One big piece of news in America is that California Proposition 8, which was passed by the majority of the voters in that state, has been overturned by a federal judge.
For those who aren’t familiar with Proposition 8, allow me to refresh your memory. Two years ago, the California Supreme Court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violated the state constitution. In response, supporters of traditional marriage followed California’s legal and democratic process: They collected enough signatures to put a proposed amendment to the state constitution on the ballot.
Two years later, secularist and gay activists appealed to the federal courts, obviously displeased with the outcome of the election. Throughout the 13-day trial, Judge Vaughn Walker’s sympathies were clear to observers. Even though his ruling isn’t surprising, his dismissal of the opinions of the people of California and five thousand-plus years of human tradition is breath-taking. Then again, inasmuch as Walker is one of the few openly gay federal judges, maybe his dismissal shouldn’t shock us, either.
In other words, the people of the state of California voted against the assault on marriage, and for a while it had to be accepted as the law. However, once again it was taken out of the hands of voters by someone who had a stake in the case and had never been a neutral party in the first place, and simply passed over by activists and their advocates in the corrupt American judiciary. Of course, this seems to happen more often than not in “democratic” societies when people don’t vote the way they’re supposed to. Just like the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland.
This ruling is a sort of foolishness which is only surpassed by attempted intellectual justifications of it. The central question is not whether “the purpose of marriage is to build a family”, as all manner of familial associations can feasibly be contrived of – polygamous, tribal, extended, interchangeable etc. What is at issue is whether the politicized social identity of “homosexuals” is deserving of the privileged legal recognition of their romantic unions, which had formerly been reserved (since the Napoleonic Code) exclusively for Man and Woman. Apart from the transparently deranged ideology homosexual emancipation, voluntarism, and criticisms of the nuclear family, there is little basis for this political agitation on behalf of an identitarian faction whose only basis for voluntary association is their shared exclusion for heterosexual romantic unions and practices.
And one final comment: While this was greeted as “great” news by the American public, just imagine the outrage, dear readers, if an Iranian judge overturned a democratically selected outcome in Iran. Wouldn’t that be a cause for the controlled media’s concern and universal condemnation of Iran?
