A constitutional amendment to protect marriage is not an attack
on federalism but an exercise of it. The amendment power exists in
our federalist Constitution for a moment as dire as this one. The
nation’s judicial tyrants, who operate like the legal arm of
ACT-UP, will continue to hack up marriage unless the people stop
them through a constitutional amendment.
Seeking to dupe conservatives into confusion and passivity,
homosexual activists like Congressman Barney Frank hector them
about their supposed failure to uphold “federalism” if they support
the amendment. Since when has Frank been an expert on federalism?
Earlier this year Frank said Texas didn’t have a right under
federalism to prohibit homosexual conduct. But now that the
autonomy of his own state (which amounts to the autonomy of
Massachusetts judges) is under discussion, he is suddenly talking
about the states as laboratories of democracy. And don’t worry,
says Frank, our experiment won’t blow up in your face. “Vermont
filed civil unions. No state has said that civil unions done in
Vermont are binding in my state. It hasn’t happened,” he said on
ABC’s This Week, arguing that states don’t need a
constitutional amendment to prevent the transportation of
homosexual marriage to their states.
It is too bad no one on the panel bothered to ask Frank: So does
this mean you won’t try and transport homosexual marriage to other
states? Does this mean you and your activist friends won’t
challenge the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (the
half-hearted Clinton bill)?
Obviously they will. They won’t respect the opposition of states
to “homosexual marriage” for the simple reason that the activists
believe it is a constitutional right no state should be able to
prohibit. It is only because a constitutional amendment protecting
marriage would foil judges in their pocket from making it a
national right that these activists have to fake an interest in
federalism for the moment. The it-won’t-come-to-your-state
reassurances are coming from charlatans like Frank who have every
intention of bringing it to your state.
The choice is clear here: either the people make traditional
marriage the law of the land through a constitutional amendment or
activists will make homosexual marriage the law of the land through
judicial tyrants.
It is absurd to say that if the people use a power contained in
a Constitution belonging to them on such a vital matter to ward off
judicial tyrants they aren’t respecting federalism. This
constitutional amendment, on an issue far more fundamental to our
civilization than other issues that occasioned constitutional
amendments (such as letting 18 year olds vote), is a fulfillment of
federalism — the people in the states coming together to salvage a
Constitution a handful of judges are busy shredding. It is hard to
imagine the authors of The Federalist Papers advocating
that the people sit on their hands while judges foist homosexual
marriage on them.
Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the Lawrence decision
underscores the urgency of a constitutional amendment. The Supreme
Court, in its reasoning, is already committed to homosexual
marriage (and polygamous marriage, as Utah polygamist Tom Green had
his lawyer recently argue: “It doesn’t bother anyone [and with] no
compelling state interest in what you can do in your own home with
consenting adults, you should be allowed to do it.”)
Moreover, the court is immersed in a legal culture that, as
Scalia says, “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual
agenda.” He notes the “fact that the American Association of Law
Schools (to which any reputable law school must seek to belong)
excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its
job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does
not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly
engages in homosexual conduct.”
To think that judges who emerge from this culture will protect
the federalist right of states to refuse recognition of the marital
status of same-sex couples in Massachusetts and Vermont is
delusionary. The judicial elite are in the business of closing down
conservative laboratories of liberty and mandating labs of
license.
Scalia warned Americans to discount the Supreme Court’s claim
that the Lawrence decision wouldn’t lead to homosexual
marriage. The “Court says that the present case ‘does not involve’
whether the government must give formal recognition to any
relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter,” Scalia writes.
“Do not believe it?This case ‘does not involve’ the issue of
homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that
principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this
Court.”
The only thing standing between this judicial juggernaut and
homosexual marriage is a constitutional amendment. To resist one on
supposed federalist grounds will not protect any state’s right to
maintain traditional marriage but guarantees that the states lose
it to judges — judges whose respect for marriage is about as deep
as their respect for the Constitution.
