Viewpoint has been arguing ever since our first post last May that legalizing gay marriage will have the ultimate consequence of destroying the institution of marriage altogether. The rationale given for the recent decision by judge Richard A. Kramer of San Francisco County Superior Court overturning California's marriage laws provides all the confirmation of the validity of this concern that one could ask for.
According to the New York Times Judge Kramer stated that "the denial of marriage to same-sex couples appears impermissibly arbitrary," thus violating the equal protection clause of the state's Constitution. In other words, defining marriage as a bond between one man and one woman is unsupported by anything more than cultural habit and preference.
The fact is, of course, that any secular definition of marriage is going to be arbitrary. No matter how a legislature chooses to define marriage, if religion and tradition are ruled to be inadequate grounds for the definition, it can be based on nothing more than sociological fashion. Thus if marriage cannot be limited to one man and one woman because that would be an arbitrary restriction, on what grounds will we be able to limit marriage to just two people?
If the gender of the spouses is a matter of cultural caprice why is not the number of spouses? If two thousand years of tradition isn't enough to eliminate what is seen as the discretionary nature of heterosexual marriage, how will courts be able to uphold laws establishing marriage as a union of just two persons?
The answer is, of course, that they won't. If Judge Kramer's reasoning is accepted by the appeals courts the door will have swung wide open for redefining marriage any way some judge finds agreeable. There will certainly be no difficulty in finding courts sufficiently sympathetic to those who wish to push the social envelope by demanding the right to participate in group marriage. But when marriage means whatever anybody wants it to mean then it will really mean nothing at all and will cease to exist, at least in the form we recognize today.
The addled and myopic reasoning which afflicts Judge Kramer's opinion is not untypical of contemporary liberal jurisprudence, which is why it is imperative that conservative judges be appointed to the federal bench and Supreme Court. The Left knows its ideas, such as they are, would not prevail in state or national legislatures so it circumvents these by enacting its agenda through judicial fiat.
If Democrats are allowed to continue to obstruct and block President Bush's nominees, who are the only hope we have of turning back this "judicial usurpation of democracy", we will continue to get more sophomoric judicial opinions such as the vacuous judgment handed down by Justice Kennedy in the recent Simmons case and the witless nullity delivered by Judge Kramer in this one.