Last week the California Supreme Court struck a body blow to the principle of government of the people, by the people and for the people.
The state's high court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage passed by a whopping 61.4 percent of voters in 2000. By a slim 4-3 majority, the court nullified the vote of the citizens of California and substituted its own judgment for that of the people. The court ruled that the ban violated the equal protection clause of the constitution because it discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. Never mind that, since time immemorial, marriage has represented the union of one man and one woman. And never mind that the California Constitution does not create an exception to the rule for same-sex couples.
The American people have become all too familiar with the drill. The legislature passes a law banning abortion and the court overturns it. Children try to pray in school and the courts forbid it. The citizenry takes a stand for heterosexual marriage and the courts undercut it, branding them "bigots" in the process.
Activist judges are substituting their judgment for that of the American people and undermining the right of the people to govern themselves. In doing so, they are misrepresenting the requirements of the Constitution, and the American people are standing idly by as if there is nothing they can do about it. The other two branches of government—the legislative and executive branches—are standing idly by as well. Indeed, they have aided and abetted the judicial usurpation of authority by cowering at the feet of judges who are misrepresenting the provisions of the Constitution. The elected branches have done nothing to implement the checks and balances available to them to rein in a runaway judiciary. They simply furrow their brows and wring their hands while judicial activists run away with our democracy. In its place, these activists are substituting a judicial oligarchy.
Some believe that the solution to the problem is to pass constitutional amendments aimed at overturning the court decisions. They believe that adding new words to our state and federal constitutions will solve the problem. They are wrong!
There is nothing wrong with our existing federal and state constitutions. What is wrong is that judges are wrongly misrepresenting the requirements of these documents. Indeed, they are rewriting the documents by misconstruing them in order to satisfy their own social and political agendas. Through remarkable powers of extrasensory perception they divine new meanings in the words of the foundational documents and perceive rights that are not to be found in the texts themselves. Newly-found rights to privacy are gleaned from existing documents and those rights are translated into the right of women to kill their innocent unborn children and of venal husbands to starve their disabled wives to death. Equal protection of the law means that same-sex couples have a right to marry regardless of how noxious that notion is to the majority of our citizens and notwithstanding the destructive impact of such a ruling on the family, the foundational unit of civilization. These are judges who view words as wax to be shaped and fashioned to suit their own agendas. Is it reasonable to think they will be constrained by new words when they have failed to heed the meaning and intent of the existing ones? Do we really expect that these judges will fall prostrate at the feet of the new words and submit to their plain and ordinary meaning? Continue >>
Comments
This is already a huge problem in my country, the old government of the liberals/democrats stacked the senate with liberal's and the high courts with liberal activist judges.My country has been paying for it ever since with social engineering and a lax justice system which is pathetic at placing the rights of repeat serious offenders above law-abiding citizens. It is a recipe for chaos and it bears much bad fruit, there is a distinctive lack of accountability with these judges and the damage they do is enormous- democracy is by the people, for the people, unfortunately special interest groups and the minority have wayyyyyy to much influence!!! I pray the LORD will give wisdom to these judges to straighten out this mess. IN JESUS NAME
Well said, Mr. Connor. The disinclination of congressional democrats even to vote on a Republican president's judicial appointees indicates that they are aware they can only achieve the social upheaval they seek by getting judges to do it for them.