Why The Constitution Can’t Be Used To Control Gay Marriage

Interview with Chris Ferrara on Gay Marriage

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “We have Chris Ferrara, author of Liberty, the God That Failed on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  Chris, we only have one segment left.  You said earlier to me today, and I suspect this is going to be a topic of great conversation amongst people in talk radio today, the American Principles Project calling for constitutional resistance to Obergefell v. Hodges.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  We have Chris Ferrara, author of Liberty, the God That Failed on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  Chris, we only have one segment left.  You said earlier to me today, and I suspect this is going to be a topic of great conversation amongst people in talk radio today, the American Principles Project calling for constitutional resistance to Obergefell v. Hodges.  This is going to be lauded and heralded, [mocking] “Yes!  It’s about time.  Finally somebody’s standing up to the court.”  What’s the problem?

Chris Ferrara:  The problem is it’s ultimately useless because there’s no principled basis on which to assert the American principles.  If you look at the document, what is it really saying?  It’s saying that basically we should let the people decide these questions.  When it talks about the Constitution, it doesn’t say the Constitution has an objective, universal meaning when it refers to such terms as liberty, rather, that what the court has done is not found in the Constitution.  That’s an argument from silence.  There are lots of things that aren’t explicitly set forth in the Constitution that we would all agree the Constitution protects, such as the right to marry.  The Constitution says nothing about the right to marry.  Obviously if the State were to prohibit marriage, we could go to the United States Supreme Court and demand that liberty be enforced in the sense that the State has no authority to prohibit marriage.  On the one hand it says: Let’s look at the Constitution and base ourselves on the Constitution.  Then on the other hand, it refuses to define the document’s moral content.  This is the conservative response.

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Meanwhile, the liberals are defining its moral content.  They are telling us what liberty is all about according to them.  They’re utterly corrupt, nominalist notion of liberty is liberty is whatever you want, unless, of course, it’s traditional morality.  We can’t have that.  The ultimate effect of nominalism — Pope Leo predicted this in his encyclicals — is that when you allow truth and error to flourish under the name of liberty, error prevails and truth is punished and persecuted, so that now the only meaning of liberty in the Constitution that is no longer admissible is the true meaning.  That’s the ironic, bitter, and catastrophic outcome of the conservative approach to liberty.  The conservatives have to stand up and say we have to rely on the Constitution, of course, rightly construed so that liberty is given its objective, universal meaning, which is rooted in the divine and natural law, so that when we say we defend marriage, we say much more than our historical understanding of marriage.  That’s useless.  The historical understanding of marriage is in flux now.  In a hundred years, who knows what people will think marriage is.  That’s no defense.  You need stand up for objective truth.  You need to give meanings to the terms you use.

Mike:  They also say we’re going to defer to the states.  A state is still a secular legislative body.  As we know, a half-dozen states or so have stepped up to the plate and said: We know what marriage is.  Stan and Steve, that’s marriage, so they’ve defined it.  If you’re going to leave it up to the hands of the states, you’ve just traded one Herod for another Herod.  We’re just rearranging the deck chairs.

Ferrara:  If you look at the therefore clauses in this statement from American Principles, with all due respect to these eminent scholars, most of whom are far brainier than I am, you have to look at these therefore clauses.  You just have to laugh.  The first one is, “We stand with James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in recognizing that the Constitution is not whatever a majority of Supreme Court justices say it is.”  Really?  Then what is the Constitution?  First of all, the Supreme Court justices have a duty to construe constitutional terms.  They’re the only ones who can tell us what it means if there’s a dispute.  The problem is not that they’re telling us what the Constitution means; the problem is that they’re giving us the wrong answer.  This is ridiculous.  That’s the very function of the Supreme Court, to tell us what the Constitution means in a disputed case, not the majority.  We don’t vote on what the Constitution means.  The Supreme Court tells us what it means in these difficult cases.  The conservatives have consistently fled from the confrontation with the liberals on the core meaning of these terms, especially the term liberty.

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The next therefore clause, “We remind all officeholders in the United States that they are pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the will of five members of the Supreme Court.”  What does that mean?  Pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States?  Understood in what sense?  What is the meaning of the Constitution in terms of the term liberty?  What does it mean?

Mike:  We’re having some technical difficulties with our connection.  Bill in Pennsylvania, you’re on the Mike Church Show.  How you doing?

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.

Caller Bill:  Good morning.  I was listening to the two of you.  I can’t help but think of the account of Flavius Josephus when he described the destruction of Jerusalem with militant homosexuality as it is right now.  As Chris said, right now I’m having a hard time even trying to read blogs because I’m getting very, I don’t want to say despair, but it’s obvious you can see what’s happening whenever you can see the Pope posing with pictures in the Vatican, and the articles about Kim Davis, his acceptance — his handwriting is on the wall.  You can actually see where this is going.  I pray on my rosary every day.  When you read the accounts of Flavius Josephus and what happened and the destruction of Jerusalem, when Christ was denied, known truth was denied.  This is what happens.  We should expect this.  This is going to happen.

Mike:  Bill, thank you very much for the call.  I haven’t gotten around to the accounts of Flavius Josephus, but whenever someone brings him up, I’m always reminded, you mean one of the world’s first historians that said Christmas was actually on December 25^th?  That guy?

End Mike Church Show Transcript