On the SCOTUS Gay marriage decision. Funny how every other justice in over 224 years of SCOTUS missed this "right"

A Question For Those Who Celebrate the Gay Marriage Decision Posted: 27 Jun 2015 02:08 PM PDT (John Hinderaker) What would you think if the Court had decided the opposite? That is, if the Court had held that same sex marriage is unconstitutional, so that all state laws approving such unions are void, and all court decisions establishing same sex marriage are overruled. Would you then think it appropriate for “five lawyers,” as Chief Justice Roberts put it, to remove this issue from the democratic process and purport to resolve it by judicial fiat? I am pretty sure you wouldn’t. I am pretty sure that in the face of such a ruling, you would howl with outrage and insist that the issue of same sex marriage be determined by democratic processes. I realize that hardly anyone on the Left acknowledges any obligation to be consistent. But logically, the issue of same sex marriage either is governed by the Constitution, or it isn’t. The truth is that the Constitution is silent with regard to marriage, which has always been a matter of state law. To assert that the Constitution mandates gay marriage is as outrageous as to assert that it prohibits gay marriage. It does neither. Liberals have become accustomed to the idea that Supreme Court decisions can help, but never hurt, their causes. But that isn’t true. At one time, the Court held that there is a fundamental constitutional right to own slaves, which Congress could not limit in the territories. (The justices in the Dred Scott majority were loyal Democrats, doing their party’s bidding much like today’s progressives.) Subsequently, the Court held that wage and hour laws were unconstitutional because they infringed the fundamental right of contract. Both of those cases were decided on precisely the same theory as the Court’s gay marriage decision, i.e., substantive due process. It is disheartening to see the almost universal acclaim received by a decision that is, in terms of process, a raw and unconstitutional usurpation of power. One would think that there should be many Americans who care about the Constitution, regardless of their views on gay marriage. But that does not appear to be the case.

Anthony Kennedy Discovers a Right to Gay Marriage [Updated]

Posted: 26 Jun 2015 07:26 AM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Two hundred twenty-four years after the Constitution was ratified, Anthony Kennedy and four loyal Democrats have discovered, hidden somewhere in its provisions, a right to gay marriage. This so-called right, deemed “fundamental” by the five-justice majority, was undreamed of until a few years ago.

From Justice Scalia’s dissent Posted: 26 Jun 2015 01:24 PM PDT (Scott Johnson) Justice Scalia’s dissent in today’s gay marriage diktat is all must reading. Short of posting the whole thing, let me offer these pointed excerpts (to which I have added some paragraphing in the interest of readability): The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance. Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves. * * * * * [W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not. They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution." Steven Heyward Let’s not forget Barack Obama’s position on marriage from not all that long ago (and Hillary Clinton, too).  Funny how agreeing with Obama and Hillary just a few years ago now gets you marked out as a vile bigot.