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.
