The SUPREME Court - The Bigger Picture - Welcome to Totalitarianism

It has been an eventful week. First the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. The same justice Roberts who earlier defied the argument of the measures supporters that the mandate did not amount to a tax and essentially rewrote the statute to make it a tax in order to uphold it (yes, it was that bad), was at it again.

This time, in spite of almost irrefutable evidence and plain logic based on the words of the law indicating that the Obamacare subsidies were to be provided by individual states, not the Federal Government, Justice Roberts found a way to stretch the meaning of "State" to include a nebulous "intent" that went beyond the wording, thus making the law valid. This massive usurpation of legislative authority relied on feeling over law and a basic denial that words have meaning at all, as Justice Scalia pointed out in a scathing dissent.

Then the Supremes ruled on same-sex marriage. Again the linguistic gymnastics required to manufacture a desired outcome was something the Court found a way to justify. Justice Scalia excoriated the line " "The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity."

What exactly does it mean, as a legal matter, to "define and express (one's) identity?" What are the limits on this right now that gender in society is defined entirely by one's "feelings"?
Or the line "The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality."

Has society ever defined marriage in such a way? While this is a predictable end to the trend that has made marriage about the desires of adults and utterly separated marriage from procreation and raising of children, where the constitution provides support for such a finalizing viewpoint is unclear.

Scalia was correct in his most direct criticism. "When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so...They [the majority] have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a 'fundamental right' overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since."

The overreach of the court has been discussed before. Now I wonder if anyone other than the few Americans who actually still understand the argument Scalia is making will understand the implications of these decisions, not for the issues decided, but for the massive shift in power that has been completed with these rulings. Scalia and Thomas agreed that the Court on which they serve is "a threat to American Democracy". How?

What this means for churches and individuals that in good conscience cannot support SSM remains to be seen, but it is clear that the influence of 3400 years of Judeo-Christian thought on marriage had no bearing on the ruling.

Over at Powerline, there is a long quote from the Late Richard John Neuhaus. Quoting from "The Naked Public Square", the point is made that only the influence of transcendent values from Religion can provide a lasting check on the abuse of power in government. One has to appeal to a standard, a law, higher than government, else government has carte blanche to define anything as "law".

Excerpts, highlights are mine:

"When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded (from public policy), the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church…

"...only the state can…'lay claim to compulsive authority.'

"…the state must displace religion as the generator and bearer of values…
"…once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it – the state and the individual. Religion as a mediating structure…is no longer available as a countervailing force to the ambitions of the state…

"…When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with the force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless and the marginal…

"Politics is an inescapably moral enterprise. Those who participate in it are…moral actors. The word “moral” here…means only that the questions engaged [in politics] are questions that have to do with what is right or wrong, good or evil. Whatever moral dignity politics may possess depends upon its being a process of contention and compromise among moral actors, not simply a process of accommodation among individuals in pursuit of their interests.

"The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate…

"The founding fathers of the American experiment declared certain truths to be self-evident and moved on from that premise. It is a measure of our decline into what may be the new dark ages that today we are compelled to produce evidence for the self-evident…”

One of the unfortunate problems with the SSM issue (like the abortion issue) is the false impression, aggressively asserted by the left, that the only objections to redefining marriage are religious in nature, as if religious and spiritual ideas have no connection to the actual realities of life, culture and society. Christians have often made the mistake of opposing SSM on purely religious grounds and ignored the compelling arguments from sociology, psychology, medicine and plain old logic that might have helped avoid the marginalization of defenders of traditional marriage as religious kooks.

But Neuhaus is on to something. It would also be a mistake to give up the right, as religious individuals, to inject transcendent values into the debate. If there are no transcendent values higher than government, then government is the highest authority.

If a society decides that “religion” has no place in public policy, if there are no “transcendent” values, then there are no inalienable rights – period. If there is no “higher law” then all disputes will be settled only through amoral battles for power. Whatever “rights” the state grants can be removed with the same suddenness as occurred last Friday, when the collective wisdom of 3400 years of western thinking was set aside by a 5-4 vote of unelected judges.

One side may have won this particular battle, but the lasting effect is that Western Civilization may have lost the war. In rejecting a broad notion of "natural law" based loosely on Judeo-Christian morality, we have made the power of the State the final authority in everything.

Totalitarianism is, in effect, here.