Herewith, Part III of John Haskins' series on judicial tyranny and the Homosexual "Marriage" Ruling. (See "Gays Can't Answer: Where Is Statute Legalizing 'Gay Marriage'?", Part I and Part II below.)
Lawmaking by judges is explicitly illegal and non-binding. Void, null, without meaning, as Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, and many others said.
An oath by a public official to uphold a constitution is primarily an oath to block a creeping coup d'etat by the other branches or by the bureaucracy (or by another level of the local, state, federal system).
On the specifics of the Massachusetts situation: Laws have descriptive terminology in them that reveals the intent of the legislature. Massachusetts law has gender-specific language. This language is legally binding on everyone, including Supreme Court justices. Only the legislature, or the people themselves, can erase it.
If this were not true, judges could deconstruct every single law in existence and give it meanings unrelated to the legislature's intended meaning. Under whose definition would this be democracy? How many American soldiers have died to defend the right of judges to randomly rule over the ratified laws of elected representatives of the people? Zero, I think.
Governor Romney cannot give valid licenses to anyone that are not authorized by law. He is an "executive" sworn to execute only laws ratified by the Legislature within the strict boundaries of the constitutional document.
If a court rules that the state constitution compels that all red-headed boys be refused health care, is a governor to take their word for it or to pull out his copy of the constitution? His oath is not to a court's interpretation. It is to the constitution. Read Jefferson on this.
A governor has not merely the right, but an inescapable obligation to enforce the state constitution as written. Outside of those boundaries he becomes a tyrant -- maybe a handsome, smiley, affable tyrant, but a tyrant -- and no court can give him additional constitutional authority to wander. You may agree with the policy outcome and think him a benevolent tyrant, just as handsome as dictators come, but he nevertheless meets the Founding Fathers' definition of a tyrant.
So Romney violated the constitution by ignoring marriage law as ratified, simply because he was under "pressure" from a court and from the Boston Globe to ignore the law.
If marriage laws "need updating" (to use a loaded phrase that usually reveals a basic belief that laws and moral concepts have a "sell-by" date after which they are obsolete), the people, through their elected legislature or state ballot initiative, are the only ones with constitutional authority to annul or "update" laws.
This is endlessly re-stated -- and very forcefully -- in the language of the Founders and is the core of constitutional (republican) democracy. It is perhaps more explicitly formulated in the Massachusetts Constitution (written by John Adams) than anywhere else.
The point that people just don't get is that we are, sadly, in a post-constitutional phase of our political history. Many judges and legal scholars are frank about this off the record. My recent column,"No More Striking Down Constitutions" in the American Spectator, addresses this.
Lawyers do not even study constitutions in law school. They study case law -- precedent -- and their professors call that "constitutional law."
Aside from the three dissenting justices and the appellate court judge, those who have pointed out the raw tyranny of this ruling are simply not given much access to the media, even to the "establishment" conservative media.
As I recall, except for the overtly anti-constitutionalist Lawrence Tribe, the entirety of Harvard Law faculty who went on record rejected the courts' claimed right to impose any general policy on marriage. It's not rocket science.
