Courting Disaster
Just a couple of crucial points here to make about this dopey ruling on Proposition 8 in California:
1. When we have become a nation in which every voter initiative can be overturned by judicial fiat, there is nothing left for people but revolt. Issue supporters on all sides like to go judge-shopping to find a judge sympathetic to their cause, and then strike. So no matter what the majority wants, some activist judge can be found to overturn it. (Guess which side of the political spectrum has the most activist judges.) How do you think this makes voters feel about issues they care about, especially at times like this when the government at all levels is at war with its own citizenry (cf. Arizona, the Ground Zero mosque, Obamacare, etc).
The thumb on the scale is not visible, but you can see by the results that it's there.
2. I hope that gay marriage enthusiasts are cool with polygamy, because as Mark Steyn points out, there is no argument in favor of same-sex marriage than cannot and will not be used to promote polygamy. This from last year:
Five years ago, proponents of same-sex marriage went into full you-cannot-be-serious eye-rolling mode when naysayers warned that polygamy would be next. As I wrote in that Western Standard piece:
“Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.”
Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, the former Supreme Court justice, remains confident the drawbridge is firmly up. “Marriage is a union of two people, period,” she said in Quebec the other day. But it used to be a union of one man and one woman, period. And, if that period got kicked down the page to accommodate a comma and a subordinate clause, why shouldn’t it get kicked again? If the sex of the participants is no longer relevant, why should the number be?
3. A court that is powerful enough to give you whatever you want is powerful enough to take away whatever it wants. Someone who will not see the problem with this has a grasp of history that makes a gnat’s look comprehensive.
