A Judicial Outrage

If Republicans want voters to understand the threat to representative self-government posed by an activist judiciary, they need look no further than the outrageous usurpation of legislative authority by the California Supreme Court, which has effectively created a right to gay marriage out of whole cloth.

This is, of course, after the voters of California overwhelmingly approved a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman -- and despite the fact that the California law invests those who register as domestic partners with the same rights and responsibilities accruing to husbands and wives.

Those who want gays to have the right to marry had the right and the power to try to change their fellow citizens' minds. Instead, like the abortion activists back in 1972, they've chosen to take their case to an unelected judiciary who has seen a hitherto-unimagined right somehow emerge from a "living" document.

It's wrong and an illegitimate use of judicial authority for the state Supreme Court to insert itself into what's essentially a legislative controversy over a moral and religious matter. Yet, that's what it's done, somehow rearranging the interpretive tea leaves to announce from on high that such a sweeping change will be imposed on Californians --against their explicit, expressed desires eight short years ago.

This makes a mockery of the concept of self-government.