High Priests of Secularity in the California Supreme Court

on May 15, 2008

James D. Berkley
May 15, 2008

 

The following commentary originally appeared on The Berkley Blog, the weblog of James D. Berkley, Director of IRD’s Presbyterian Action program, and is reproduced here with his permission.

 

The California Supreme Court has released a decision that in essence requires that same-sex unions be termed marriages, reversing the moral position taken by the people of California. See the whole decision here, and a useful and briefer segment here.

This is an amazing, if not too surprising, case of judicial activism, as a dissenting opinion by Justice Corrigan also holds. The court has decided that it knows better than the people of California what is good and right and desirable, and the court imposes its vision upon the people by fiat.

A couple of portions of the ruling stood out for me as disturbingly audacious:

These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish—with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life—an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.

The court doesn’t really believe that. What if the person has chosen his mother to whom to be married? Or a ten-year-old? Or his daughter or granddaughter? What if the person one chooses is already married to someone else but would willingly add another spouse?

What if many such individuals are chosen, rather than one? For that matter, on what grounds, using this logic, would just one spouse be deemed the proper number, if it is all about the fundamental opportunity and right to establish a family the way one chooses?

Must any and every coupling, no matter how exploitative or ridiculous, be “accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage”? Ridiculous!

Finally, retaining the designation of marriage exclusively for opposite sex couples and providing only a separate and distinct designation for same-sex couples may well have the effect of perpetuating a more general premise—now emphatically rejected by this state—that gay individuals and same-sex couples are in some respects “second-class citizens” who may, under the law, be treated differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals or opposite-sex couples [emphasis added].

This statement is so full of judicial activism! The state has voted. The people determined quite soundly that marriage is between a man and a woman. Now four of seven justices emphatically reject for the whole state the very beliefs the state has embraced for itself!

This statement within the decision is also a religious statement. The judges have taken their belief, their value judgment—that gay sex is not morally wrong and is to be accorded every respect given to marital heterosexual sex—and imposed it wholesale on the state. The state supreme court justices have made a religious/moral determination on their own, distinctly different from the moral determination the state has made through its proper voting process, and they now impose that morality from on high upon a state that has said it doesn’t so believe. That is tyranny!

Fellow Christians: Be prepared to live your lives as social outcasts from a society that calls your moral beliefs heterosexist discrimination and labels your morality the state-disapproved notions of hateful bigots.

For believing God’s Word and for standing for the sexual purity that God has taught us, you will be one of those Neanderthals considered to be promoting something “emphatically rejected by the state.” Well, not exactly rejected “by the state,” but certainly by a majority of activist California Supreme Court justices speaking as if they were the state.


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