Objections To Marriage Equality Decisions Are Actually Objections To The Constitution

With federal District Courts in Utah and Oklahoma having recently struck down deliberately discriminatory gay marriage bans in those states the Christofascists and their whores trained circus dogs in the Republican Party are hyperventilating.  Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) has even introduced the "State Marriage Defense Act Of 2014," which would require federal agencies to look into a person's "legal residence" when determining marital status and how federal law would be applied. The result?  If one was a legally married couple and moved to an anti-gay state you'd suddenly no longer be married and all attendant marital benefits would disappear.  Weber's bill is an affront to the U.S. Constitution and the concept of equal protection.  A piece in Think Progress looks at how these anti-gay marriage extremists ultimately are attacking the U.S. Constitution.  Here are highlights:

Federal judges have overturned state bans on same-sex marriage in three states now — California, Utah, and Oklahoma — in addition to decisions by state courts in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, and New Mexico. The most recent rulings in Utah and Oklahoma are thorough but reach a simple conclusion: defining marriage as only between a man and a woman accomplishes nothing and only serves to discriminate against same-sex couples. The U.S. Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law, the judges wrote, so the disparate treatment of these amendments violates this principle. 

Opponents of marriage equality respond to these decisions by decrying “unelected judges” who are “overturning the will of the people.”

These statements imply that a majority vote (or a supermajority, as was the case when Oklahoma passed its ban) should supersede Constitutional protections, but that notion actually betrays the fundamental principles of the Constitution. Indeed, the founding fathers were insistent that a pure democracy with majoritarian rule would fail, which is why they instead created a republic, a representative government with checks and balances and a Constitution that is particularly difficult to amend. Here’s what some of them had to say about pure democracy:

John Marshall: “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
John Adams: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
James Madison: “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
Alexander Hamilton: “It has been observed by an honorable gentleman that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved, that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

Though the U.S. Supreme Court has thus far stopped short of addressing the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage, it has asserted that marriage is a “fundamental right.” The judges in Utah and Oklahoma have observed that by denying individuals the ability to choose who they marry on the basis of sexual orientation contradicts that right, because a right without the freedom of choice is no right at all. People may disapprove of same-sex couples marrying — though fewer do with each passing poll — but the Constitution and its judicial branch were specifically designed to protect minorities from the discriminatory whims of the majority, and in these cases, it is doing just that.

The Christofascists hate accurate history of the nation's founding documents and the intent of the Founding Fathers because they consistently are at odds with the Christofascists' goal of a theocracy and majority mob rule.  It's little wonder that they try to take over local school boards so that they can rewrite history.