Wednesday, March 27, 2013 |
Redefining "marriage" within the borders of a State is no one's business except that State's.
o United States district, circuit, or even supreme court has any jurisdiction under what's left of our national Constitution to decide what marriage means in any or every state. Absent a constitutional amendment to the contrary, only the people of each state or their duly chosen representatives may make that decision for themselves. They, of course, may not impose their decision on the people of any other state in a manner that voids or makes meaningless the latter's own decision; and the U.S. Congress has the power to ensure that they don't.
In both cases now before it, the orders of the Supreme Court of the United States ought to be unanimous: We must let each state decide. No state may be forced to accept another state's decision.
Consent of the governed is the only principle a government can follow to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers. No just or legitimate power can ever be derived from any attempt to transcend that principle, no matter what the cause. At every level it is so fundamental to our form of government, there would be no ground of public confidence in the government once its violation is allowed. Indeed, it is the beginning and the end of the American story:
When it became necessary, the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled us to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station, one within which we alone have authority to institute, together for our nation and respectively for our states, new governments. In each case, we were determined to lay its foundation on such principles and organize its powers in such form as to us seemed most likely to effect our safety and happiness. The general result was a "system approaching so near to perfection as it does" that it "can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Eighty years later our consent was required to abolish slavery and to make it unconstitutional for any government to deny or abridge a citizen's rights on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In light of that consent, the U.S. Supreme Court belatedly but unanimously overturned all laws prohibiting miscegenation, which by 1967 were on the books in only a third of the states. A man and a women, regardless either's skin color, now could marry each other anywhere in the United States. That decision, however, prohibited discrimination based on physical attributes, not behavioral choices.
So what if two sisters want to "marry" each other? If a state's law or highest court says they have the "right" to, what effect should that have on the laws against incest in other states? Can there be any constitutional grounds for prohibiting those states the power to enforce such laws if "Mrs. and Mrs. Doe-Doe" choose to reside in any of them?
So what if more than two persons want to "marry" each other? Are all laws against polygyny, polyandry, or group marriage rendered unenforceable in every state when one state decides they should be? (And if a state decides that all animals and/or plants have the same rights as human beings, what then?)
Must we seek to impose these views by force of law on our fellow citizens? If so, what is the point of enacting any marriage "law"?
If a mere five judges of the Supreme Court either fail to realize that the real goal of these views' proponents is not to redefine "marriage" but to render that term substantively meaningless, or otherwise decide to activistly promote that goal, how much more corrupted must the American people become before they themselves decide that the term "despotism" can never again retain with them any meaning at all?
Labels: a Republic if we can keep it, elitist despot liberals (BIRM), fascist totalitarian liberals (BIRM), liberal hypocrites (BIRM), liberals are always extreme, National Socialist liberals (BIRM)
