And here it is. And please, don't try to tell me that any of you were surprised by this decision, as it was Justice Kennedy who wrote the 5-4 majority opinion, just as we always knew he would:
The Supreme Court declared Friday that same-sex couples have a right to "marry" anywhere in the United States.
Gay and lesbian couples already could marry in thirty-six states and the District of Columbia. The court's 5-4 ruling means the remaining fourteen states, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans on same-sex marriage.
The outcome is the culmination of two decades of Supreme Court litigation over marriage, and gay rights generally.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, just as he did in the court's previous three major gay rights cases dating back to 1996. It came on the anniversary of two of those earlier decisions.
"No union is more profound than marriage," Kennedy wrote, joined by the court's four more liberal justices.
Mr. Gibbs did the heavy lifting on covering the harrowing implications that will ensue from what he aptly describes as the "gay rights Roe v. Wade," freeing me up to reiterate why nobody should be shocked or surprised or even bat an eyelash at Justice Kennedy having gotten out of the left side of his bed this morning:
I’ve been arguing ever since Lawrence was decided that it would overturn all sorts of laws, as well as federalize most social issues. Lawrence overturned a rather antiquated but still-used sodomy law in Texas on the basis that it interfered with private conduct between consenting adults, among other issues. Clarence Thomas blasted that decision by noting that stupid laws don’t rise to the level of federal scrutiny just based on their stupidity alone, and that the holding in Lawrence would soon be used to justify federal intervention in many other contexts. And here we are. There are, in fact, twenty-one separate references to Lawrence in this document, most of them in the majority opinion. [emphasis added]
Case in point from Justice Kennedy's majority opinion:
As this Court held in Lawrence, same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to enjoy intimate association.
Which isn't the same thing as state-recognized and -sanctioned marriage.
Lawrence invalidated laws that made same-sex intimacy a criminal act. And it acknowledged that “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” 539 U. S., at 567. But while Lawrence confirmed a dimension of freedom that allows individuals to engage in intimate association without criminal liability, it does not follow that freedom stops there. Outlaw to outcast may be a step forward, but it does not achieve the full promise of liberty. [emphasis added]
Which is not the SCOTUS's job and it does not have the constitutional legal authority to mandate - although, as always, it does have the usurped power. This ruling goes orders of magnitude beyond the Lawrence decision. That one decriminalized fudge-packing, which as Justice Thomas said at the time was a silly law because there was no practical way to enforce it in the privacy of its practitioners' homes. Now, the SCOTUS has all but mandated universal homosexuality.
Chief Justice Roberts, perhaps mitigating conservative anger at his second ObamaCare sellout in three years, expands on this self-evident truth in his dissenting opinion:
Neither Lawrence nor any other precedent in the privacy line of cases supports the right that petitioners assert here. Unlike criminal laws banning contraceptives and sodomy, the marriage laws at issue here involve no government intrusion. They create no crime and impose no punishment. Same-sex couples remain free to live together, to engage in intimate conduct, and to raise their families as they see fit. No one is “condemned to live in loneliness” by the laws challenged in these cases — no one. Ante, at 28. At the same time, the laws in no way interfere with the “right to be let alone.”...
The majority goes on to assert in conclusory fashion that the Equal Protection Clause provides an alternative basis for its holding. Ante, at 22. Yet the majority fails to provide even a single sentence explaining how the Equal Protection Clause supplies independent weight for its position, nor does it attempt to justify its gratuitous violation of the canon against unnecessarily resolving constitutional questions. See Northwest Austin Municipal Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U. S. 193, 197 (2009). In any event, the marriage laws at issue here do not violate the Equal Protection Clause, because distinguishing between opposite-sex and same-sex couples is rationally related to the States’ “legitimate state interest” in “preserving the traditional institution of marriage.” Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 585 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment).
It is important to note with precision which laws petitioners have challenged. Although they discuss some of the ancillary legal benefits that accompany marriage, such as hospital visitation rights and recognition of spousal status on official documents, petitioners’ lawsuits target the laws defining marriage generally rather than those allocating benefits specifically. The equal protection analysis might be different, in my view, if we were confronted with a more focused challenge to the denial of certain tangible benefits. Of course, those more selective claims will not arise now that the Court has taken the drastic step of requiring every State to license and recognize "marriages" between same-sex couples. [emphases added]
As usual, Justice Scalia went nuclear in his concurring dissent:
We have no basis for striking down a practice that is not expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment’s text, and that bears the endorsement of a long tradition of open, widespread, and unchallenged use dating back to the Amendment’s ratification. Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples....
Because it never occurred to them that they would ever have to, since in those halcyon days culture and politics were still two separate realms.
....the public debate over same-sex "marriage" must be allowed to continue.
But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law. Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its “reasoned judgment,” thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.13 That is so because “[t]he generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions . . . . ”14
Which anybody before now would have assumed would have been left to the people to decide for themselves at the State level. Which multiple States did only a decade ago, when they realized that they were going to have to do something to protect their culture from radical government encroachment. A protection that the SCOTUS has now battered down.
One would think that sentence would continue: “. . . and therefore they provided for a means by which the People could amend the Constitution,” or perhaps “. . . and therefore they left the creation of additional liberties, such as the freedom to 'marry' someone of the same sex, to the People, through the never-ending process of legislation.” But no. What logically follows, in the majority’s judge-empowering estimation, is: “and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”15 The “we,” needless to say, is the nine of us. “History and tradition guide and discipline [our] inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries.”16 Thus, rather than focusing on the People’s understanding of “liberty”—at the time of ratification or even today—the majority focuses on four “principles and traditions” that, in the majority’s view, prohibit States from defining marriage as an institution consisting of one man and one woman.17
This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy. [emphases added]
Or a constitutional republic, Justice Scalia. Which this country is no longer, and hasn't been for at least six and a half years.
The States were free to adopt whatever laws they like. Now they will be forced to adopt whatever laws Barack Obama and Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagen force upon them. And We the People will be forced to comply.
Hope y'all are stocked up on Crisco.
Exit question: Does this decision shoot Mike Huckabee into the 2016 GOP top tier?
UPDATE: More from Chief Justice Roberts on future implications:
Federal courts are blunt instruments when it comes to creating rights. They have constitutional power only to resolve concrete cases or controversies; they do not have the flexibility of legislatures to address concerns of parties not before the court or to anticipate problems that may arise from the exercise of a new right. Today’s decision, for example, creates serious questions about religious liberty. Many good and decent people oppose same-sex "marriage" as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is—unlike the right imagined by the majority— actually spelled out in the Constitution. Amdt. 1. …
The majority’s decision imposing same sex "marriage" cannot, of course, create any such accommodations. The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to “advocate” and “teach” their views of marriage. Ante, at 27. The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to “exercise” religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses.
Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex "marriage" — when, for example, a religious college provides married student housing only to opposite-sex married couples, or a religious adoption agency declines to place children with same-sex "married" couples. Indeed, the Solicitor General candidly acknowledged that the tax exemptions of some religious institutions would be in question if they opposed same-sex marriage. See Tr. of Oral Arg. on Question 1, at 36–38. There is little doubt that these and similar questions will soon be before this Court. Unfortunately, people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today. [emphases added]
And that's not all - not by a long shot:
Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex "marriage" is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one. It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage. [emphases added]
Of course the court majority left the door open to bigamous and polygamous "marriages". That was the whole point, because those court cases will be next. Also pedophilic "marriage," beastiality "marriage" (gotta bring the animal rights wackos into this sometime), vegesexual "marriage" - it's all in the on-deck circle warming up. Thanks to Justice Kennedy and friends, the sky is literally the limit.
As for real marriage and the God of the Bible Who ordained it, and His followers, Justice Thomas delivers our cultural eulogy:
Aside from undermining the political processes that protect our liberty, the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect. …
In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well. Id., at 7. Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil "marriages" between same-sex couples.
The majority appears unmoved by that inevitability.
Of course, they're not; that inevitability was the whole point.
It makes only a weak gesture toward religious liberty in a single paragraph, ante, at 27. And even that gesture indicates a misunderstanding of religious liberty in our Nation’s tradition. Religious liberty is about more than just the protection for “religious organizations and persons . . . as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” Ibid. Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.7
Although our Constitution provides some protection against such governmental restrictions on religious practices, the People have long elected to afford broader protections than this Court’s constitutional precedents mandate. Had the majority allowed the definition of marriage to be left to the political process — as the Constitution requires — the People could have considered the religious liberty implications of deviating from the traditional definition as part of their deliberative process. Instead, the majority’s decision short-circuits that process, with potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty. [emphases added]
Nothing "potential" about it, Justice Thomas.
Robert Heinlein is cumming in his grave right about now.
UPDATE II: Congressional Republicans try, futiley in light of the inevitable Democrat filibuster and Barack Obama veto, to infringe upon O's and the SCOTUS's usurped Article I, Section 1 powers:
The First Amendment Defense Act seeks to protect individuals and organizations who contend that marriage is between one man and one woman from being targeted with federal taxes or removal of benefits.
For example, the bill would not allow the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of non-profit organizations like religious oriented schools who maintain traditional marriage views.
Labrador, an Idaho-1 Republican, introduced the legislation with fifty-seven co-sponsors,in the lower chamber, while Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced corresponding legislation with eighteen co-sponsors in the Senate.
You can't say that this bill is just for base consumption, since it was filed over a week ago, doubtless in anticipation of the Obergefell ruling.
And one more sneak peak and the Gaystapo tyranny to come, since, after all, Canada is a decade ahead of us in that regard:
In Canada, redefining marriage has led straight to the persecution of Christians. Just a decade ago, Canada made same-sex marriage legal, leading to fines for a Catholic-owned Knights of Columbus hall for refusing to host a homosexual wedding reception. Likewise, in 2005, Calgary Bishop Fred Henry was called before a [Gay] Rights Tribunal for writing a public letter defending Catholic doctrine on marriage. The complaint was withdrawn, but the message was clear: Dissent is not tolerable under the new regime. [emphasis added]
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