Our country’s name, the United States of America, is plural. Yet a more accurate description at this late date would be the Unitary State of America—singular, not plural. Consider some recent events:

• “The Obama administration released a warning Monday telling the nation’s landlords that it may be discriminatory for them to refuse to rent to those with criminal records,” reported the Daily Caller. So if you want to rent out that extra room in your house to make some cash to pay the massive taxes the feds impose, you can’t refuse to lease it to a released killer or rapist. State and local laws on your side have been abolished.

• In March, the U.S. Supreme Court took over Alabama after the state would not recognize a lesbian couple’s adoption of a child in Georgia. Alabama was the last state with a law allowing for this. Only a few decades ago, families, churches and charities, handled adoption with the child placed in a home with the same religion as the parents, especially that of the mother. Then states took over adoptions as part of the expansion of welfare. Now it’s the feds that decide everything.

• The Obama regime is attacking North Carolina because it continues to protect its wives and daughters from being raped by men in bathrooms, what the New York Times calls “bias.” The rag’s online headline is a little different, but its April 2 headline in the print edition read, “North Carolina May Risk Aid With Bias Law.” The story reported, “The law prohibits transgender people from using public bathrooms that do not match the sexes on their birth certificates.”

• Pro-lifers in some states have had success in putting some limits on abortion, if only to provide standard sanitation at the abortion mills, as one would at any medical facility, and limiting late-term (or partial-birth) abortions. But Sen. Bernie Sanders threatened last week, “If elected president, not only will I continue to defend a woman’s right to choose, I will take on those Republican governors all over this country who trying to restrict or take away that right.” A President Hillary, equally pro-abort, can be expected to do the same thing.

We were warned by the Antifederalists that centralization would be imposed by the new Constitution, a document most conservatives still revere. Just on the judiciary, Centinel predicted (on October 5, 1781) in an letter to the Freemen of Pennsylvania,

The objects of jurisdiction recited above, are so numerous, and the shades of distinction between civil causes are oftentimes so slight, that it is more than probable that the state judicatories would be wholly superceded; for in contests about jurisdiction, the federal court, as the most powerful, would ever prevail. Every person acquainted with the history of the courts in England, knows by what ingenious sophisms they have, at different periods, extended the sphere of their jurisdiction over objects out of the line of their institution, and contrary to their very nature; courts of a criminal jurisdiction obtaining cognizance in civil causes.

The battle against what was branded “consolidation” is a rear-guard action, but still worthwhile. Yet let us not have any illusions about what is going on in the Unitary State of America.