You know, the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court didn’t do what so many people said it did. It did not reverse the discrimination that prevented homosexuals from getting married. In fact, homosexuals have been able to get married all along; no law prevented that. That’s because marriage is the union between a man and a woman and gays and lesbians have always been able to marry someone, as long as he or she is the opposite sex.
What the Mass. court did was change the meaning of the word “marriage.” Of course, saying something is so, doesn’t make it so. The court could decide to redefine the meaning of “mother” to include men, but all the judicial rulings in the world won’t allow me to bear children. This is why people are saying that the court’s ruling, taken to its logical end, simply removes all meaning from the word “marriage” so that by meaning nothing, it means everything: polygamy, polyamory, incest, bestiality. If marriage doesn’t mean what thousands of years of human civilization says it means, then it means anything.
This is the extreme of judicial activism: No longer content to redefine law or write new ones, something which is clearly outside their constitutional jurisdiction, the courts are now re-writing language and re-defining the foundations of civilization. Unless the people—the vast majority of whom do not agree with judicial activism, but remain like silent sheep nonetheless—wake up and demand action, then we continue the slide into oblivion. But if the people do act, we can still salvage what remains of civilization.
What we need is for our political leaders to be as fully outraged at this as we are. What if the Legislature simply declared that the Supreme Judicial Court had gone beyond its constitutional jurisdiction in creating new law and it wasn’t going to allow the court to do this?
The people must become and remain outraged. We have to organize, join organizations that fight this, pressure our reps who will be at the constitutional convention in February, send our support to political leaders who support our aims, ask our priests to preach about this on Sundays.
There’s lots to do, we just have to have the will to do it.