Kalahari Bushmen, Han Chinese, Carthaginians and Aztecs

Gay marriage: an extract from the Dissenting Opinion of USA Supreme Court Justice Roberts, C J, in the case of Obergefell v Hodges:

p41 & ff 

"The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent. The majority expressly disclaims judicial “caution” and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice.”  

"As a result, the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs.  

"Just who do we think we are?" 

Quite. Hooray for Justice Roberts. And hooray, too, for dissenting Justice Thomas, J.

p 78 & ff (My emphasis.)

"The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits. The Framers created our Constitution to preserve that understanding of liberty. Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic. I cannot agree with it. " 

St Thomas More, patron saint of lawyers and politicians, pray for us.