By now you’ve heard that a federal appeals court struck down California’s voter-mandated ban on homosexual marriages. Every time the voters reject homosexual marriage, it’s the courts that overrule them.

Usually, I am not a fan of law by majority vote, but in an era where judges rule in terms of their own predilections, sometimes the sane majority has to step in and set things right in opposition to the insane minority.

The Constitution gives us the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” This was done with Proposition 8 when more than 7 million people in the liberal state of California voted no to a practice that makes neither moral nor logical sense. It shows that there is still some sanity in America.

Consider this argument from Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who was appointed to the court by former President Jimmy Carter. (Yes, elections do matter.):

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”

The ruling is about a particular sexual practice, and based on that behavior people should be permitted to marry. On what basis did the court give homosexuals the right to marry without first ascertaining the origin and nature of marriage? Marriage is not mentioned in the Constitution. This means that its definition is extra-constitutional. Appealing to the 14^th Amendment, as 2 of the 3 justices ruled, does not answer these two questions: What is the origin of marriage and who gets to define it?

Today’s courts have made the Constitution into a wax nose that they bend and twist into any shape they want. The 14^th Amendment is not about marriage, and certainly not about homosexual marriage, and the judges on this panel know it. Appealing to the 14^th Amendment does not make homosexual marriage any more valid than the 1^st Amendment made polygamy valid when polygamists appealed to it to justify their multiple marriage views based on their religion. The same is true of PETA’s appeal to the 13^th Amendment to give rights to whales.

The Constitution assumes a law outside itself. There are no prohibitions against murder, stealing, rape, etc. Why are these behaviors morally wrong? Why weren’t they mentioned in the Constitution? Because our founders believed that there was a God-given law. We see this in the Declaration of Independence by an appeal to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” and “the Supreme Judge of the world.” There was no need to make a detailed list of moral commands since this already existed or could be ascertained.

Notice how the Supreme Court ruled in the 19^th century when the issue of polygamy came before it. In Reynolds v. United States (1878) the Court determined that “[Polygamy] is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity had produced in the Western world.” Once Christianity goes, everything goes with it. We are on a slippery slope to the redefinition of everything.

In The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States (1890), the court determined that “[t]he organization of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in a measure, a return to barbarism. It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity had produced in the Western world.”

In Davis v. Beason (1890), a similar ruling was made:

“Bigamy and polygamy are crimes by the laws of all civilized and Christian countries. . . . To call their advocacy a tenet of religion is to offend the common sense of mankind. If they are crimes, then to teach, advise and counsel their practice is to aid in their commission, and such teaching and counseling are themselves criminal and proper subjects of punishment, as aiding and abetting crime are in all other cases.”

The courts no longer have any direction or moral certainty. When legal decision making gets to this point, no one is safe. Redefinition is the name of the game.