In the beginning, maybe it was Adam and Bruce, after all...

The Massachusetts Supreme Court's 4-3 decision sanctioning - mandating - homosexual marriage is but the latest in a long line of cultural assaults, large and small. From random recall:

In a campaign to redefine the abnormal as normal, the expropriation of the word "gay" for behavior of a sort eminently sad. Religious denominations roiled over issues of homosexuals in the clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. Devastation of the Catholic Church by pederasty and (principally) homosexual predation. In New York, the nation's first school for homosexual youth - the city-funded Harvey Milk High.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell." AIDS, rampant across the globe. The flowering of homosexual studies through e.g. the Larry Kramer Initiative at Yale in its effort to solidify its reputation as the Ivy League's foremost homosexual community. The overturning of anti-sodomy laws. National groups and school clubs to shore up the self-esteem of homosexuals who are by their sexual preference different and "don't fit."

Al Sharpton, host to the view that civil unions are a form of discrimination ("it's like saying ... (homosexuals have) the right to shack up but not marry"), declaring he proudly would perform a same-sex marriage ceremony. Sen. Hillary Clinton introducing a bill to give homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual couples. Same-sex marriage in Holland and Canada. Civil unions legalized by Howard Dean in Vermont, with Dean telling "Meet the Press" in June he would "insist that every state find a way to recognize the same legal rights for gay couples as they do for everybody else."

In this, as with the death penalty and affirmative action, et al., the courts have looked across the sea for support. Writing for the majority in the Lawrence case striking down a Texas anti-sodomy law, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the European Court of Human Rights and other foreign courts - while dismissing stare decisis and our own judicial heritage. He concluded his opinion with this bit of smug modernism:

"Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

And so now, with our knowledge superior to that of the Founders - knowing what they did not know, and could not - a Massachusetts court has directed its fire at an institution created for the procreation of children and their healthy upbringing by a woman and a man.

Far as we may have come, there remain many miles to go. Continued...