As the world now knows, a bare 5-4 majority of the United States Supreme Court ruled last Friday that the U.S. Constitution requires every state in the nation to perform and accept same-sex “marriage,” even if doing so violates their laws as determined by their own elected officials or voters.
The majority’s opinion is as long on empathetic rhetoric for same-sex couples — waxing poetically about their “nobility,” “dignity,” “intimate choices” and “personal identity” — as it is short on constitutional authority to redefine marriage. The majority doesn’t rely on any enumerated constitutional provision, nor is it based on prior court precedence. Rather, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his stellar dissent, the majority has essentially decided that it knows what’s best for America, basing its ruling on “new insights” into the “nature of injustice” and its own “under¬standing of what freedom is and must become.”
