Free Republic

Calif. high court to hear challenge. There is little common ground between those on either side of the charged debate over marriage in California. But on the eve of the state Supreme Court hearing in San Francisco on Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage, advocates on both sides describe the issue in similar high-stakes rhetoric. “History swings on very small hinges sometimes,” said Jim Garlow, pastor at Skyline Church in La Mesa and one of the state's highest-profile supporters of Proposition 8. “On a broader scale, beyond the scope of the definition of marriage, this is about whether the social...

In the long, dreary annals of judicial idiocy, perhaps the stupidest words ever uttered by a black-robed booby were contained in the recent California Supreme Court decision mandating homosexual marriage. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Ronald M. George declared: “In light of these circumstances, we conclude that retention of the traditional definition of marriage (a man and a woman) does not constitute a state interest sufficiently compelling, under the strict scrutiny equal protection standard, to justify withholding that status from same-sex couples.” Curiously, George is saying the government of California lacks any compelling interest in maintaining the integrity of...

Advocates for same-sex marriage should feel embarrassed by current efforts to recycle the three most discredited ideas of the “Free Love” Revolution of the 1960’s. Most Americans look back at the radical notions of that rebellious and drug-soaked era with skepticism and discomfort, if not outright regret. The sweeping changes in intimate relationships may have provoked excitement some forty years ago, but those alterations produced so many painful costs in terms of shattered families, degraded culture and proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases that even the most enthusiastic revolutionaries have come to reconsider the advisability of encouraging copulation without consequences or...

They say we are tired of culture wars. Tell that to the California Supreme Court, which didn't sound tired at all when it lobbed a big, fat hand grenade into the marriage debate. Ideas have consequences. And the California court endorsed two big, brand-new, very bad ideas. The first idea is that the internationally recognized human right to marry includes same-sex marriage. In U.S. constitutional law, fundamental human rights are those deeply rooted in our traditions. Not even in Massachussetts or in New Jersey could the courts quite stomach the idea that same-sex marriage is deeply rooted in those traditions....

Americans seem mesmerized by the word "change." And, by golly, they sure got it last week from the California Supreme Court. It is difficult to imagine a single social change greater than redefining marriage from opposite sex to include members of the same sex. Nothing imaginable -- leftward or rightward -- would constitute as radical a change in the way society is structured as this redefining of marriage for the first time in history: Not another Prohibition, not government taking over all health care, not changing all public education to private schools, not America leaving the United Nations, not rescinding...