Good News and Bad on Gay
Marriage
by Christopher A. Ferrara
In a moment of
judicial sanity, New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, handed
down a decision on July 6, 2006 which holds — to the stupefaction of
liberals everywhere — that the New York Constitution actually does not
appear to contain any right to "gay marriage."
By a vote of 4-to-2
— that’s right, two justices thought otherwise — the Court held
(as Newsday reported in a July 7th story) that "despite some
ambiguous language, New York marriage laws permit only opposite-sex couples to
marry, and that limitation does not violate the constitutional guarantee of
equal protection because lawmakers might rationally have wanted marriage laws
to encourage couples that could conceive children to form stable unions, and
might reasonably have favored child rearing in families with a mother and a
father."
In the majority
opinion he wrote for the Court, Judge Robert Smith declared: "It is not for us
to say whether same-sex marriage is right or wrong… We do not predict what
people will think generations from now, but we believe the present generation
should have a chance to decide the issue through its elected
representatives."
So, as we can see,
the decision is good news and bad. Good news because New York’s highest
court has not (at least not yet) gone the way of the Massachusetts high court.
Bad news because, as Judge Smith himself observed, there is nothing at all
permanent about the court’s decision, for that decision is not based on
any objective standard of right or wrong but on what "the people" happen to
think at any given moment in history, whether in adopting a constitution or in
voting on legislation concerning "gay marriage."
Yes, in a
"democracy" it is simply impossible to predict what public morality will be
tomorrow, because, as Judge Smith says, one cannot "predict what people will
think generations from now." And in a democracy it is "what people think," not
the immutable law of God as expounded and defended by His Church, that
determines the content of civil law.
Behold the madness
of liberal social order — the social order that resulted from
Luther’s revolt against the Church, the corruption of political philosophy
owing to its detachment from revealed truth and Catholic theology, and finally
the revolutionary movements of the 18th and 19th
centuries, which destroyed Catholic social order and left us all at the mercy
of "what people will think."
And this, they
tell us, is "liberty." But of course it is slavery of the worst kind: the
slavery of sin enacted into law based on "what the people think." It is this
very slavery from which Our Lord came to deliver us, promising that "You will
know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
But the nations of
former Christendom have turned away from Christ the King, preferring the idol
of Liberty that enslaves them. For this reason has the Queen of Heaven warned
mankind, at Fatima and Akita, of a coming chastisement even greater than the
Flood.
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