So U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down California's Proposition 8, passed by over 7 million Californians to protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Imagine the hubris of an unelected guy in a black robe to overturn the historical and traditional definition of marriage that has been in existence since the dawn of civilization. Now I know that some will say that different cultures have defined marriage differently and point to those that allowed polygamy. Well, even in polygamous households, the marriages took place one at a time, not as a group. Each marriage was still between one man and one woman.
The arrogance of an unelected judge to overturn the express will of the people of a state is beyond comprehension. silly me, I thought that under the Constitution we were a government of the people and by the people. If Judge Walker's ruling is allowed to stand, and there is a 50/50 chance that it will, then the people of California have come under the rule of one man.
That this issue is a Constitutional issue is absurd. It is a stretch to say that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment applies, because no one is being denied their rights on the basis of citizenship. Homosexuals enjoy the same rights as that of any citizen. they can choose to marry anyone of the opposite sex that they wish. No citizen has the constitutional right to enjoy special privileges based on his actions.
In Judge Walker's ruling is the idea that laws, which have any basis in faith or even commonsense morality, are unconstitutional as he stated that, "The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite sex couples. Did you get that?: The idea that morality or a religious basis cannot be a factor in deciding law.
Now that would be a shock to the late Dr. M.L. King who based his entire civil rights movement on the idea of Biblical morality. The Black pastors of Birmingham asked Dr. King why he was breaking the law and he replied in his famous "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" that there were two types of laws: just and unjust. King state that one had a moral and legal responsibility to obey just laws, but one had a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. the difference was that a just law was a law was in accordance with the moral law of God land an unjust law was a law that was out of harmony with the moral law. This is straight out of the tradition of Augustine, Aquinas and later, Blackstone, whose "Commentaries" formed the basis of our legal system for the first 150 years of America's existence before we devolved to case law and began relying solely on the opinion of judges.
Being a homosexual himself, Walker's opinion exudes resentment to the idea that the state can somehow consider heterosexual couples superior to homosexual couples and he doesn't believe that there is any reason from the state's point of view to differentiate between them. Well, he could not be more wrong. From the state's point of view, heterosexual couples are superior.
Although for various reasons, not all heterosexual marriages produce children, in the normal course of things, they do. Homosexual couples are incapable of producing children by themselves. Marriage then normally leads to a family, and it is the family that is the basic building block of any society. The only reason that government would have any interest in the institution of marriage at all is that of promoting the welfare of families. It is in the family that future generations are socialized, taught responsibility, discipline and a host of other virtues that will produce good citizens. Therefore any wise government will institute policies that will support an institution that produces good citizens.
Judge Walker, in his arrogance, fails to realize that we don't get to define marriage. It has already been defined by history, tradition, and yes, by God himself. All we get to do is to recognize it.
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