Probate Judge Don Davis asked to be relieved of the order because it would cause him to violate a federal court order that struck down the marriage law. On March 10, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a second order refusing to relieve him of the order and directing that he immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

On March 12, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a third order directing that “all probate judges” in the state are subject to the March 3, 2015, order and that they must immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

On June 26, 2015, the 5-4 opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Obergefell marriage case was released. The ACLU then asked the Alabama Supreme Court to reverse its prior orders in light of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion. Liberty Counsel argued that the prior Alabama Supreme Court orders remain valid.

Last Friday the Alabama Supreme Court made permanent the Petition for Mandamus, which upheld the marriage laws and ordered the probate judges to comply with those laws. The Alabama Supreme Court then dismissed the ACLU’s motion to clarify and reverse this prior order. The Judgment reads as follows:

CERTIFICATE OF JUDGMENT

WHEREAS, the ruling on the application for rehearing filed in this cause and indicated below was entered in this cause on March 20, 2015:

Application Overruled. No Opinion. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Bolin, Parker, Murdock, Main, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. [This refers to the ACLU motion.]

WHEREAS, the above referenced cause has been duly submitted and considered by the Supreme Court of Alabama and the orders indicated below were entered in this cause:

Petition Granted. Writ Issued. March 3, 2015. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Bolin, Parker, Murdock, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. Main, J., concurs in part and concurs in the result. Shaw, J., dissents. [This refers to Liberty Counsel’s Petition for Mandamus.]

Writ Issued as to Judge Don Davis. March 11, 2015. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Parker, Murdock, Main, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. Shaw, J., dissents. [Same as above]

Writ Issued as to additional respondents. March 12, 2015. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Bolin, Parker, Murdock, Main, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. Shaw, J., dissents. [Same as above]

NOW, THEREFORE, pursuant to Rule 41, Ala. R. App. P., IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that this Court’s judgment in this cause is certified on this date. IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that, unless otherwise ordered by this Court or agreed upon by the parties, the costs of this cause are hereby taxed as provided by Rule 35, Ala. R. App. P.

Along with the Judgment, the Alabama Supreme Court released the separate opinions of the Justices. In his 105-page opinion, in which he concurred in the Judgment, Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote the following:

Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court’s holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order.

Later in a public statement after the Judgment was issued, Chief Justice Roy Moore made the following statement:

The Court dismissed in its order “pending motions and petitions” in the API case today but did not dismiss “lawsuits” or dismiss the case. In fact, the Court also issued the certificate of judgment (COJ) which explicitly recognized the 3 orders issued in this case last year. As I stated in my written concurrence, the Court did not disturb the existing orders in this case or the holding in API that Alabama’s Sanctity of Marriage Amendment and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act were constitutional.

“Some media reported the opposite of what the Alabama Supreme Court did. When the Alabama Supreme Court entered the Judgment on its March 2015 order and dismissed the ALCU’s motion to reverse that order, the result was a clear victory for our case,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “The Alabama Supreme Court order upholding the marriage laws and ordering the probate judges to comply with those laws still remains in effect. The ACLU’s request to reverse that order was dismissed. The Alabama Supreme Court rejected the 5-4 marriage opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. While some of the Alabama Supreme Court Justices wrote separate opinions ripping apart the U.S. Supreme Court, it is clear a majority of the Court issued a Judgment affirming that their prior orders upholding the marriage laws remain valid in Alabama,” said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

[On Friday] in a 170-page ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion by issuing its own Judgment in favor of Liberty Counsel’s Petition for Mandamus. In the petition, Liberty Counsel demanded on behalf of its Alabama clients – Alabama Policy Institute (“API”) and Alabama Citizens Action Program (“ALCAP”) – that the state’s probate judges obey Alabama’s Constitution and laws. On March 4, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered the probate judges to immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

“The ruling last year by the Alabama Supreme Court was historic, and is one of the most researched and well-reasoned opinions on marriage to be issued by any court in the country. Today’s opinion by the Alabama Supreme Court calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion ‘illegitimate’ will be remembered in history like the ‘shot heard around the world,’” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Following the June 26, 2015, U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Obergefell opinion on marriage, the Alabama Supreme Court requested the parties to file additional briefs. [On Friday], the Alabama Supreme Court issued its final Judgment, thus affirming and implementing its March 4, 2015 opinion.

“The Alabama Supreme Court has openly rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 marriage opinion, labeling it ‘illegitimate’ and without legal or precedential authority. This is a clear victory for the rule of law and an historic decision by the Alabama Supreme Court. The Judgement makes permanent the Alabama Supreme Court’s order prohibiting probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Alabama Supreme Court has rejected the illegitimate opinion of five lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Staver.

Chief Justice Roy Moore and Justice Tom Parker issued concurring opinions openly criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court marriage opinion. Using Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert’s term of “five lawyers” when referring to the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell opinion, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote a blistering 105-page concurring opinion:

• Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court’s holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order.

• I agree with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts, and with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, that the majority opinion inObergefell has no basis in the law, history, or tradition of this country. Obergefell is an unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority that usurps the legislative prerogative of the states to regulate their own domestic policy. Additionally, Obergefell seriously jeopardizes the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

• Based upon arguments of “love,” “commitment,” and “equal dignity” for same-sex couples, five lawyers, as Chief Justice Roberts so aptly describes the Obergefell majority, have declared a new social policy for the entire country. As the Chief Justice and Associate Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito eloquently and accurately demonstrate in their dissents, the majority opinion in Obergefell is an act of raw power with no ascertainable foundation in the Constitution itself. The majority presumed to legislate for the entire country under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. 

• The Obergefell majority presumes to amend the United States Constitution to create a right stated nowhere therein. That is a lawless act. 

• I submit that our Founders knew a lot more about freedom than [Justice Kennedy’s opinion] indicates. They secured the freedoms we enjoy, not in judicial decrees of newly discovered rights, but in the Constitution and amendments thereto. That a majority of the Court may identify an “injustice” that merits constitutional correction does not dispense with the means the Constitution has provided in Article V for its own amendment.

• Although the Court could suggest that the Constitution would benefit from a particular amendment, the Court does not possess the authority to insert the amendment into the Constitution by the vehicle of a Court opinion and then to demand compliance with it. 

• Novel departures from the text of the Constitution by the Court are customarily accompanied by pretentious language employed to conceal the illegitimacy of its actions. Justice Scalia in hisObergefell dissent refers to this abandonment of “disciplined legal reasoning” as a descent into “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

• Some of the ostentatious phrases used in the majority opinion [are] more suitable to a romance novel.

• The majority seeks to invoke the grief, sorrow, and compassion associated with a Greek tragedy. Riding a tidal wave of emotion, the ensuing tears and pathos then suffice to fertilize a new constitutional right nowhere mentioned in the Constitution itself.

• Abandoning the role of interpreting the written Constitution, the majority has instead decided to become the supposed “voice” of the people, discerning the people’s sentiments and updating the document accordingly. The function of keeping the Constitution up with the times, however, has not been delegated to the Court — or to Congress or the President; that function is reserved to the states under Article V. 

• Historically, consummation of a marriage always involved an act of sexual intimacy that was dignified in the eyes of the law. An act of sexual intimacy between two men or two women, by contrast, was considered “an infamous crime against nature” and a “disgrace to human nature.”Homosexuals who seek the dignity of marriage must first forsake the sexual habits that disqualify them from admission to that hallowed institution. Surely more dignity attaches to participation in a fundamental institution on the terms it prescribes than to an attempt to wrest its definition to serve inordinate lusts that demean its historic dignity.

• A “disgrace to human nature” cannot be cured by stripping the institution of holy matrimony of its inherent dignity and redefining it to give social approval to behaviors unsuited to its high station. Sodomy has never been and never will be an act by which a marriage can be consummated.

• Government exists to secure that right. Because liberty is a gift of God, it must be exercised in conformity with the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

• Liberty in the American system of government is not the right to define one’s own reality in defiance of the Creator. . . . But the human being, as a dependent creature, is not at liberty to redefine reality; instead, as the Declaration of Independence states, a human being is bound to recognize that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are endowed by God. Those rights are not subject to a redefinition that rejects the natural order God has created.

• Citing Genesis 2:24 — The Obergefell majority’s false definition of marriage arises, in great part, from its false definition of liberty. Separating man from his Creator, the majority plunges the human soul into a wasteland of meaninglessness where every man defines his own anarchic reality. In that godless world nothing has meaning or consequence except as the human being desires. Man then becomes the creator of his own reality rather than a subject of the Creator of the Declaration.

• This false notion of liberty, which permeates the majority opinion in, is the ultimate fallacy upon which it rests. In a world with God left out, the moral boundaries of Scripture disappear, and man’s corrupt desires are given full rein. The end of this experiment in anarchic liberty is yet to be seen. The great sufferers will be the children — deprived of either a paternal or a maternal presence — who are raised in unnatural families that contradict the created order.

• The invocation of “equal dignity” to justify the invention of a heretofore unknown constitutional right is just another judicial mantra to rationalize the invalidation of state laws that offend the policy preferences of a five-person majority.

• The majority opinion in Obergefell represents the culmination of a change in our form of government from one of three separate-but-equal branches to one in which the judicial branch now exercises the power of the legislative branch.

• The Obergefell majority, presuming to know better than the people themselves how to order the fundamental domestic institution of society, has usurped the legislative prerogatives of the people contrary to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

• In short, the majority acts not as a court of law but as a band of social revolutionaries. The Chief Justice, amazed at this presumption, exclaims: “Just who do we think we are?”

• The Chief Justice’s quotation of Justice Curtis’s Dred Scott dissent merits serious consideration. If acquiescence to Obergefell indicates that “we have no longer a Constitution,” then the legitimacy of Obergefell is subject to grave doubt. If five Justices of the Supreme Court may at will redefine the Constitution according to their own policy preferences, the mechanism of judicial review, designed originally to protect the rights of the people from runaway legislatures, has morphed into the right of five lawyers to rule the people without their consent.

• Indeed, as the Chief Justice warns, the plenary power the majority asserts to redefine the fundamental institutions of society offers no assurance that it will not give birth to yet further attacks on the social order.

• If, as the Chief Justice asserts, the opinion of the majority is not based on the Constitution, do state judges have any obligation to obey that ruling? Does not their first duty lie to the Constitution? 

• The right to change the form of government in this country belongs to the people themselves through the amendment process, not to judicial oligarchs.

• These metaphors identify the essence of the majority’s actions: an illegal displacement and usurpation of the democratic process. Chief Justice Roberts accuses the majority of imposing “naked policy preferences” that have “no basis in the Constitution.” Accordingly, the majority’s “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy” is “dangerous for the rule of law.” The unmistakable theme that emerges from these critiques is lawlessness.

• Justice Scalia also emphasizes the revolutionary character of the majority’s assault on the social order — elevating the “crime against nature” into the equivalent of holy matrimony. This decision, “unabashedly not based on law,” represents a “social upheaval” and a “judicial Putsch.” Justice Alito sounds the same themes. The Court has not unwittingly tread into forbidden territory; instead, it has acted “far beyond the outer reaches” of its authority, boldly trampling the right of the people “to control their own destiny.” 

• For the last 50 years, the Supreme Court has consistently misused the Fourteenth Amendment to destroy state laws that protect the marital relation and its offspring. Obergefell is the latest fruit of this corrupt tree (refer to Matthew 7:17-18).

• Truly, the less basis the majority has for its innovations upon the Constitution, the grander is the language employed to justify them, as if high-blown rhetoric could compensate for the absence of constitutional substance. 

• Obergefell is but the latest example of the Court’s creation of constitutional rights out of thin air in service of the immorality of the sexual revolution. Like Roe, Obergefell is no more than “an exercise of raw judicial power … an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”

• Amendments to the Constitution are the business of the people pursuant to Article V; they are not the business of the Court under Article III. Truth may not always be clearly seen, but the majority’s reasoning should not blind us to the reality that the Court seems determined to alter this nation’s organic law. 

• The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has existed for millennia and has never been considered an “ill tendency.” By contrast, the Court’s attempt to redefine marriage is “a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty.” 

• The Obergefell majority, conspicuously overlooking the “essential and historic significance” of the connection between religious liberty and “supreme allegiance to the will of God,” failed to appreciate the seriousness of imposing a new sexual-revolution mandate that requires Alabama public officials to disobey the will of God. 

• Religious liberty, however, is about more than just “teaching” and “advocating” views of marriage. The majority condescendingly approves religious speech against same-sex marriage but not religious practice in conformity with those beliefs. As Chief Justice Roberts states in his dissent: “The First Amendment guarantees … the freedom to ‘exercise’ religion. Ominously, this is not a word the majority uses.”

• Obergefell promises to breach the legal protections that have shielded believers from participating in acts hostile to their faith. As Chief Justice Roberts points out, the Obergefellmajority piously declaims that people of faith may believe what they want and seek to persuade others, but it says nary a word about them practicing or exercising their faith as the Free Exercise Clause provides.

• The Free Exercise Clause, an express constitutional provision, logically takes precedence over a pretended constitutional right formulated from whole cloth by “five lawyers.”

• Foreseeing the dire consequences for religious freedom in the principle that same-sex marriage must be given equal stature with holy matrimony and foreseeing the inevitable pressure to compel religious institutions, businesses, and practitioners of professions to conform to that unreality, it would be imprudent to wait for the onset of these persecutions, to stand idle until Obergefell “usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.” Rather “the axe [must be] laid unto the root of the trees,” (refer to Matthew 3:10) and the consequence avoided by denying the principle. To allow a simple majority of the United States Supreme Court to “create” a constitutional right that destroys the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment violates not only common sense but also our duty to the Constitution. 

• I disagree with the conclusion that the “rule of law” requires judges to follow as the “law of the land” a precedent that is “a super-legislative imposition,” “a mockery,” “a legal fiction,” and “an utter travesty.”

• By the plain language of Article VI, state judges are bound to obedience to the Constitution, laws made in pursuance thereof, and treaties made under the authority of the United States, not to the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. 

• Thus, in the plainest terms and employing emphasis, Hamilton declared that acts of the federal government that invade the reserved rights of the states are “acts of usurpation” that deserve to be treated as such. Such acts “would not be the supreme law of the land, but an usurpation of power not granted by the Constitution.”

• The Supremacy Clause, quite obviously, by this chain of reasoning, does not give the United States Supreme Court or any other agency of the federal government the authority to make its every declaration by that very fact the supreme law of the land. If the Court’s edicts do not arise from powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, they are to be treated not as the supreme law of the land but as mere usurpation. 

• Thus, if precedents are “manifestly absurd or unjust,” “contrary to reason,” or “contrary to the divine law,” they are not to be followed.

• Applying Blackstone’s analysis, which is compatible with that of Hamilton, one must conclude that the Obergefell opinion is manifestly absurd and unjust, as demonstrated convincingly by the four dissenting Justices in Obergefell and the writings of two Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court in Costanza. Basing its opinion upon a supposed fundamental right that has no history or tradition in our country, the opinion of the Obergefell majority is “contrary to reason” as well as “contrary to the divine law.”

• The Obergefell opinion, being manifestly absurd and unjust and contrary to reason and divine law, is not entitled to precedential value. 

• If, as an individual who is sworn to uphold and support the United States Constitution, I were to place a court opinion that manifestly and palpably violates the United States Constitution above my loyalty to that Constitution, I would betray my oath and blatantly disregard the Constitution I am sworn to uphold. Acquiescence on my part to acts of “palpable illegality” would be an admission that we are governed by the rule of man and not by the rule of law. Simply put, the Justices of the Supreme Court, like every American soldier, are under the Constitution, not above it. 

• The general principle of blind adherence to United States Supreme Court opinions as “the law of the land” is a dangerous fallacy that is inconsistent with the United States Constitution. Labeling such opinions as “the rule of law” confuses the law itself — the Constitution — with an opinion that purports to interpret that document.

• Opinions of the Supreme Court that interpret the Constitution are, as Lincoln said, “entitled to very high respect and consideration,” but only insofar as they are faithful to that document. In a case like Obergefell, the “evil effects” Lincoln described should be confined to the unfortunate defendants in that case. We must protect the institution of marriage from judicial subversion and maintain loyalty to the principles upon which our nation was founded.

• Finally, we should reject the conversion of our republican form of government into an aristocracy of nine lawyers.

• Some contend, however, that Obergefell, by its mere existence, abrogates the March 2015 orders in this case. Those orders, of course, were not the subject of review in Obergefell. 

• The Court had no jurisdiction to order nonparties to Obergefell to obey its judgment for they have not had an opportunity to appear and defend.

• No Alabama probate judges were parties to Obergefell. Neither were they officers, agents, or servants of any of the defendants in those cases, or in active concert or participation with any of them. The Obergefell defendants were state officials in the four states in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, namely Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Needless to say, Alabama probate judges were not agents, servants, or employees of any of those state officials. Nor were they in “active concert or participation” with any of them.Thus, the judgment in Obergefell that reversed the Sixth Circuit’s judgment does not constitute an order to Alabama probate judges.

• The dissents of Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito provide ample justification to refuse to recognize Obergefell as a legitimate judicial judgment. Obergefellconstitutes an unlawful purported amendment of the Constitution by a judicial body that possesses no such authority. As Chief Justice Roberts stated: “The right [Obergefell] announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”

• Rather than limiting themselves to the judicial function of applying existing law to the facts and parties before them, the Obergefell majority violated “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” by purporting to rewrite the marriage laws of the several states to conform to their own view of marriage.

• Even more injurious to the rule of law, the Obergefell majority “overleap[ed] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people” as expressed in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The majority thus has jeopardized the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and the right to acknowledge God as the author and guarantor of true liberty. 

• By transgressing “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” and “overleap[ing] the great Barrier” which protects the rights of conscience, the Obergefell majority “exceed[s] the commission from which they derive their authority” and are “tyrants.” By submitting to that illegitimate authority, the people, as Madison stated, become slaves. Free government, rather than being preserved, is destroyed.

• Obergefell is completely without constitutional authority, a usurpation of state sovereignty, and an effort to impose the will of “five lawyers,” . . . on the people of this country. 

• In my legal opinion, Obergefell, like Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade that preceded it, is an immoral, unconstitutional, and tyrannical opinion. Its consequences for our society will be devastating, and its elevation of immorality to a special “right” enforced through civil penalties will be completely destructive of our religious liberty.

• Obergefell contradicts “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” that were invoked in the organic law upon which our country is founded. To invariably equate a Supreme Court decision that clearly contradicts the Constitution with “the rule of law” is to elevate the Supreme Court above the Constitution and to subject the American people to an autocracy foreign to our form of government. Supreme Court Justices are also subject to the Constitution. When “that eminent tribunal” unquestionably violates the limitations set forth in that document, lesser officials — equally bound by oath to the Constitution — have a duty to recognize that fact or become guilty of the same transgression.

In a separate concurring opinion, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Parker wrote:

• “Obergefell conclusively demonstrates that the rule of law is dead.”

• “Obergefell … trampled into the dust the last vestiges of the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court.”

• “Obergefell is not based on legal reasoning, history, tradition, the Court’s own rules, or the rule of law, but upon the empathetic feelings of the ‘five lawyers’ in the majority.”

• “[The Supreme Court] majority illegitimately imposed its will upon the American people. We now appear to be a government not of laws, but of ‘five lawyers.’”

• “Obergefell is ‘no judicial act at all’ because it is ‘without principled justification.’”

• “Obergefell is without legitimacy.”

• “This is not the rule of law, this is despotism and tyranny.”

• “Despotism and tyranny were evils identified in the Declaration of Independence as necessitating the break with King George and Great Britain.”

• “Obergefell is the latest example of judicial despotism.”

•  “As justices and judges on state courts around the nation, we have sworn and oath to uphold the United States Constitution. We have not sworn to blindly follow the unsubstantiated opinion of ‘five lawyers.’”

Justice Parker quotes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 abortion decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

[T]he Court cannot buy support for its decisions by spending money and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees. The Court’s power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands…. [A] decision without principled justification would be no judicial act at all…. The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decision on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make. Thus, the Court’s legitimacy depends on circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation.

“Justices and judges are bound to interpret the U.S. Constitution. When they write opinions that have no legal foundation, then their opinions lack legal legitimacy. That is what the five lawyers did on the U.S. Supreme Court in the marriage opinion. They ignored the Constitution, the Court’s precedents, and millennia of human history. Their opinion calls into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. When we the people lose trust in the Justices, the authority of the Supreme Court is undermined. If the people accept this 5-4 opinion, then we have transitioned to a despotic form of government. The people must now decide if we are governed by the rule of law or the whim of unelected judges,” concluded Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

I’ve been saying that 2015 is the year of pushback, and this might be the most significant act of pushing back so far: A group of legal scholars, most of them university professors, have declared that the U.S. Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage this past June 26^th is not “the law of the land,” and they are calling on all office holders, together with all presidential candidates, to join them in rejecting the Court’s decision.

Make no mistake about it: This is really big news.

These scholars, who teach at schools like Princeton and Oxford and Notre Dame and Boston and Boston College and Michigan State and Kansas State and Vanderbilt and Hillsdale and the University of Toronto and the University of Nebraska, state that the Court’s decision “has no more claim” to being the law of the land “than Dred Scott v. Sandford had when President Abraham Lincoln condemned that pro-slavery decision as an offense against the very Constitution that the Supreme Court justices responsible for that atrocious ruling purported to be upholding.”

They note that “Lincoln warned that for the people and their elected leaders to treat unconstitutional decisions of the Supreme Court as creating a binding rule on anyone other than the parties to the particular case would be for ‘the people [to] have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.'”

They also cite James Madison, who in 1788 had this to say about the balance of powers: “The several departments being perfectly co-ordinate by the terms of their common commission, neither of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers.”

But these professors and lawyers are not simply making a philosophical statement about the Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.

They have issued a call for action, reminding “all officeholders in the United States that they are pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the will of five members of the Supreme Court.” They also call on “all federal and state officeholders” to “refuse to accept Obergefell as binding precedent for all but the specific plaintiffs in that case.”

They urge these officeholders to recognize the right of each state to define marriage, to “pledge full and mutual legal and political assistance to anyone who refuses to follow Obergefell for constitutionally protected reasons,” and to “open forthwith a broad and honest conversation on the means by which Americans may constitutionally resist and overturn the judicial usurpations evident in Obergefell.”

To repeat: This is big, and it gives further legal, moral, and Constitutional teeth to the first and fourth principles laid out in Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Never Compromise Your Convictions and Refuse to Redefine Marriage.

These scholars have also issued a fourfold call to all presidential candidates, urging them to:

1. treat Obergefell, not as “the law of the land,” but rather (to once again quote Justice Alito) as “an abuse of judicial power”
2. refuse to recognize Obergefell as creating a binding rule controlling other cases or their own conduct as President
3. appoint judges and justices who respect the constitutional limits of their power, and
4. support the First Amendment Defense Act to protect the conscience and free speech rights of those who hold fast to the conjugal understanding of marriage as the union of husband and wife.

To help send this critically important message to all the presidential candidates, join me in signing this statement here, and let’s pray for a continued spirit of revival in the Church and awakening in the society.

Preserving the meaning of marriage and restoring the sacredness of marriage must be among our top priorities if we want to see America become healthy, and as disciples of Jesus, we can do nothing less.

This landmark action by these scholars could be another spark that will help fan the flames of a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution.

On with it!

This article was originally posted at the ChristianPost.com

Over the course of the past few months I gathered articles about the question of “judicial supremacy” — are U.S. Supreme Court decisions “the law of the land,” or are they rulings on cases?

Here is that page of excerpts, quotes, and links: Judicial Supremacy: Not in the U.S. Constitution, Not the Intention of the Founding Fathers.

Republicans and conservatives rarely even attempt to disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution to the uninformed and misinformed. Of course, that is a bit much to ask when too many on our side aren’t even clear on what it says.

For many who have attended most law schools in the country, the chances are greater than not that they came away with the idea that, not only is the U.S. Supreme Court the highest court in the land, but it is also the supreme governing body. Why do so many law school graduates think that? Because that is what law schools teach.

What is sad is that so many conservatives fall for the notion of judicial supremacy. As to why they do, I can only engage in a bit of psychological speculation.

Here are just eight possible reasons why conservatives fall for and then defend the theory of judicial supremacy:

1.) Because they weren’t actually taught the U.S. Constitution — but rather the opinions of U.S. Supreme Court justices. Yes, this is an important distinction if you actually want to understand the U.S. Constitution, and not merely the written opinions about the U.S. Constitution by unelected lawyers.

2.) Because even as they were taught to consider legislative debate and the writings of legislators when it comes to interpreting statutes, they completely ignore the words of the Founding Fathers regarding the design and purpose of the U.S. Supreme Court.

3.) Because they absolutely hate the idea that they were taught wrong. After all, if they were misinformed about this, what else might they have been misinformed about?

4.) Because it flies in the face of the idea that lawyers are an elite class — if those nine lawyers are no longer the oligarchy they were led to believe it is, their sense of elitism is threatened.

5.) Because they can’t conceive of how American government can work if it’s all about checks and balances and divided power — someone has to be in charge, right?

6.) Because they can’t grasp that the power is invested in the People, not in whatever majority happens to sit on the Court at any given time.

7.) Because just like the idea that “any kid can grow up to be president” is lovely, so too is the notion that “any lawyer can some day be appointed to be that fifth and deciding vote on U.S. Supreme Court cases and thus the ruler of the land — superior to the lowly elected U.S. President down Pennsylvania Avenue and those nobodies that populate the U.S. Senate and U.S. House across the street.“One ‘us’ needs to be in charge.”

8.) Because “I went to law school and you didn’t, therefore I know better.”

This last one is actually my favorite of them all, since I enjoyed both a year of “Con Law” in undergrad while studying political science and political philosophy, and one year while in law school. The United States Constitution wasn’t written based upon the opinions of legal minds but rather that of political philosophers, political scientists, and statesmen. Why some think lawyers have special knowledge about the U.S. Constitution is a mystery to me.

Within the past few days I added two articles to that page of links. First, one I’d missed from late June. Second, a new article that posted just three days ago. Here are excerpts from both of them:

The Myth of Judicial Supremacy
By Paul Moreno (June 26, 2015)

Forget Marbury v. Madison. Judicial supremacy is mostly an invention of the Warren Court. The Supreme Court this morning declared that states cannot limit marriage to one man and one woman.

But this is not the last word on the question. Article VI of the Constitution reads: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . ” The idea that Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land is a very recent contention.

When the Constitution was written and for a long time thereafter, many doubted that the Court had the authority to interpret the Constitution at all — in other words, they believed that the Court had no power of “judicial review.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 78, made the classic argument that, given a written constitution established by the sovereign people, the Court had no choice but to maintain the supremacy of the people’s Constitution when it was alleged to be in conflict with an ordinary law passed by their representatives.

Today’s legend of judicial supremacy begins with Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803). In fact, Marbury was quite a modest decision, in which Marshall held that Congress could not extend the jurisdiction of the Court beyond what the Constitution had provided. (And it is unlikely that the act in question did so anyway.) The decision was hardly ever cited for the next century.

Marshall never made any claim of judicial supremacy, nor did the country accept any such principle. Presidents Jefferson and Jackson resisted the idea that the Court had a monopoly on constitutional interpretation.

Moreno goes on to explain that “The myth of judicial supremacy began near the end of the 19th century, when conservatives sought to justify unpopular Court decisions — especially the 1895 decision holding the income tax unconstitutional.”

And that “Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court went on to ever bolder exercises of judicial power”:

The first rhetorical expression of judicial supremacy came in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), when a federal district court, following the High Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), had ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. The justices claimed that Marbury v. Madison had “declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in its exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this court and the country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.” For the first time, the Court now added that “the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land.” Civil rights became such a popular cause that the Court has been living off the moral capital of Brown ever since.

Can you imagine how upset lawyers are when they learn about the short term memory problem of their esteemed professors?

I encourage you to read Moreno’s entire article here.

Here an excerpt from our next new link, where the writer touches on the confusion of many that argue against judicial supremacy:

Why Judicial Supremacy Isn’t Compatible with Constitutional Supremacy
By Ramesh Ponnuru (September 10, 2015)

A pro-choice voter in New Hampshire had a question for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who was making the rounds as a presidential candidate: Would he “respect” Roe v. Wade even though he is a pro-lifer? Kasich answered, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Whether he knew it or not, Kasich had wandered into a debate over the courts, one in which some of the other presidential candidates are also participants. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has denounced “judicial tyranny.” When five justices ruled that the Constitution requires governments to recognize same-sex marriage, he scoffed that the Supreme Court was not “the Supreme Being.”

It’s an often-heated debate. Huckabee’s side says that the courts have established a “judicial supremacy” at odds with the actual constitutional design; the other side says that people like Huckabee are threatening the rule of law. Both sides have some reasonable points, and both could profit from conducting the debate at a lower level of abstraction.

Huckabee’s side of the argument is of course the weaker one in our political culture. Think of how often people say, without realizing they are making a controversial claim, that abortion is “a constitutional right” or that laws against it are “unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court has ruled to that effect; our shorthand treats its rulings as either correct by definition or authoritative in such a strong sense that we should describe them as though they were. “The Constitution is what the judges say it is,” as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said before he was on the Court. Even when arguments about judicial supremacy appear to have no practical import, they lie beneath judgments about how we should talk about judicial decisions.

The case against this way of thinking holds that judicial supremacy is incompatible with constitutional supremacy. The courts can get the Constitution wrong; if they could not, there would be no point to justices’ trying to get it right by reasoning about the Constitution. Judicial review, though not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, can be inferred from it: In cases where the courts have to decide whether to apply the Constitution or a statute that conflicts with it, the higher law has to take precedence. The case against judicial supremacy rests on a similar inference: In cases where a judicial interpretation of the Constitution is at odds with the actual document, it is the latter that deserves the allegiance of citizens and officeholders. Kasich is therefore wrong: The Constitution is “the law of the land,” not Roe. (You can look it up in the Constitution’s sixth article.)

Read more: National Review

This article was originally posted at JohnBiver.com

Written by John C. Eastman

Until her release [last week], Kim Davis, the clerk of rural Rowan County, Kentucky, was confined to a jail cell because she refused to issue marriage licenses over her name to same-sex couples. She has been pilloried in the media for “lawlessness” and compared not to Martin Luther King Jr. for her civil disobedience but to Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Michael Keegen of the grossly misnamed People for the American Way called her actions an “abuse of power” and proposed instead that she should “find another line of work” — that is, resign her elected office — if she “can’t in good conscience fulfill [her] duties.”

The double standard on display is palpable. I don’t recall Keegen or any of the other self-righteous, newfound devotees of the rule of law calling for the resignation of Kentucky’s attorney general when he refused to defend his state’s marriage law — or any of the other state attorneys general who did the same, from California’s Jerry Brown to Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Kane, and several others, including perhaps most notoriously Oregon’s Ellen Rosenblum, who was caught actively colluding with plaintiffs to ensure judicial invalidation of the Oregon marriage law she disliked.

“But Davis was refusing to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court,” it will be argued. So, too, did all those illustrious attorneys general. All of them refused to do their duty and defend their state’s man-woman marriage laws, even though the binding precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court at that time, a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, was that such laws were constitutionally valid.

Ms. Davis’s position has also been mischaracterized as asserting that because the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is contrary to God’s authority, she cannot be compelled to comply with it and therefore can prevent same-sex couples from getting married in her county. Her position — so described — has been belittled by simpletons across the political spectrum as nothing more than the misguided stance of a crazy evangelical clinging to her Bible. But that is not her legal argument at all (however much merit it might have as a reaction to an illegitimate decision by the U.S. Supreme Court). Her actual argument is much more restrained.

Kentucky has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which expressly prevents the government from imposing a substantial burden on someone’s religious beliefs unless the government’s mandate is narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest. Because this lawsuit is pending in federal court, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which contains the same protection, is also applicable. Ms. Davis’s lawyers have simply argued that these federal and state laws require that her religious objection to issuing same-sex “marriage” licenses over her own name be accommodated.

There is no compelling interest here. Even assuming the validity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision holding that right to same-sex “marriage” is a fundamental right, no one is being denied the right to marry. As a matter of Kentucky law, the couples seeking to compel Ms. Davis herself to issue them a marriage license can obtain a marriage license from any other county in Kentucky. They can also get one from the county executive of Rowan County. And if the governor would simply call the legislature into special session to deal with the problem that has arisen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June, it would likely even be possible for other clerks in Ms. Davis’s office to issue a marriage license without its being issued on Ms. Davis’s authority (the legislature could simply remove the problematic “under [her] authority” language from the statewide uniform form), or for marriage licenses to be obtained via a statewide online system.

But none of those options would accomplish what the same-sex couple and its chorus of advocates are really after, which is not the “marriage” but forcing Ms. Davis and everyone like her to bow to the new, unholy orthodoxy. In other words, this controversy has all the hallmarks of the one that engulfed Thomas More, who silently acquiesced in but would not condone King Henry VIII’s illicit marriage.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, both the federal law and Kentucky’s version of it, required that Ms. Davis’s religious objection be accommodated as a matter of law. The federal court’s refusal to respect those laws is where the real lawlessness lies in this case. And of course, that lawlessness is quite apart from the not insignificant question of whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is itself lawless. Such claims did not originate with Ms. Davis, but with the four U.S. Supreme Court Justices who stridently dissented from Justice Kennedy’s diktat, calling it “illegitima[te],” “indefensible,” “dangerous for the rule of law,” “demeaning to the democratic process,” “a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power,” “pretentious,” “egotistic,” a “judicial Putsch,” “deeply misguided,” a “usurp[ation of] the constitutional right of the people,” a “perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation,” and an “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.”

That latter point is important to put to rest the other charge that has been leveled against Ms. Davis, namely, that she is violating her oath of office by not upholding the law she swore to uphold. The Constitution requires that all officials, both federal and state, take an oath to “support this Constitution,” and the Constitution itself provides that “this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” Neither the oath clause nor the supremacy clause requires fealty to an erroneous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that is contrary to the Constitution itself. That is not constitutionalism, or the rule of law, but the rule of judges; a claim that although the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the Constitution is whatever the judges say it is, even if what they say is a patently erroneous interpretation of the Constitution.

Reacting to a similar piece of judicial tyranny in the Dred Scott case, Abraham Lincoln famously said, in his first inaugural address, that although judicial decisions are binding on the specific parties to a case, “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

In short, Ms. Davis was much more faithful to her oath of office, and to the Constitution she vowed to support, than the federal judge who jailed her for contempt, the attorney general of the state who refused to defend Kentucky’s laws, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who usurped the authority of the states and the more than 50 million voters who had recently reaffirmed the natural definition of marriage, in order to impose his own more “enlightened” views on the nation. One can only hope that Ms. Davis’s simple but determined act of civil disobedience will yet ignite the kind of reaction in the American people that is necessary to oppose such lawlessness, or at the very least bring forth a national leader who will take up the argument against judicial supremacy in truly Lincolnian fashion.

This article was originally posted at the National Review Online.

— John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service, and former dean, at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law. He is also the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage.

A consensus appears to be developing among otherwise reasonable people that Kim Davis, of Rowan County fame, either needs to start issuing marriage licenses or quit her job.

For those just joining us, a county clerk in Kentucky is refusing to issue marriage licenses against her conscience and is also refusing to resign. Her name, which should be on a bronze plaque on the side of the courthouse, is Kim Davis. A federal judge has ordered her to appear in his courtroom Thursday to explain why Davis should not be held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses.

File this under sentiments which seem extreme at the time, but heroic when the danger is over, and you are reading them inscribed on the base of a polished marble memorial.

But there is a difference between contempt of court and seeing that the courts have become contemptible.

Now while florists and bakers and photographers enjoy a great deal of active support from the broader Christian world, the most people like Davis will get is a sympathetic lack of sympathy. It falls out this way because Christians generally understand the private sector — that’s where they live, after all — but they don’t understand the nature of government. They don’t understand the public sector and the relationship of God’s  Word to it. Their theology develops a distinct limp as soon as they step into the public square, but it is not the kind of limp you might acquire by wrestling with God at Peniel. It is more like what might happen if you dropped the Collected Works of Immanuel Kant on your foot. That results in quite a distinctive limp, one  you see everywhere.

Here is a quick sampling of that sympathetic lack of sympathy:

Carly Fiorina says the clerk needs to comply or move on. Ed Morrissey says the same. Ryan Anderson generally agrees with that, as does Rod Dreher. Note particularly the last comment in Dreher’s piece — that there are hills to die on, but that this is not it.

Update: After Ryan Anderson objected, I went back and reread him. His position is more nuanced than I let on, and so my apologies to him. I still have objections to his solution, but that will require a separate post.

So I want to begin by making an observation about that hill-to-die-on thing, but then move on to discuss the foundational principle that is at stake here. After that, I want to point out what it would look like if more government officials had the same understanding that Kim Davis is currently displaying — despite being opposed by all the intoleristas and also despite being abandoned by numerous Christians who admire her moxie but who don’t understand her moxie.

First, whenever we get to that elusive and ever-receding “hill to die on,” we will discover, upon our arrival there, that it only looked like a hill to die on from a distance. Up close, when the possible dying is also up close, it kind of looks like every other hill. All of a sudden it looks like a hill to stay alive on, covered over with topsoil that looks suspiciously like common ground.

So it turns out that surrendering hills is not the best way to train for defending the most important ones. Retreat is habit-forming.

This brings us to my second goal this morning, which is to highlight the principle. Pick some absurd issue — admittedly a dangerous thing to do in these times that defy the tender ministrations of satire — and that means that to be sufficiently absurd it would have to be an issue like legalized cannibalism. Now let us say that we live in a time, some weeks hence, when cannibalism can be practiced generally on established free market principles (Dahmer v. Illinois, 2023). But if you want to have a BBQ of that nature in a city park, on city property, then you are going to need a permit. Now say that you are Kim Davis’s granddaughter, and your office issues the permits for all activities in all the city parks. Do you issue the permit? Or do you arrange for a compromise? Find somebody in the office not nearly so squeamish as you are? “Hey, Queequeg! Can you handle this one?”

I interrupt this post to anticipate an objection to my choice of illustrations. “Are you saying, Wilson, that same sex marriage can be equated with cannibalism?” Well, no, they are very different sins. That said, they are both very wicked and God hates them both, and county clerks ought not give either one the sanction of law. But I am not trying to equate anything here — I am simply trying to illustrate how a believer’s conscience ought to work if he is employed by a government that tries to sin grievously through the instrumentality of a godly magistrate. This is just how I paint illustrations, with bright yellows and gaudy greens. I do that so that people can see them.

So, follow me closely here. Chesterton once said that art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. We have a set up where a line must be drawn at some point. And in the abstract all evangelical Christians would almost certainly agree that when that line was crossed, wherever it is, the revolt of the county clerks would be a good thing. With me?

Let me spell it out further. Back in the thirties, if a county clerk had refused a marriage license to a couple because they attended a church where the pastor baptized people with heads upstream, instead of her preferred way, with heads downstream, we would all agree that said clerk had gotten above himself. And if a county clerk expedited and stamped all the processing papers for trains full of Jews headed to Auschwitz, we would all have no problem with said clerk being prosecuted after the war. And when he was prosecuted, “it was entirely legal” would not be an adequate defense. Got that? Two positions, marked clearly on the map, and there is a line somewhere between them.

Where is that line? Why is that line there? By what standard do we make that determination? Who says? These questions cannot be answered apart from the law of God, and that is why we are having such trouble with them. We want a pagan society to respect our sentimental religiosity, and that is not going to happen any time soon.

The point here is not just private conscience. The right to liberty of conscience is at play with florists, bakers, and so on. But Kim Davis is not just keeping herself from sinning, she is preventing Rowan County from sinning. That is part of her job.

Every Christian elected official should be determining, within the scope of their duties, which lines they will not allow the state to cross. When they come to that line, they should refuse to cross it because “this is against the law of God.” They should do this as part of their official responsibilities. This is part of their job. It is one of the things they swear to do when they take office.

This is nothing less than Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrates (Institutes 4.20.22-32), which I would urge upon all and sundry as relevant reading material. And as Calvin points out, after Daniel — a Babylonian official — disobeyed the king’s impious edict, he denied that he had wronged the king in any way (Dan. 6:22-23).

Now this takes me to my citation of Jefferson above. Some might say that it is a shame that I, a staunch Calvinist, have taken to quoting a Deist on the relationship of righteousness to government. And I say that it is a shame that a 18th century Deist has a better grasp of the relationship of righteousness to government than do two and a half busloads of 21st century Reformed seminary professors. The striking inconsistency might have two possible causes, in other words.

If just ten governors treated Obergefell the same way Kim Davis is treating it, that entire unrighteous and despotic imposition would collapse and fall to the ground. And if they did so, they would not be sinning against the United States. Rather, they would be preventing the United States from sinning.

The end game here is not armed revolution. The end game is simply a refusal to cooperate with their revolution. Make them fire or impeach faithful officials. Once removed, such faithful officials should run for office again with a promise to continue to defy all forms of unrighteous despotism. As one friend of mine put it, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”

Some might ask what the good in that would be. Wouldn’t it just result in no Christians in such positions? Perhaps, but it would be far better to have godless results enforced by the godless than to insist that the godly do it for them. It would be far better to have the “no Christians in power results” when it was actually the case that no Christians were in power. I would rather have non-Christian clerks acting like non-Christian clerks than to have Christian clerks do it for them. I mean, right?

Don’t tell believers to stay engaged so that they can make a difference, and then, when they start making a difference, tell them that this is not a hill to die on. Make the bad guys reveal themselves. Make them crack down on evangelical county clerks, while continuing to wink at sanctuary cities and local defiance of federal pot laws. Why do they apply their “It’s the law! Bow down!” standard so inconsistently? Well, mostly it is because evangelicals are sweet and naive enough to let them get away with it.

So it is ironic that this valiant stand is being taken by a clerk, because those sidling away from her provide a standing example of our real problem — the trahison des clercs.

Article was originally posted at douglaswilson.com

“Judicial activism occurs when judges write subjective policy preferences into the law rather than apply the law impartially according to its original meaning.”  ~The Heritage Foundation

To vocal opponents of judicial activism, this comes as little surprise. The U.S. Supreme Court has suffered a major credibility blow in the wake of its politically motivated 5-4 Obergefell v. Hodges “gay marriage” opinion. In it, they presumed to do the impossible – both redefine the age-old institution of natural marriage and to give this fictional definition precedent over freedoms actually enumerated in the Bill of Rights. According to Rasmussen, only “36 percent of Likely U.S. Voters still think the high court is doing a good or excellent job.”

Incredibly, even the Chicago Tribune had this scathing assessment of the high court:

“We must confess we are shocked at the violence and servility of the Judicial Revolution caused by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. We scarcely know how to express our detestation of its inhuman dicta, or to fathom the wicked consequences which may flow from it. … This decision has sapped the constitution [sic] of its glorious and distinctive features, and seeks to pervert it into a barbarous and unchristian channel … Jefferson feared this Supreme Court, and foretold its usurpation of the legislative power of the Federal Government. His prophecy is now reality. The terrible evil he dreaded is upon us.”

As many of us warned, this opinion is already being used to crush Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. This was not lost on the Tribune, which added, “To say or suppose, that a Free People can respect or will obey a decision so fraught with disastrous consequences to the People and their Liberties, is to dream of impossibilities. No power can take away their rights. They will permit no power to abridge them.”

The New York Tribune was equally dismissive: “The decision, we need hardly say, is entitled to just as much moral weight as would be the majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

OK, I’ll come clean. The above quotes are not in reference to Obergefell. But they might as well have been. These quotes addressed the U.S. Supreme Court’s equally illegitimate 1857 Dred Scott decision. Whereas, in Dred Scott, the justices defied natural law and presumed a “right” for whites to own blacks, the court’s 2015 Obergefell decision likewise defied natural law and presumed to deconstruct and redefine the institution of marriage.

Both decisions are illegitimate, and here’s why. For the U.S. Supreme Court to justifiably overturn some law duly passed by the United States Congress, its opinion must be deeply rooted in one or more of the following:

1. A clear reading of the U.S. Constitution;
2. Some prior court precedent;
3. History and the Common Law;
4. Our cultural customs or traditions;
5. Some other law enacted by Congress.

As the high court’s four dissenting justices rightly observed in Obergefell, the “five attorneys” who invented this newfangled “right” to “gay marriage,” failed, abysmally, on each and every requirement.

The same was true of Dred Scott.

And so both opinions should be summarily ignored.

As President Andrew Jackson famously quipped of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion he thought usurped his executive authority, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

After the Dred Scott decision was released, Sen. William Pitt Fessenden, R-Maine, who later served as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of treasury, said this: “[It is charged] that I am undermining the institutions of the country by attacking the Supreme Court of the United States! I attack not their decision, for they have made none; it is their opinion.”

Over the last few decades, the other two branches of government, the legislative and the executive, have, for some inexplicable reason, acquiesced to the notion of judicial supremacy – a dangerously dominant concept that erroneously regards the United States Supreme Court as the final arbiter of all things public policy. If this is so, then these nine unelected lawyers are ultimately unaccountable to anyone or anything, and the other two branches of government are but toothless figurehead bodies merely spinning their wheels while spending our dollars.

This flies in the face of the framers’ intent. It’s also the very unfortunate reality under which we live. It is fully within the constitutional authority of the other two branches of government to rein in these judges gone wild.

Article III, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to “check” judicial activism, up to and including when justices illegitimately legislate from the bench: “[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Our Republican-led Congress, from a regulatory standpoint, has the absolute constitutional authority to smack down this rogue U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, to date, it has either been unwilling or unable to do so.

Still, it’s not Republicans alone who must halt this judicial imperialism. Freedom-loving Democrats, to the extent that such animal yet exists, must also join the fight. After the Dred Scott opinion, they did.

“[F]orthwith we are told that the Supreme Court of the United States has become the appointed expounder of Democratic principles. Since when?” asked Sen. George Pugh, D-Ohio. “Who constituted the judges of the Supreme Court the makers or expounders of Democratic principle? Certainly not Thomas Jefferson, who pronounced them the sappers and miners of the Constitution; certainly not Andrew Jackson, who told them he would interpret his own oath, as well as his own principles, according to his views of the Constitution. … When we get to going by courts, it seems to me we have departed from the whole spirit and principle of the Democratic Party.”

My, how the Democratic Party has changed.

In the vast majority of their writings the Founding Fathers were explicit that the judicial branch of government is effectively the weakest of the three. Regrettably, such is not the case with today’s modern misapplication. Americans currently live under what is, for all intents and purposes, a counter-constitutional judiciocracy led by nine unelected, unaccountable, black-robed autocrats.

No, five extremist lawyers don’t get to decide “the law of the land.” Only the legislature can do that. The high court merely issues opinions.

And then the other two branches decide what, if anything, to do with them.

The Declaration of Independence acknowledges that true rights are God-given and unalienable.

Religious free exercise is sacrosanct.

“Gay marriage” is pretend.

And the U.S. Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being.

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court announced the previously unknown constitutional “right” to impose same-sex “marriage” on all 50 states, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was readying its next volley.

For two decades, the ACLU has cited the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) as a defense of religious liberty in various worthy and some not-so-worthy cases. No more.

The ACLU has decided that the unalienable right to religious freedom embodied in the First Amendment must give way to newly coined claims by newly empowered groups.

In a Washington Post column, ACLU Deputy Director Louise Melling called on Congress to make RFRA essentially toothless. Of course, that’s not the way she put. Here’s her signature sentence:

“It’s time for Congress to amend the RFRA so that it cannot be used as a defense for discrimination. Religious freedom will be undermined only if we continue to tolerate and enable abuses in its name.”

As with the proverbial village in Vietnam, we apparently have to destroy religious freedom in order to save it. As a prime example of “abuses,” Ms. Melling cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year in favor of Hobby Lobby’s refusal to provide employees coverage for abortifacients, which she described misleadingly as “contraception.” She warned that this sort of liberty could proliferate:

“Religiously affiliated nonprofit organizations such as universities are taking the argument further,” she wrote. “They invoke the RFRA to argue not only that they should not have to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, but also that they should not even have to notify the government that they refuse to do so.”

Can’t have that. The ACLU seems more concerned than ever that conservative religious people might retain some rights of conscience in the face of ever-increasing demands. Its website sports a “Using Religion to Discriminate” page that bemoans all sorts of religious freedom claims.

New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer, writing in TIME, cuts right to the chase. In his June 28 piece, “Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions,” he argues that,

“Rather than try to rescue tax-exempt status for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality, we need to take a more radical step. It’s time to abolish, or greatly diminish, their tax-exempt statuses.”

Like many on the Left, Mr. Oppenheimer sees religious tax exemptions not as a recognition that the state has no authority over churches and church property, which belong to another kingdom entirely, but as a favor (“subsidizing”) that the state has extended. Viewed that way, it’s not a stretch to have the government assert taxing power over ecclesiastical property.

As for “settled public policy,” he means that the Court’s ruling is final, something that the Left never accepts when they lose. For example, the ACLU and others stepped up their legal attacks on the Boy Scouts after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 upheld the group’s right to enforce their moral standards. Whenever the pendulum swings left, we’re told the law is “settled.” If it swings right, well, that’s just a provocation to do more.

In the coming days, conservative religious business owners, academic institutions and any individual who will not genuflect to the Left’s version of reality will face subtle and outright discrimination. The furor in Indiana over the legislature’s enactment of a state RFRA last March was only a taste of the kind of hysteria that the Left and its media enablers will gin up over any resistance to the latest demands.

Not missing a beat, atheist activist Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has uncorked yet another call for the Pentagon to weed out conservative Christians. In a Daily Kos posting, he wrote that chaplains who teach biblical marriage:

“don’t belong in the military. … At this stage, the only honorable thing that these losers can do is to fold up their uniforms, turn in their papers, and get the hell out of the American military chaplaincy. If they are unwilling or too cowardly to do so, then the Department of Defense must expeditiously cleanse itself of the intolerant filth that insists on lingering in the ranks of our armed forces.”

Given that this is what passes for tolerance, it’s not surprising that the ACLU and others on the Left want to render meaningless the free exercise of religion guarantee of the First Amendment and any federal and state laws that fortify religious liberty.

Deploying the language of inevitability, such as “being on the wrong side of history,” they seek to persuade the vast majority of Americans that resistance is futile.

Are they right? The answer will depend on a vigorous, renewed fight for liberty in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

Written by Dr. Frank Newport

The two major decisions recently handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court have very direct relationships to public opinion. One of the decisions fits well with majority public opinion. The other, in a broad sense, does not. The first corresponds to public opinion that has shifted significantly over the past several years, while the second relates to public opinion that has been more fixed. One of these is an issue that has very much been tethered to or anchored by Americans’ underlying religious beliefs; the other is a purely secular issue unrelated to the usual concerns based on religion. But it is the religiously tethered attitude that has seen the biggest change and that ends up more in line with the U.S. Supreme Court decision, while the secular attitude has remained unchanged and is more out of sync with the court’s ruling.

The first of these two major SCOTUS decisions, of course, is the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that in essence legalized same-sex marriage across the country. The second — albeit basically a ruling on a technicality — is the King v. Burwell decision that validated the continuation of the Affordable Care Act.

Obergefell falls in line with majority public opinion in the U.S. Americans’ attitudes toward legalizing same-sex marriage have shifted dramatically in recent years, as has been well-documented, with six in 10 in our latest Gallup reading (before the decision) in favor.

This dramatic change in attitudes has occurred despite the fact that the issue of same-sex marriage is one of a cluster of family and reproduction issues that traditionally are strongly connected to religious doctrine, and highly correlated with an individual’s religiosity. Given that religious beliefs are tethered to fundamental beliefs in a Supreme Being and in overall worldviews, one would thus hypothesize that religiously connected attitudes have a very fundamental anchor that would be resistant to change.

But that hasn’t been the case. In fact, attitudes concerning a list of moral behaviors and values traditionally linked to religious doctrines — including same-sex marriage — have shifted quite substantially in recent years, all toward acceptance of what may previously have been more negatively sanctioned behaviors. There are still marked religious differences in tolerance for these types of behaviors, but the shifts have occurred among segments that are both highly religious and not so religious. In short, attitudes connected to the type of family and reproduction issues most highly related to most religions’ normative structures have been the most labile.

We’ve seen relatively little change in terms of attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act, albeit over its fairly short existence and the brief period in which we have measured it. Less than half of Americans said that they approved of the Affordable Care Act in our latest measure, before the SCOTUS decision (we are updating this measure now). And there has been no rapid or significant change in those attitudes in recent years as the provisions of the healthcare law have become operational.

These attitudes about Obamacare are thus the ones that appear to be connected to an underlying anchor or foundation, certainly more so than is the case with same-sex marriage. (While attitudes about the Affordable Care Act are correlated with religiosity, I think that’s more of an artifact of the relationship between religion and politics than it is a representation of religiously driven attitudes.)

If it’s not religion, what is that anchor? One answer to that question is Americans’ fundamental attitudes toward government. It’s quite likely that the healthcare law has become symbolic of the role of government in people’s lives, and that in turn appears to be a very strong and apparently stable base issue in Americans’ minds.

Check out this trend on a core Gallup question asking Americans about their views of the role of government in Americans’ lives:

This trend graph does not show the same type of progressive change seen in moral attitudes since the mid-1990s. The one strong shift in the period immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks quickly dissipated, as attitudes fell back into the accustomed pattern shortly thereafter. If Obamacare is bound up with these fundamental underlying attitudes that are relatively stable and fixed, even though secular in nature, that could help explain why views toward Obamacare are not moving a lot. Government and its role in society, in other words, may be the type of bedrock or fundamental underlying attitude we traditionally associate with religion, while moral issues appear much more likely to be built on “shifting sand.”

There has been a good deal of discussion as to how the presidential candidates — particularly Republican candidates — will handle a changing environment in which their positions on moral issues and values are less mainstream than they were even just a few years ago. Many of the candidates will no doubt back off from a heavy focus on these issues, taking account of public opinion, unless they assume that the quickness with which attitudes changed in one direction means they could change back in the other just as fast — an unlikely possibility.

But a campaign focus on the Affordable Care Act is another matter. Unlike same-sex marriage, the healthcare law does not enjoy majority public opinion (unless that changes in new, post-decision measures). And the lack of a major shift in attitudes toward Obamacare or toward the underlying issue of the role of government in Americans’ lives suggests that these attitudes are strongly held.

Some commentators have assumed that expansion of the role of government is the simple and logical next step in the evolution of American society. Others still view government expansion as a strong evil. But if conservatives have the equivalent of a religious underpinning to their opposition to big government — and if liberals have just as strong an underpinning to their support for big government — then the debate has the potential to become a powerfully important fulcrum on which the election could turn.

If candidates on the left are going to focus on their conviction that the role of government needs to be expanded — say, in terms of intervening in the economic system to reduce inequality or create jobs by increased focus on infrastructure — they are going to have to try to understand why this provokes such a strong reaction from those who are more in the center or on the right. Similarly, if Republican candidates are going to focus on a call for reducing the role of government in Americans’ lives, they are going to have to try to understand why this is so strongly unacceptable to those more in the center or on the left.

I’ve pointed out before how these attitudes about government are two-pronged, involving both philosophic and practical concerns. Candidates are going to have to deal with both. The role of government — along with the usual suspects of the economy and international relations — could be the major playing field on which the coming election is played out. Moral issues and values may be less so.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well.

This article was originally posted at the Gallup.com website.

One day after the [Obergerfell v. Hodges] ruling, I received a press release from Pro-Polygamy.com  one of the largest Polygamy groups east of the Mississippi, located in Maine.  Their slogan is “Polygamy: The Next Civil Rights Battle.”   Last Sunday they followed up with another release of an editorial.   Both items complain, “all that Kennedy declared about the importance of marriage to those who choose same sex marriage (SSM) equally applies to others who choose unrelated consenting adult polygamy (UCAP).”

Mark Henkle of Pro-Polygamy states, “for UCAPs, only one obstacle to freedom remains to be overcome – the outstanding bigotry of big government still unconstitutionally mandating an arbitrary determinant of “two-person unions” for the definition of marriage. After that, polygamy will be included.”

Numerous commentators, and even Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, have also noted that the SCOTUS ruling contains no logical basis for prohibiting polygamy or practically any other limit on marriage. This supports the comment in my media statement that, “if marriage can mean anything, it ultimately means nothing. When marriage loses its meaning, society and children suffer.  When children suffer, government expands. When government expands, liberty contracts.”

By the way, homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, the polyamorous, are not the only ones looking for societal approval based upon sexual orientation.  This article on the blog of former U.S. Congressman Allen West referencing a more detailed and disturbing article from the Northern Colorado Gazette says there is a quietly growing group of “experts” claiming that pedophilia is a sexual orientation worthy of special rights and recognition.

One such group is the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. The IASHS lists, on its website, a list of “basic sexual rights” that includes “the right to engage in sexual acts or activities of any kind whatsoever, providing they do not involve nonconsensual acts, violence, constraint, coercion or fraud.” Another right is to, “be free of persecution, condemnation, discrimination, or societal intervention in private sexual behavior” and “the freedom of any sexual thought, fantasy or desire.” The organization also says that no one should be “disadvantaged because of age.”

For all practical purposes, the tax-funded sex education/abortion giant, Planned Parenthood, has made similar statements in defense of their school programs for years.

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Written by Diane Medved

President Barack Obama was so romantic when commenting on the U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 ruling that same-sex marriage be permitted nationally.  “Love is Love,” he declared, in a puzzling statement of the obvious.

Yes, love is love. But it is not marriage, though the president implied that’s so. Do all people who deeply love each other naturally want to marry?

The nursery rhyme that “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” is as outdated as the horse and carriage. Nowadays more Americans are single than married. Many live together; many just hook up. Others cultivate relationships for years but don’t marry.

Love is love. It is a feeling. It can waver and wane and disappear. More marriages based on how spouses feel will mean more divorces, and divorce is inevitably sad, divisive and, when children are involved, becomes difficult, uncomfortable and complicated.

Redefining institutions is a dangerous business. Changing an institution into a feeling is absurd, but it has happened. Marriage, in every culture, through all time, was the setting designated as the procreative, child-rearing core of societies. Without the purpose of man and woman creating offspring that they together raise, marriage would not have endured. Why would the world’s major religions sanctify–set aside–marriage as a glorified institution if societies have no stake in its welfare? Marriage would have faded or morphed thousands of years before if it was defined as a declaration of feelings.

But now that the Supreme Court has decided love is the legally recognized criterion for marriage, they’re going to have a tough time upholding other criteria. Triplet sisters with a close bond certainly deserve to marry as much as two strangers! And should they decide to obtain sperm and become pregnant, isn’t it nicer for a child to have THREE mothers rather than merely two? Doesn’t a child deserve more legally recognized love, rather than less?

Love is love, and now it’s marriage. Love comes in many different types, none more than a mother for her child. I know many who claim their mothers are their best friends. That bond cannot be surpassed; who is to say it is less permanent than those of the same generation? Children should be able to marry their mothers. At age 4, my son Danny pledged to marry me. I remain solidly married to his father and Danny chose a brilliant wife, but we continue our commitment to each other, so why not marriage?

Love is love, so if someone currently married to another–or others–finds a willing person to add to his/her constellation of love, then clearly under the new definition, he should not be denied marriage. Isn’t it better for children if Mom and Dad or Moms and Dads, remain together? Why should the government require divorce? Isn’t that bad for children? Isn’t divorce economically disruptive? Love is love. How dare the government limit one’s love to just one other person?

Ahh, but government makes many inconsistent laws. When logic dictates one thing, legislators often ignore it. Love is marriage for gay and straight unrelated couples. Love as marriage is forbidden if you love too many people, or love family members or have no divorce.

There are many ways to show respect for those with all sexual orientations. Government does not impede private relationships between people. But like every other culture at every other time, our nation retains a stake in children being born and raised in the environment that offers them the best opportunity to thrive.  That is the only relationship that should be encouraged. Every person is worthy of respect, but not every relationship is worthy of marriage.

The American version of the English language is confused when love is defined as marriage and marriage defined as love. Feelings make poor basis for reliability and predictability, and so with this change, all marriages become tougher to uphold and defend.

This article was first published at the Micheal Medved blog.

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention just released a document titled “Here We Stand: An Evangelical Declaration on Marriage,”  signed by scores of religious leaders. It is largely an excellent document that embodies an unequivocal, courageous commitment to truth.

That said, it also makes the troubling claim that Christians ought not be angry: “Outrage and panic are not the responses of those confident in the promises of a reigning Christ Jesus.”

My concern about this may seem an unnecessary quibble, but the notion that Christians ought not feel angry is integral to the serious problem of Christian silence on matters related to homosexuality.

This statement echoes what Trinity Evangelical Divinity School New Testament professor D.A. Carson said in a recent interview with Desiring God: “This is no time for panic, or resentment, and it is certainly no time for hate.”

Clearly, it is no time for panic, and it’s no time for hate if by hate Dr. Carson is referring to hatred of persons.

I think, however, that resentment of injustice and hatred of wickedness are warranted. A fuller, more nuanced discussion would have been helpful in freeing Christians from bondage to a neutered, passionless complaisance regarding a pernicious Court decision that embodies pernicious ideas about marriage and homoeroticism.

The claims about anger expressed in the declaration and articulated by Dr. Carson seem to contradict the views of Leon Podles in an article titled “Unhappy Fault” published in Touchstone Magazine:

[M]any Christians have a false understanding of the nature and role of anger. It is seen as something negative, something that a Christian should not feel.

In the sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, those who dealt with the bishops have consistently remarked that the bishops never expressed outrage or righteous anger, even at the most horrendous cases of abuse and sacrilege.

…
Conrad Baars noticed this emotional deformation in the clergy in the mid-twentieth century….In forgetting that growth in virtue was the goal of the Christian’s moral life, it forgot that the emotions, all emotions, including anger and hate, are part of human nature and must be integrated into a virtuous life.

Baars had been imprisoned by the Nazis. He knew iniquity firsthand and that there was something wrong with those who did not hate it:

A little reflection will make it clear that there is a big difference between the person who knows solely that something is evil and ought to be opposed, and the one who in addition also feels hate for that evil, is angry that it is corrupting or harming his fellow-men, and feels aroused to combat it courageously and vigorously.

Wrath is a necessary and positive part of human nature: “Wrath is the strength to attack the repugnant; the power of anger is actually the power of resistance in the soul,” wrote Josef Pieper. The lack of wrath against injustice, he continued, is a deficiency: “One who does good with passion is more praiseworthy than one who is ‘not entirely’ afire for the good, even to the forces of the sensual realm.”

Aquinas, too, says that “lack of the passion of anger is also a vice” because a man who truly and forcefully rejects evil will be angry at it. The lack of anger makes the movement of the will against evil “lacking or weak.” He quotes John Chrysostom: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong.”

…

As Gregory the Great said, “Reason opposes evil the more effectively when anger ministers at her side.”

…

Sorrow at evil without anger at evil is a fault….

I’m not alone in my concern about the ERLC’s statement about anger. New Testament scholar Robert A. Gagnon is also troubled:

I believe the unnamed author of the document…erred in claiming that Christians should not express outrage at this decision….When I read the document, this statement jumped out at me more than any other. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one for whom this was the case. Christianity Today highlighted that remark above all others (in apparent approval, unfortunately).

Jesus expressed outrage at sin repeatedly in his ministry (the cleansing of the temple is a fairly concrete case in point). So did John the Baptist (his direct criticism of Herod Antipas for taking his brother’s wife is an obvious instance). So did Paul (I would say that outrage was a hallmark of his comments on tolerance for the incestuous man in 1 Cor 5). So did John of Patmos in Revelation (comparing the Roman Empire and its emperors to a harlot and a disgusting 7-headed beast rising from the sea, a puppet of the dragon that symbolizes Satan; likewise symbolizing the provincial imperial cult leaders as a blasphemous beast rising from the earth).

Friends, if this were the Supreme Court attempting to restore the Dred Scott ruling, would it be unchristian to express “outrage”?…Democracy and liberty in America have been struck the greatest body blow in our lifetime. The action of the five lawless Justices will have enormous negative repercussions for the church corporately and Christians individually. And outrage at egregious immorality is not antithetical to love. This action by the Lawless 5 will harm many, especially those who experience same-sex attractions. We should have a godly outrage toward that.

In my view, although the statement polarizes outrage and faith (implicitly also love), the real polarization is between outrage and “niceness.”

It is troubling to have religious leaders advocating a generalized prohibition of anger. There exists evil in the world about which those who know truth should outrage. God does not enjoin followers of Christ never to feel or express anger. We need to guard how we express anger, and we must  temper anger when excessive. But we ought to feel anger about wickedness that harms those we are commanded to love.

Here are just a few evils that warrant Christian outrage:

• We should feel anger that incipient human lives are being daily snuffed out.
• We should feel anger that judges and lawmakers deem the slaughter of the unborn a “right.”
• We should have felt anger when men, women, and children were bought and sold as chattel during the slave era.
• We should have felt anger when black men were lynched.
• We should have felt anger when Plessy v. Ferguson was passed by another group of feckless justices, reinforcing the practice of treating blacks as inferior to whites.
• We should have felt anger over the imprisonment and extermination of Jews by the Nazis.
• We should feel anger when girls and women today are bought or traded for the twisted pleasure of men.
• We should feel anger when children are abused and adults conceal and facilitate their abuse.
• We should feel anger about the existence of child pornography.
• We should feel anger when teachers introduce our little ones to perversion in our taxpayer-funded schools and call it good.
• We should feel anger when teachers in taxpayer-funded schools teach that all family structures are equally valuable.
• We should feel angry when our laws and policies embody the false and destructive idea that children have no inherent right to both a mother and father.
• We should feel angry over parades that celebrate perversion in our streets and when our elected officials join in the corrupt chorus rejoicing in the normalization of sodomy as an “identity” and non-marital sodomitic unions as “marriages.”
• We should be outraged when public high school “educators” teach the egregiously obscene, pro-homosexual play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes to high school students.

And we should feel outrage that parents of an eight-year-old boy permitted him to cross-dress and “vogue” in the recent New York City “pride” parade after which throngs of adults with darkened minds cackled and shrieked at the tragic spectacle of an exploited little boy in a dress sashaying across a stage.

Perhaps the ERLC marriage declaration needed to be more carefully crafted in order to make a clearer distinction between permissible and warranted righteous wrath and impermissible types of  expressions of anger. Perhaps the writer or writers could have distinguished between bitterness and appropriate anger at evil that harms. Perhaps they should have warned against excessive anger.

With all due deference to men far wiser and knowledgeable than me, I think what America needs right now is righteous anger and fearless, impassioned denunciation of a sexuality and marriage ideology that deprives children of their rights and threatens the temporal and eternal lives of men and women.

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The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will soon issue a ruling on same-sex “marriage.” In the video below, Princeton University Professor Robert P. George tells IFI that  Christians should be in prayer about the Justices’ decision:

“Prayer is the most powerful weapon we have.”

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to visit The Defend Marriage Pledge website. Add your name to send a clear message to the justices of the SCOTUS, asking them to uphold God’s biblical plan for marriage and to uphold the choice of the American people.

It is vital for people of faith to let the justices know that millions of American voters stand united in defense of biblical marriage: one man and one woman.  We cannot remain silent when our government officials mandate policies that conflict with God’s design of marriage.

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A conservative legal organization is calling for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to recuse herself from deciding the marriage case now before the court.

“A judge should avoid the appearance of impropriety as much as possible,” says Roger Gannam, senior counsel with Liberty Counsel.

Ginsburg, a far-left justice, had conducted five same-sex marriage ceremonies before the high court heard the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges in April. A ruling is coming in June.

More recently, Ginsburg presided over the so-called marriage of two men in Washington, D.C., reportedly emphasizing the word “Constitution” in the ceremony to the delight of  ttendees.

Gannam complains that Ginsburg is an “activist” for same-sex marriage rather than an impartial justice while the Supreme Court, he points out, is weighing the future legal definition of marriage in the United States.

He also points to statements Ginsburg made last February to the press on the subject.

“She basically said she thinks America is ready for same-sex marriage,” says the attorney, “and what she doesn’t seem to understand, or at least respect, is that it’s not the job – it’s not the role of the U.S. Supreme Court – to decide what America is ready for.”

OneNewsNow reported last September that Ginsburg praised the “genius of the Constitution” for allowing her to preside over her first homosexual ceremony in 2013.

That praise apparently only goes so far. A year before that ceremony, Ginsburg told Egyptian legal scholars that they should pattern that country’s constitution on others around the world, not the one in the United States she would later describe as “genius.”

When an influential political leader states that, when it comes to abortion, our “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed”; when a New York Times columnist tells us we need to remove homosexual practice from our “sin list”; when the Solicitor General tells the U.S. Supreme Court that, potentially, religious schools could lose their tax exemption if they refuse to redefine marriage – when statements like this are being made on a regular basis, don’t tell me I’m overreacting when I sound the alarm.

Recently, after I posted yet another “wake up” call online, a woman accused me of “fear mongering” and called me “Chicken Little” on my Twitter feed.

Ironically, she claimed to be a truth-based realist in her bio, yet it seems that her personal, anti-Christian biases had robbed her of her ability to think clearly, since it is anything but fear mongering to tell American believers that we had better come to grips with the most aggressive assault on our faith in our nation’s history.

I’ve often pointed out that, 10 years ago, when I began to say that, whereas gay activists came out of the closet in the late 1960s, they now want to put us in the closet, I was greeted with mockery and derision. “No one wants to put you in the closet!”

A few years ago, I noticed a change in sentiment, with people now saying, “Bigots like you belong in the closet!”

Now, with the U.S. Supreme Court potentially poised to make same-sex “marriage” the law of the land (this is not a foregone conclusion but could well happen), believers are still saying, “What’s the big deal? How does this affect me?”

How can so many of us be so self-centered and blind?

Cultural commentators like John Zmirak have recently posted articles with provocative titles like, “Gay Totalitarianism and the Coming Persecution of Christians,” with subtitles declaring, “Hatred of the Gospel is boiling over into the vilification of Christians. State violence won’t be far behind, history teaches.”

Another Zmirak article proclaims, “If the Supreme Court Imposes Same Sex Marriage, You Could Lose Your Church,” noting that “Obama’s Solicitor General admits that the feds will treat orthodox Christians like racists.”

A few weeks ago, I posed the question, “Could Biblical Preaching Be Outlawed in America?” Not a few of those responding to the article answered, “Yes!”

After all, if our religious liberties could be eroded so dramatically in a matter of years, who can predict what’s coming next – unless we wake up and start doing what is right today.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that, “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

What kind of world are we leaving to our children?

When our kids or grandchildren ask us one day, “What were you doing when they changed America?”, how we will respond?

Thankfully, there is still time for us to turn the cultural tide, and there are many leaders and individual believers who have refused to capitulate or throw in the towel.

But there are many more who are still slumbering blissfully in the midst of the storm, content with their cozy, non-offensive gospel churches and their meaningless, “Who am I to judge?” mantras.

That’s why I raise my voice as often as possible, seeking to arouse my fellow Americans from their slumber, urging them to see that an anti-Christian tsunami is already flooding the country.

The good news is that, sooner or later, they will recognize I (and others) have been telling the truth without exaggerating or overreacting. The bad news is that by then it could be too late.

This article was originally posted at the Townhall.com website.