by Rod D. Martin
March 26, 2013

Several people have asked me what the issues are as the Supreme Court hears arguments regarding California’s Proposition 8, by which the people amended their state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman (i.e., the position of pretty much the entire civilized world for the last couple thousand years or so).

My apologies to Saudi princes who choose — with the full blessing of the Koran — to have harems.  Somehow modern liberals have decided that this is not an affront to the dignity of all women, but rather a “choice”, one of the few they allow these days (Big Gulps, no; tobacco, no; freedom of religion, no; choose your own doctor, no; kill your baby in the womb, yes).  Who knew?

Anyway, the main issues are:

1. The legal abolition of the long-held societal position that children ideally should be raised by a father as well as a mother;

2. The lack of any legal distinction between same-sex marriage and polygamy, polyandry, adult incestuous relationships, and so on, meaning that all of these will be legalized the instant same-sex marriage is;

3. The already extreme repercussions of these sweeping changes for public school education;

4. The position already taken by the Canadian Supreme Court that questioning any of this is necessarily a hate crime; and moreover that the Bible (and by extension, the Koran and nearly all religious texts) are hate speech and must be banned; and

5. The inversion of any hint of democracy in a society where you deny the rights of speech, religion and conscience to 98% to accommodate the absolutely historically unprecedented demand of significantly less than 2%.

Finally, there is one additional issue the Supreme Court should absolutely take up, but best I can tell is not: regardless of its feelings on same-sex marriage, Prop 8 was overruled by the 9th Circuit because of the same-sex marriages performed during the short period between its passage and its reinstatement by the California Supreme Court, the intervening period existing only because a lower court enjoined its enforcement and unilaterally decreed same-sex marriage legal. In effect, this means — if upheld — that a local court can by itself create a nationally-mandated civil right — not to mention thwart a constitutional amendment, which is supposedly beyond the power of courts to rule upon — through a procedural trick.

If this is true, there is no law, only the whim of a few judges and the partisans who appoint them.

Why this last bit has not gotten more attention I cannot fathom.  And it is such an overwhelming, all encompassing nightmare that everyone who believes in liberty, homo or hetero, should agree that this must not stand.

It’s a terrible way to win.  Unless what you’re really after is indeed the destruction of America’s constitutional order.  One can hope our Supreme Court might take note, all other issues notwithstanding.