Hope & Pray for Judicial Honesty
Radio Commentary, 90.7, 91.7 New Life FM, November 21, 2014 – By Sue Ella Deadwyler
With judge after judge ruling traditional marriage unconstitutional and shaking their fists in the face of God, there’s hope on the horizon. On November 6th the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2 to 1 to uphold the right of citizens to define marriage in Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan and Ohio. The judges filled that decision with, truly, remarkable comments.
For example: they said, “Our judicial commissions did not come with such a sweeping grant of authority, [to allow two of the three of us] to make such a vital policy call for the 32 million citizens who live within the four states of the Sixth Circuit. What we have authority to decide instead is a legal question: Does the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibit a state from defining marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman?
“It is not society’s laws or … any one [religion], but nature’s laws (that men and women complement each other biologically), that created the policy imperative. Even today, the only thing anyone knows for sure about the long-term impact of redefining marriage is that they do not know.” That was an amazingly honest statement! But, a case in Louisiana has added even more honesty. Days after that November 6th decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals received a brief that argued, “If ‘marriage’ means fulfilling one’s personal choices regarding intimacy … it is difficult to see how states could regulate marriage on any basis. If personal autonomy is the essence of marriage then not only gender [which means behavior], but also number, [family] relationship, and even species are insupportable limits on that principle, and they all will fall. This is not a slippery slope on which [they want] to set us. It is a bottomless pit into which they desire to throw us. It is clearly within a state’s right to define marriage between a man and a woman.”
Let me emphasize that last fact. If personal autonomy, meaning personal preference, is the essence of marriage, no coupling can be denied, whether the coupling is with the same sex, multiple partners, family members or species other than humans. Since the court decisions legalizing same-sex marriage do not prohibit polygamy, polyamory (group sex), incest, or bestiality, the Fifth Circuit Court brief, accurately, concludes that laws against all such sexual conduct will “fall.” For Georgia Insight I’m Sue Ella Deadwyler, your Capitol correspondent.