Israel's Supreme Court has built up a highly controversial record of judicial activism over the last decade. In a country with a unicameral parliament and without a written constitution --- and a relatively young jurisprudence --- this phenomenon is to some extent inevitable, as the Supreme Court occasionally has to fill a legal vacuum by thrashing out precedents. Yet it is very hard to shake the impression of a small group of "enlightened" people who see it as their duty to act as "trailblazers" steering the benighted rest of us where we dare not go. As can be expected, this triggers reactions from legislators who want to curtail a court whose president publicly declared "everything can be subjected to judicial review". Note that I am not ruling out (no pun intended) that the Supreme Court may actually be right on some of the issues of contention.
Now the US is having a similar problem, over (of all things) same-gender "marriages". And true to the Law of Unintended Consequences, a number of self-appointed legal philosopher kings who could not leave well enough alone and tried to judicially establish same-gender marriage on an unwilling nation may end up triggering a Constitutional Amendment (most recently endorsed by the POTUS himself) that explicitly defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. James Taranto notes wrily that the liberal left is now suddenly discovering the virtues of "States' Rights" (or Federalism), and calls upon them to therefore support his alternate proposal: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require any state or the federal government to recognize any marriage except between a man and a woman." Such an Amendment, unlike the one presently being put forward by conservative legislators, would allow individual States to authorize same-gender "marriages" if their State legislatures passed laws to this effect.
UPDATE: Humpty Dumpty Logic is Orson Scott Card's take on the subject. I cannot add anything to the moneygraf:
Regardless of their opinion of homosexual "marriage," every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.
Go read the whole thing, although he does get shrill in a couple of places.
Comments