Nearly four-fifths of the states have laws defining marriage as purely heterosexual. Will that stop the courts as the argument spreads to the heartland from the people's republics of Massachusetts and California? Here and there it may. Or will the U.S. Supreme Court do the heavy lifting for the redefiners, applying on marriage a national policy that flows logically from its sodomy law decision?

A national constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of a man and woman becomes inevitable by the logic of the case. Only thereby can the courts be disarmed of their ability to redefine reality.

I caught Sen. John Cornyn (Republican from Texas and a former state supreme court justice and attorney general) making approximately this argument on CSPAN the other day. It is virtually impossible to argue against the necessity of such an amendment, as likely or unlikely its chances of ratification might seem.

The cry when a theft has been perpetrated is "Stop, thief!" There is no difference here. Judges, at both state and federal level, are in the process of stealing cherished possessions such as the people's right to determine for themselves the moral relationships on which their society rests. A jurist who claims to know better than the rest of us how to define reality steals the older reality, dropping on us, for replacement purposes, nothing more than a personal interpretation. Stop, thief! Stop!

That is what we now must shout. With all that's in us.