The Judge Report - May 16th, 2008

Well, I see where the California Supreme Court on a 4-3 vote just overturned six thousand or more years of common definition of the institution of marriage, which is stylish of them.

Now I happen to believe in the federal system and if another state wants to define the terms of intercourse (I'm using this in its broadest meaning) between its citizens, who am I to comment? Of course, in this case 61% of the voters of the state already defined marriage as quite the opposite of what the court just determined.

What I do have a huge objection to is judges who believe they, and they alone, have the right to turn the commonly held meaning of constitutions topsy-turvy and find that in 2008 it means something completely different from when it was adopted. When constitutional rights can be redefined at whim, then they mean nothing at all, and the risk of tyranny by robe becomes very great indeed. This is the second state court to reach the same conclusion (many others did not), and both by 4-3 votes.

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I do prefer, however, that both judges and politicians be straight (I'm using this in its broadest meaning) about what they are saying and doing, and to that extent at least the California court puts all the marbles on the table instead of that wishy-washy "civil union" "compromise" imposed in Vermont and discussed elsewhere. What kind of gobbledy-gook is that?

After all, what is a civil marriage if not a "civil union", that is, a relationship between two people solely defined by the state with provisions for a beginning, a middle and an end. In most states civil matrimony involves a whole lot less than the traditional notions of permanent families. So if you're going to toy with the notion of civil unions, then call it what it really is, civil matrimony with such meaning as the state defines, the lowest common denominator of the understanding of human relationships.

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I often hear conservatives and others freak out when things like this happen, blaming the "gay lobby" and the "gay agenda".

I don't see it that way.

If the definition of marriage is getting fuzzy, it isn't because of some interest group or other. WE have made the meaning of marriage obscure by our own actions as a society over the last . . . well, my lifetime.

When I was in elementary school, I only remember two of my friends having divorced parents, and those were whispered about in shocked disbelief. It didn't affect our relationship with the kids, they were still our friends. We just felt terrible for them. One of them, raised by his father, pretended his mother was dead. He kept that up for years, even though here in small town America we all knew the truth. We were deep into high school when one day, out of the blue, he said to me, "My mother's not dead, you know."

"Yeah, I know." And that was that.

The old social norm of saving yourself for marriage, even if honored as much in the breech as in the observance, went out the window completely with the dawn of The Pill and the coming of the drug era. We once used pejorative terms like "shacking up" and "playing house", activities which later became recognized by the federal government as "POSSLQ", Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters, which prompted Charles Osgood to write his famous poem,

There's nothing that I wouldn't do

If you would be my POSSLQ

You live with me and I with you,

And you will be my POSSLQ.

I'll be your friend and so much more;

That's what a POSSLQ is for.

Matrimony, which used to be the sacrosanct institution for the unifying spiritual power of sexual relations and the procreation and raising of children in a harmonious unit has become totally cheapened by the customs of the day. Sex is for the moment, children a commodity that can be accepted, rejected or tossed in a bin behind the abortuary.

If people of the gay persuasion look at the way we have dumbed down marriage to a simple piece of paper defining the property interests of the parties, who can blame them when they say, "Well, why can't we have that, too?"

Perhaps if we had a better idea of what matrimony is, or should be, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

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Tags: courts

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Quote of the Day	11:14 am

Peggy Noonan in today's WSJ:

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

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Tags: conservative