Tom Piatak

May 15, 2008

The news that the California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, has decided to overturn the law enacted by the voters of that state limiting marriage to its historical definition has a depessingly familiar ring.  Time and again, judges have misused their authority and usurped power from the legislature to decide political issues in favor of the left.  This ruling is particularly absurd.  Not only would the framers of the California constitution been horrified at the suggestion that what they had enacted would one day mandate legal recognition of homosexual marriage, the American people have repeatedly expressed their outrage at this scheme to deconstruct the very foundation of society, enacting bans on gay marriage in some twenty states. 

The words of Justice Curtis, dissenting in the Dred Scott decision, ring as true today as when they were penned:  “[W]hen a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean.”

The people of California ought to do all they can to undo this tyrannical decision, including removing from office those who authored it.  For as the President elected in part because of Dred Scott warned,  “[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”  (These quotes are taken from Justice Scalia’s magnificent dissent in Planned Parenthood v Casey, the 1992 decision reaffirming Roe v Wade, itself an example of judicial tyranny par excellence)