Getting Government Out of the Marriage Business

American Thinker ^ | 06/08/2015 | Michael L. Grable

[SeekAndFind]

It seems surreal a single unelected lifetime judge could decide that the nation’s supreme law requires its unwilling states to derail human history’s central social institution. The bad news is that’s likely to happen this month. The good news is that unwilling states can sidestep it.

The lifetime judge is Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy. The supreme law is the U.S. Constitution. The unwilling states are Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The social institution is heterosexual marriage. The case is Obergefell v. Hodges. The issue is whether the U.S. Constitution compels unwilling states to license homosexual marriages. And Justice Kennedy – the balance of power between the Court’s four conservative and four liberal judges – will swing that issue’s decision one way or the other.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t even mention marriage. It does, however, expressly limit the federal government’s powers, and its founding principle reserves all remaining powers exclusively to the states and their people. How then has it eventuated that the sole determinant still standing between the unwilling states and homosexual marriage is a single Supreme Court justice?

The constitutional deus ex machina is the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Lower courts have already used that clause to impose homosexual marriage on 25 unwilling states (only 12 states have voluntarily adopted the federal handwriting on the judicial wall).

But how could a clause in a Reconstruction-era amendment – designed to prevent the postbellum South from abridging the newly acquired equality of its emancipated blacks – have 147 years later become the horse upon which homosexual marriage rides into the supreme law of the land? Are not race and sexual activity different? Is heterosexual marriage tantamount to homosexual slavery?

Like the Constitution itself, the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t mention marriage.

[Mad Dawgg]

"Just know that it may cost you in income taxes, in estate taxes, in property rights, in social security benefits."

So then a guy who never gets married and never decides to take a wife either or any spouse doesn't get the same deal from the US Federal Government.

Why? Sounds like he is not getting equal treatment from the government.

[highball]

You’re right.

Sadly, the right is as likely to favor social engineering as the left; we just disagree with them on what we use it for.

[Wuli]

Equal Protection, in the frame in which the term became part of the 14th amendment, and in what those that framed it meant,

(a) DOES NOT MEAN laws could not establish terms of eligibility for some legal distinction, good or bad, provided they were not framed by prejudice towards someone due to their race, religion or national origin (I don’t see “sexual orientation” there)

and IT DID MEAN

(b) in the exercise of ANY law, those executing a law could not discriminate against (choosing to only execute it against, or failing to execute it in favor of) anyone by reason of their race, religion or national origin.

That’s all it means.

Example: A cop could not ONLY fine African Americans for some offense they never fined a “white person” for. Example: A court could not fail to rule in favor of an African American for an assault made against them by a “white” person.

Equal protection means equal application of the laws as they are (provided they did not discriminate due to race, religion or national origin), but does not mean that those laws cannot make distinctions among who the law does and does not apply to.

It does NOT mean, outside of what law cannot discriminate against, that laws cannot define legal recognition by a law based on any criteria which fails to give legal recognition to someone. The law does this everywhere YOU either don’t fit who the law is talking about, and others do, or you fit who the law is talking about and others do not. That is NOT “unequal protection of the law”. That is the limits of the applicability of the law.

Ah but someone says, what about “gay” marriage.

Without a constitutional amendment enshrining “sexual orientation” into the mandates of the 14th amendment, there is no “equal protection” issue about states defining marriage as what it historically has meant.

Judges who are attempting to add it by judicial fiat are treading on unconstitutional ground.

If they say “same sex” marriage MUST BE PERMITTED, then will not couples who are minors, or siblings or other non-married relatives qualify for “marriage” because they say they fit the new definition that would become the only one allowed - they are a “loving couple that wants to live together”? You think that’s a joke.

That is where we are, because the “loving couple” rationale is at the core of the “same-sex” marriage promotion, and judges accepting it for gays will twist themselves into pretzels trying to say their rationale for “gay” marriage does cannot apply to ANY “loving couple”. They will not get away with saying the law is “unconstitutionally” discriminating against “gays” now, but its O.K. to discriminate against all kinds of other adult “loving couples” and not given THEM marriage licenses also.

It’s an either all or none rationale, or its sheer dishonest hypocrisy. Either states can make distinctions as to who qualifies for marriage, or tons of present distinctions WILL fit what the courts will say is “discriminatory” toward “gay” couples now.

Or maybe the government will have to get out of the marriage business entirely. You want to make a “marriage” contract with someone, and file it in a local court for a “public record”, then go ahead - no limits.