Catholic Action League Denounces Supreme Court Decision on Same Sex Marriage

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today criticized this morning’s decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States—ratified in 1868—contained a heretofore undiscovered right to same gender marriage.

The five to four decision, written by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, vacates all existing state laws and state constitutional provisions which define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Just two years ago, in U.S. v. Windsor, the same court overturned the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, partly on the basis that it infringed on the longstanding right of individual states “to regulate domestic relations.”

The Catholic Action League called the ruling “anthropological change through judicial fiat” and “ideological enforcement masquerading as jurisprudence.”

Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “The hubris of the Supreme Court is Olympian. Today, five unelected, unaccountable, appointed officeholders, cloaked with the immunity of lifetime tenure, decided that all of civilization—in its laws, ethics, religious beliefs, and moral sensibilities—was wrong for thousands of years about the character of marriage; that a form of behavior historically understood to be a crime is, in fact, a conjugal act; and that a document written 150 years ago, by men who believed in  natural law and limited government, is the foundation of a societal revolution unimaginable to its framers. They also decided that they, not the people and their elected representatives, were self-authorized to come to these conclusions.”

“This entirely predictable, but nonetheless appalling travesty speaks to the debasement of our laws, the corruption of our courts, the depravity of our nation’s morals, and the corrosion of our culture. Kennedy’s majority decision was a mixture of invention, specious assertion, intellectual dishonesty, manifest absurdity, pretentious hypocrisy, and an unbridled presumption of judicial entitlement. Dissenting justices cited The Federalist Papers and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, while Kennedy opined on dignity, demeaned feelings, and “new insights” which allowed homosexuals “to define and express their identity.”

“This contrived right is on a collision course with the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment. Justice Thomas, in his dissent, wrote that the ruling ‘has potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.’ Chief Justice Roberts reasoned that it would affect everything from the adoption policies of religious charities to the housing arrangements of religious schools. The Solicitor-General had previously admitted, in oral arguments, that an affirmative ruling could impact the tax-exempt status of religious institutions.”

“Religious believers opposed to same sex marriage whose businesses serve wedding ceremonies are already being sued and fined. As a practical matter, the demonization, marginalization, and victimization of orthodox Christians and Jews will accelerate. Anyone with memories of the fiasco of forced busing in Boston in the 1970’s will remember the ultimate argument defending the indefensible—‘It’s the law.’ So it will be in this controversy.”