We are all aware that a fierce debate has
been raging over same-sex marriage during the last several years. The people of
11 of our 50 states decided to expand the definition of marriage either through
a direct vote or the vote of their representatives. However, the majority of
the states did not change the definition of marriage, in fact most voted to
reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage, including liberal states such
as California. This is the way this debate should have been decided, but
unfortunately the United States Supreme Court on June 26, 2015, put a stop to
the debate. With that decision, as Justice Antonin Scalia clearly asserts, here
is some of what we have lost,
Today’s
decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans
coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion
in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one
can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the
Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of
constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied
(as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most
important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in
the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.[i]
Scalia says this
decision is a “naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power;
a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government.” It is abusive
because this was not a decision of the people and not an election of the people
but an imposed law by an oligarchy.
The pride and
arrogance of the five justices who made same-sex marriage legal in all 50
states is incredible. Scalia says it best:
But
what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The
five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding
that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the
Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex
marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a
“fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification,
and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal
minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo
Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not. They
are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them
the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called
for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting
marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that
an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in
history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than
ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not
agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous
judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.[ii]
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