Tea at Trianon: Marriage and the Supreme Court

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, June 26, 2015

Marriage and the Supreme Court

From Christine Niles:

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 24, 2015 (ChurchMilitant.com) - The U.S. Supreme Court is about to issue a history-making ruling on marriage, with the opinion for the case Obergefell v. Hodges expected to be handed down any day now. At stake is whether the states will retain the right to define marriage on their own terms, as they always have in the past, or whether the Supreme Court will impose a straight-jacket ruling on all 50 states redefining marriage.

Obergefell is a consolidation of cases from four states — Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky — with gay residents of each state suing their respective state bans on gay "marriage." At the heart of the analysis are two questions:

Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?

Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

More specifically, the Court will examine whether a fundamental "right to gay marriage" can be found in either the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
John Bursch, former solicitor general for the state of Michigan (a devout Catholic and married father of five), is arguing on behalf of the states' right both to refuse to license same-sex "marriages" and to refuse to recognize the same from other states. Mary Bonauto, representing the opposition, is arguing that the Constitution implicitly contains a fundamental right to gay "marriage" under the Fourteenth Amendment. Bonauto is also a Catholic, and is in a lesbian "marriage" with her longtime partner with whom she is raising twin daughters.

The lower court decision on appeal before the Supreme Court had upheld the states' bans on gay marriage, encapsulating its reasoning thus:

What we are left with is this: By creating a status (marriage) and by subsidizing it (e.g., with tax-filing privileges and deductions), the States created an incentive for two people who procreate together to stay together for purposes of rearing offspring. That does not convict the States of irrationality, only of awareness of the biological reality that couples of the same sex do not have children in the same way as couples of opposite sexes and that couples of the same sex do not run the risk of unintended offspring. That explanation, still relevant today, suffices to allow the States to retain authority over an issue they have regulated from the beginning.

Because marriage has traditionally been reserved to each individual state's sphere of governance, and because the states have a rational basis for restricting marriage only to a man and a woman (namely, procreation and children), according to the appellate court, it has no authority to define policy in this area, and therefore ruled in favor of each state's right to define marriage according to legislative will.

But Bonauto is arguing that the U.S. Constitution trumps states' rights in this case. Both the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses have been used in the past as a "catch-all" for various fundamental rights — most notoriously the Due Process Clause, which ushered in a so-called right to abortion in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade. (Read more.)