In yet another attempt to excuse bypassing the democratic process, California Chief Justice Ronald George recently asserted that a 1948 court decision legalizing interracial marriage in California is analogous to the May 15 ruling granting same-sex couples the “right” to marry. He went on to predict, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, that same-sex “marriage” will be more quickly accepted by the public than racial equality.
Putting aside for the moment that it’s quite presumptuous to say that Californians consider same-sex “marriage” a more important thing to act quickly upon than racism, Chief Justice George’s take on the California fiasco proves once again that judges make poor prophets, as his prediction and comparison fall miserably short on several grounds.
First of all, the court’s role in society is not to make laws, but to interpret and apply them; lawmaking is reserved for the legislature.
But secondly, what about similarities between the California Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriage 60 years ago (Perez v. Sparks) and the recent ruling legalizing same-sex “marriage” (In re: Marriage Cases)? The chief justice of the highest court in California apparently fails to see the obvious differences.
It’s an undeniable fact that interracial marriage laws in 1948 were a departure from historical marriage, as prohibitions of interracial marriage had nothing to do with the institution of marriage and everything to do with societal prejudice. It was also quite clear that a key issue in Perez had to do with lawmakers not wanting the mixing of races to produce interracial children.
The court’s ruling to legalize same-sex “marriage” fails to compare with the Perez decision in that redefining “marriage” changed the institution itself, whereas marriage both before and after 1948 remained one man and one woman. Only after May 15, 2008, has the time-honored institution of marriage been adulterated to give virtually any two friends the right to have their friendship licensed as a “marriage.”
Regardless of the unsubstantiated arguments used to create same-sex “marriages,” none of them even come close to justifying the potential and proven consequences children face when raised in a home without both a mother and a father. The government should never set policy and courts should never impose a system that knowingly deprives a child of a mom or a dad.