Friday, June 26, 2015

The Supreme Court Decides....That They Get To Decide.

The enormity of today's Supreme Court decision is such that I can barely think, but I'm going to give it a try.

The Supreme Court has invented yet another Constitutional right just as they did in Roe v. Wade and many other cases since. These inventions make a mockery of the Constitution and the separation of powers it requires. Only Congress has the authority to make laws and yet the Supreme Court has repeatedly taken that authority unto themselves.

As Justice Scalia said in his dissent:
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.
There is no "right" in the Constitution for people of the same sex to marry. It isn't there. The justices have made it up. Americans should be outraged that 5 justices would take it upon themselves to redefine an institution that has been the basis of human society for millennia. But, hey, they know better. This ruling is an insult to freedom.
Scalia goes on:
But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law. Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its “reasoned judgment,” thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.13
In other words, this decision actually asserts that the Supreme Court gets to decide laws.

Again from Justice Scalia, (the voice of reason):
This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy......
SCALIA, J., dissenting 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 2003.20 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,21 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.

I hope you didn't skip over Justice Scalia's words because they are right on the money.

Today's ruling was an incredible judicial overreach. I'm hoping it will finally lead to a Constitutional amendment limiting the terms of justices, or even better, making the offices elected.

The utter arrogance and judicial overreach of the opinion aside, may I say that I am finding the simplistic platitudes that so characterize the proponents of gay marriage quite tiresome.

Example: "I know gays who love each other. Therefore their relationship and the intimate expression of it should be equated with marriage." (This is not a quote from a particular person. Just how the "logic" goes.) Say, what? They love each other. Heterosexual couples love each other. Therefore they are the same. How on Earth is this conclusion drawn? Love is not the defining element of marriage. I love my dog. I love my children. Marriage is a very specific institution that for millennia has been the bedrock of civilized society. If you want to argue in favor of same-sex marriage convincingly you've got to give me more than this.

I'm sorry. The whole thing is making me sick. May the Lord have mercy on our country for rejecting His authority as the Creator and specifically on the Supreme Court justices who decided the issue was theirs to decide.

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