Author Archives: Darrick Dean

Many upset, others happy. Some don’t care.

The truth is that everyone lost.

We’ve allowed the Supreme Court to (once again) step outside its power. The Constitution instructs it to determine the constitutionality of laws, not write them. The Constitution does not speak on marriage — does not list it as a “right” — so the court shouldn’t have even heard the case — if they were following the law. They could have argued that since marriage for many is a religious ceremony, defined by religious beliefs, that the government has no business meddling with it (as the First Amendment forbids).

The Constitution was written to define and limit the federal government’s power, not engage in social engineering. “Marriage equality” is a nice-sounding catchphrase (and an obfuscating one), but it’s not the government’s job, or right, to define what that means. Giving them the power to do so was a mistake. Letting a small group of unelected judges to do it is even worse.

Why? Because any time the views of the politicians and their judges change — and they change like the wind — they can redefine marriage or anything else at will. The people, over 300 million, have ceded their democratic control to a tiny minority of people in Washington.

This should trouble everyone, regardless of what you think of the Supreme Court’s decision. It doesn’t matter if you are Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, or of any other politics, philosophy or religion.

You all lost. We all did.

We let emotion supersede reason and the law be ignored. We have given power to the few — the very reason we created this nation was to not have that dangerous situation. Notice that the dissenting judges didn’t base their decision on opposition to “marriage equality,” but on what the Constitution does or does not state. Wrote Justice Samuel Alito:

…not what States should do about same-sex marriage but whether the Constitution answers that question for them. It does not. The Constitution leaves that question to be decided by the people of each State. 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.

So I guess if you think a couple of politician-appointed judges are needed to sanction or bless your beliefs, and unconstitutionally redefine the law in the process, then yesterday was a good day.

Most people, when they stop to think about it, probably want to decide for themselves and for the government to follow the rule of law.

When the law becomes an option, we are all in danger.