all that is of value in our institutions.

There should be no relaxation in the firm but just execution of the law now in operation, and I should be glad to approve such further discreet legislation as will rid the country of this blot upon its fair fame.

Since the people upholding polygamy in our Territories are reenforced by immigration from other lands, I recommend that a law be passed to prevent the importation of Mormons into the country.