In today’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the Supreme Court has laid waste to several key tenets of the American political experiment in representative government including federalism, a system of checks and balances with a legislative branch designed to be strongest body, and a complete devastation of the 1st Amendment.
Unlike most of colleagues from the right side of the aisle, I have known this decision was coming for some time now. When government took over the role of determining who could be recognized as legally married, the clock started ticking down towards today’s eventual outcome. If the point of the legal case was to expand the legal rights of marriage recognized by the government, then the Supreme Court made the right decision. However, all the court did was to make sure the legal rights of government recognized marriage would be equally distributed for every type of consensual adult relationship; IT did not change the religious definition of marriage.
As a student and teacher of politics and religion, I will say this as nice and straight-forward as I possibly can for both my celebrating friends on the left and my fearful friends on the right – there is still MARRIAGE INEQUALITY because the Supreme Court hasn’t taken away religious liberty of the 1st Amendment yet. However, Justice Kennedy in his majority opinion made the following statement,
The decision “ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” Kennedy also said both sides should engage in “an open and searching debate.”
Justice Alito countered Kennedy’s assertion by making the following statement in his dissenting opinion,
“(The decision) will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” Justice Alito wrote. “In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”
The Supreme Court has had a recent history of overextending its prerogative starting with Bush v. Gore. Both the left and the right have cried wolf in separate decisions by the court but one thing is crystal clear; the Supreme Court is by far the most powerful branch of government. With the recent ObamaCare decision, the Court has re-established its dominance over the legislative and executive branches. With today’s decision, the Court not only has re-established its dominance over the states and instituted a new form of aristocracy but the decision will also force the merger of church and state regarding the definition of true marriage equality from a religious perspective.
The implications of this decision may mean a restructuring of the intersection of church and the state including the use of non-profit status by churches to provide community programs. In its rush to enforce fairness and equality, the Supreme Court may have given conservatives just what they wanted – the threat of the end of religious freedom of the 1st Amendment to rally their supporters for 2016.
Faculty, Department of Political Science, Towson University. Graduate from Liberty University Seminary.