Ruling the Culture from the Bench

Same-sex marriage advocates can make erroneous emotional appeals to Americans' sense of equality, but the pattern that Connecticut's Supreme Court further solidified will have broad and oppressive consequences:

Striking at the heart of discriminatory traditions in America, the court — in language that often rose above the legal landscape into realms of social justice for a new century — recalled that laws in the not-so-distant past barred interracial marriages, excluded women from occupations and official duties, and relegated blacks to separate but supposedly equal public facilities.

"Like these once prevalent views, our conventional understanding of marriage must yield to a more contemporary appreciation of the rights entitled to constitutional protection," Justice Richard N. Palmer wrote for the majority in a 4-to-3 decision that explored the nature of homosexual identity, the history of societal views toward homosexuality and the limits of gay political power compared with that of blacks and women.

The small minority imposed philosophy, rather than interpreted law: from the deliberate elision of factual differences between male-female relationships and same-sex relationships to the self-aggrandizing attempt to be a history maker to the presumption of writing "contemporary appreciations" into law.

At a time when our culture should be fortifying its cultural building blocks, the segment of society that assumes its own moral and intellectual superiority not only over the rest of us, but over all of Western tradition, is instead intent on recreating the world in its own image.