SCOTUS Defining Marriage

“The Corruption of the Best is the Worst”

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Really, the fate of marriage as a sacramental institution that has one definition and one definition only rests in the hands of the magisterium of their church.  It just happens to be my church and yours and many other people’s.  You see where I’m going with this.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Solicitor General Olson has teamed up with Ken Mehlman – these are two Republicans that were high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to sue the State of California, which they succeeded in doing, in overturning Prop 8.  They were aligned also with Rob Reiner and the ACLU and a bunch of other agitators on this.  Their argument is that this is a 14^th Amendment, access to due privilege – the usual things that go into the miracle amendment and something you’re trying to legalize and make happen.

Now, what I said to the audience earlier – I just want to give some background on what’s going on in the court today.  You can help me flesh this out as well, Chris.  When I said to the audience earlier and said I was going to ask you this question: Did Obama know when he appointed Sonya Sotomayor, who is a Roman Catholic, did he know that?  Did he take it into consideration?  That means you’ve got Sotomayor, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia.  That’s a majority now.  Really, the fate of marriage as a sacramental institution that has one definition and one definition only rests in the hands of the magisterium of their church.  It just happens to be my church and yours and many other people’s.  You see where I’m going with this.  The failure of popes and bishops and the rest of the clergy and of institutions and elites to stand up for and demand obedience to the ancient magisterium and what it says and what it teaches and to show a love for it – you don’t do it out of a sense of drudgery; you do it out of love for it.  This is what really is on trial, isn’t it?

Chris Ferrara:  Of course it is.  There’s a saying, “Corruptio optimi est pessima,” the corruption of the best is the worst.  If Obama considered the Catholicism of Sotomayor, he considered the fact that she is not practicing, so far as we know, the teachings of the Church regarding this whole question.  A Catholic who falls from adherence to Church teaching – actually, we tend to become, especially in the area of the judiciary or in politics, one of the best operatives for the destruction of that teaching – we see this again and again with the Nancy Pelosi Catholics.  The corruption of the best produces the worst.  He may have noted that she was a Catholic, but it really didn’t involve any impediment to her being seated on the court.

This is fundamentally a moral question.  The Supreme Court will pretend that it isn’t.  The conservative dissenters – I’m predicting a 5-4 decision here, it’s pretty obvious – will make the usual argument to let the people decide.  Sometimes people will decide in favor of marriage between people who commit sodomy habitually and sometimes they’ll decide against it, but let the people decide.  That’s a losing argument for the reasons we’ve discussed in other episodes of the show.  It’s a losing argument because, while the conservatives refuse to take a moral stand, the liberals consistently do so.  They are on a conquering march driven by their moral vision of the world, which they’re implementing not only legislatively but judicially, especially on the high court.

Hadley Arkes noted this back in the early ‘90s.  Because conservatives don’t take moral stands on preeminently moral questions, while the liberals do so, conservatives ultimately have nothing to say in the judiciary or even on the floors of legislatures in these cultural question, which are moral questions, because they won’t take a moral position.  They have nothing to say except: Let the people decide.

Mike:  When you let the people decide, you’re basically letting anarchy decide.  When you rely on opinion, as I said at the beginning of this segment here, the opinion can change.  The whole point of the discussion is that the opinion can change.

Ferrara:  Not only that, it isn’t enough to point to the democratic process and say in a given case: Well, the people have decided and they don’t like gay marriage.  They don’t like it at all.  The majority said no to gay marriage.  The problem is that the same people who say no to the gay marriage problem in a particular jurisdiction are the same people who voted in presidential elections to install Obama as president.  They’re the same people who installed him as president knowing he would appoint liberal Supreme Court justices.  They’re the same people who erected a constitutional framework in which these questions end up before the Supreme Court.  And they are the same people which, in a substantial majority, will accept whatever the Supreme Court decides.  The people have decided if the Supreme Court comes down 5-4 against the idea that something like gay marriage can be prohibited by a state, “the people,” that amorphous entity operating at the federal level, have decided this question, at least indirectly, by putting those justices in their seats through the election of President Obama.  So it depends on which majority you want to look at.  One way or the other, the people have decided this.

Mike has been talking about many different ways to deal with the American Union & it’s attack dog, the “Federal” government –There’s Article V & Nullification too.

Mike:  The tragedy is that if the court rules as you think they’re going to rule, and I think they are, too – I don’t think it’s going to be 5-4.  I think it’s going to be 6-3.  I think that Roberts is again going to defect and is again going to deny what is plainly obvious, just as he did in Obamacare.  He has to know that a 5-4 decision is a guarantee of struggle and strife for the foreseeable future until it can be revisited.  It will keep it alive as a topic of political dissent, just as abortion has when you have these narrow decisions.  It’s only when they act like they’re a super majority are they trying to put it to rest.  I think that Roberts is going to bail on Alito and company, and he’s going to leave Alito, Thomas, and Scalia – I’m not even sure on Scalia, but I’ll throw Scalia in there.  It’s going to be 6-3 against this.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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